Enantioselective Synthesis of Functionalized Arenes by Nickel-Catalyzed Site-Selective Hydroarylation of 1,3-Dienes with Aryl Boronates

A catalytic method for the site-selective and enantioselective synthesis of functionalized arenes by the intermolecular hydroarylation of terminal and internal 1,3-dienes with aryl pinacolato boronates is reported. The reactions are promoted by 5.0 mol % of a readily available monodentate phosphoramidite-Ni complex in ethanol, affording a variety of enantioenriched products in up to 96 % yield and 99:1 er. Mechanistic studies indicate that Ni–allyl formation is irreversible and related to the nature of the arylboronate.     

Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Background  

There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.     

The contribution of high frequencies to human brain activity underlying horizontal localization of natural spatial sounds

Background  

In the field of auditory neuroscience, much research has focused on the neural processes underlying human sound localization. A recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated localization-related brain activity by measuring the N1m event-related response originating in the auditory cortex. It was found that the dynamic range of the right-hemispheric N1m response, defined as the mean difference in response magnitude between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation, reflects cortical activity related to the discrimination of horizontal sound direction. Interestingly, the results also suggested that the presence of realistic spectral information within horizontally located spatial sounds resulted in a larger right-hemispheric N1m dynamic range. Spectral cues being predominant at high frequencies, the present study further investigated the issue by removing frequencies from the spatial stimuli with low-pass filtering. This resulted in a stepwise elimination of direction-specific spectral information. Interaural time and level differences were kept constant. The original, unfiltered stimuli were broadband noise signals presented from five frontal horizontal directions and binaurally recorded for eight human subjects with miniature microphones placed in each subject's ear canals. Stimuli were presented to the subjects during MEG registration and in a behavioral listening experiment.     

Hopf invariants, Toda brackets and the reduced diagonal map

That there is a close connection between crude (or suspended) Hopf invariants and the reduced diagonal map has long been known. In this paper we build on a classical result of Boardman and Steer (1967) to explore some further relationships in terms of conic structures. In a related result we show that certain Toda brackets contain crude Hopf invariants as elements. In particular, using this latter observation, detection of crude Hopf invariants can be carried out.     

A sliding interface method for unsteady unstructured flow simulations

The objective of this work is to develop a sliding interface method for simulations involving relative grid motion that is fast and efficient and involves no grid deformation, remeshing, or hole cutting. The method is implemented into a parallel, node‐centred finite volume, unstructured viscous flow solver. The rotational motion is accomplished by rigidly rotating the subdomain representing the moving component. At the subdomain interface boundary, the faces along the interface are extruded into the adjacent subdomain to create new volume elements forming a one‐cell overlap. These new volume elements are used to compute a flux across the subdomain interface. An interface flux is computed independently for each subdomain. The values of the solution variables and other quantities for the nodes created by the extrusion process are determined by linear interpolation. The extrusion is done so that the interpolation will maintain information as localized as possible. The grid on the interface surface is arbitrary. The boundary between the two subdomains is completely independent from one another; meaning that they do not have to connect in a one‐to‐one manner and no symmetry or pattern restrictions are placed on the grid. A variety of numerical simulations were performed on model problems and large‐scale applications to examine conservation of the interface flux. Overall solution errors were found to be comparable to that for fully connected and fully conservative simulations. Excellent agreement is obtained with theoretical results and results from other solution methodologies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.