Systematic alternatives in lexicalization: The case of gerund translation

The process of lexical choice usually consists of determining a single way of expressing a given content. In some cases such as gerund translation, however, there is no single solution; a choice must be made among several variants which differ in their syntactic behavior. Based on a bilingual corpus analysis, this paper explains first which factors influence the availability of variants. In a second step, some criteria for deciding on one or the other variant are discussed. It will be shown that the stylistic evaluation of the syntactic structures induced by alternative lexical items is of central importance in lexical choice. Finally, an implementation of the resulting model is described.     

Energy Metabolites as Biomarkers in Ischemic and Dilated Cardiomyopathy

With more than 25 million people affected, heart failure (HF) is a global threat. As energy production pathways are known to play a pivotal role in HF, we sought here to identify key metabolic changes in ischemic- and non-ischemic HF by using a multi-OMICS approach. Serum metabolites and mRNAseq and epigenetic DNA methylation profiles were analyzed from blood and left ventricular heart biopsy specimens of the same individuals. In total we collected serum from n = 82 patients with Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM) and n = 51 controls in the screening stage. We identified several metabolites involved in glycolysis and citric acid cycle to be elevated up to 5.7-fold in DCM (p = 1.7 × 10⁻⁶). Interestingly, cardiac mRNA and epigenetic changes of genes encoding rate-limiting enzymes of these pathways could also be found and validated in our second stage of metabolite assessment in n = 52 DCM, n = 39 ischemic HF and n = 57 controls. In conclusion, we identified a new set of metabolomic biomarkers for HF. We were able to identify underlying biological cascades that potentially represent suitable intervention targets.     

Complement-Opsonized Nano-Carriers Are Bound by Dendritic Cells (DC) via Complement Receptor (CR)3, and by B Cell Subpopulations via CR-1/2, and Affect the Activation of DC and B-1 Cells

The development of nanocarriers (NC) for biomedical applications has gained large interest due to their potential to co-deliver drugs in a cell-type-targeting manner. However, depending on their surface characteristics, NC accumulate serum factors, termed protein corona, which may affect their cellular binding. We have previously shown that NC coated with carbohydrates to enable biocompatibility triggered the lectin-dependent complement pathway, resulting in enhanced binding to B cells via complement receptor (CR)1/2. Here we show that such NC also engaged all types of splenic leukocytes known to express CR3 at a high rate when NC were pre-incubated with native mouse serum resulting in complement opsonization. By focusing on dendritic cells (DC) as an important antigen-presenting cell type, we show that CR3 was essential for binding/uptake of complement-opsonized NC, whereas CR4, which in mouse is specifically expressed by DC, played no role. Further, a minor B cell subpopulation (B-1), which is important for first-line pathogen responses, and co-expressed CR1/2 and CR3, in general, engaged NC to a much higher extent than normal B cells. Here, we identified CR-1/2 as necessary for binding of complement-opsonized NC, whereas CR3 was dispensable. Interestingly, the binding of complement-opsonized NC to both DC and B-1 cells affected the expression of activation markers. Our findings may have important implications for the design of nano-vaccines against infectious diseases, which codeliver pathogen-specific protein antigen and adjuvant, aimed to induce a broad adaptive cellular and humoral immune response by inducing cytotoxic T lymphocytes that kill infected cells and pathogen-neutralizing antibodies, respectively. Decoration of nano-vaccines either with carbohydrates to trigger complement activation in vivo or with active complement may result in concomitant targeting of DC and B cells and thereby may strongly enhance the extent of dual cellular/humoral immune responses.     

Hemi- and Homozygous Loss-of-Function Mutations in DSG2 (Desmoglein-2) Cause Recessive Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy with an Early Onset

About 50% of patients with arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) carry a pathogenic or likely pathogenic mutation in the desmosomal genes. However, there is a significant number of patients without positive familial anamnesis. Therefore, the molecular reasons for ACM in these patients are frequently unknown and a genetic contribution might be underestimated. Here, we used a next-generation sequencing (NGS) approach and in addition single nucleotide polymor-phism (SNP) arrays for the genetic analysis of two independent index patients without familial medical history. Of note, this genetic strategy revealed a homozygous splice site mutation (DSG2–c.378+1G>T) in the first patient and a nonsense mutation (DSG2–p.L772X) in combination with a large deletion in DSG2 in the second one. In conclusion, a recessive inheritance pattern is likely for both cases, which might contribute to the hidden medical history in both families. This is the first report about these novel loss-of-function mutations in DSG2 that have not been previously identi-fied. Therefore, we suggest performing deep genetic analyses using NGS in combination with SNP arrays also for ACM index patients without obvious familial medical history. In the future, this finding might has relevance for the genetic counseling of similar cases.     

Preparation of Iron Filler-Based Photocomposites and Application in 3D Printing

The introduction of metallic fillers to polymers via the photopolymerization approach can endow the composite materials with some unique properties, but the relevant research is still scarce due to the issue of light penetration and inner filter effect. Herein, for the first time the fabrication of photocomposites based on fine iron powder (i.e., a typical kind of metallic filler) is reported in this work. The free radical polymerization of two different acrylate monomers, poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate and trimethylolpropane triacrylate, is performed in the presence of iron filler under mild conditions (i.e., light emitting diode (LED)@405 nm irradiation at room temperature under air). And the real-time Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy reveals remarkable photopolymerization kinetics of acrylates with high final conversions and fast polymerization rates despite the increasing contents of iron filler in the composites. Interestingly, the 3D printing technique is applied to the iron filler-based composites to produce tridimensional patterns with excellent spatial resolution. This work not only paves the way for the investigation of photocomposites based on metallic fillers through photochemical methods, but also broadens the potential application prospects.     

Biomimetic Polymer Nanostructures by Injection Molding

The nanometer scale topography of self‐assembling structural protein complexes in animals is believed to induce favorable cell responses. An important example of such nanostructured biological complexes is fibrillar collagen that possesses a cross‐striation structure with a periodicity of 69 nm and a peak‐to‐valley distance of 4–6 nm. Bovine collagen type I was assembled into fibrillar structures in vitro and sedimented onto solid supports. Their structural motif was transferred into a nickel replica by physical vapor deposition of a small‐grained metal layer followed by galvanic plating. The resulting inverted nickel structure was found to faithfully present most of the micrometer and nanometer scale topography of the biological original. This nickel replica was used as a die for the injection molding of a range of different thermoplastic polymers. Total injection molding cycle times were in the range of 30–45 seconds. One of the polymer materials investigated, polyethylene, displayed poor replication of the biological nanotopographical motif. However, the majority of the polymers showed very high replication fidelity as witnessed by their ability to replicate the cross‐striation features of less than 5 nm height difference. The latter group of materials includes poly(propylene), poly(methyl methacrylate), poly(L ‐lactic acid), polycaprolactone, and a copolymer of cyclic and linear olefins (COC). This work suggests that the current limiting factor for the injection molding of nanometer scale topography in thermoplastic polymers lies with the grain size of the initial metal coating of the mold rather than the polymers themselves.

     

Comparing orthogonal force and unidirectional strain component processing for tool condition monitoring

Signal processing using orthogonal cutting force components for tool condition monitoring has established itself in literature. In the application of single axis strain sensors however a linear combination of cutting force components has to be processed in order to monitor tool wear. This situation may arise when a single axis piezoelectric actuator is simultaneously used as an actuator and a sensor, e.g. its vibration control feedback signal exploited for monitoring purposes. The current paper therefore compares processing of a linear combination of cutting force components to the reference case of processing orthogonal components. Reconstruction of the dynamic force acting at the tool tip from signals obtained during measurements using a strain gauge instrumented tool holder in a turning process is described. An application of this dynamic force signal was simulated on a filter-model of that tool holder that would carry a self-sensing actuator. For comparison of the orthogonal and unidirectional force component tool wear monitoring strategies the same time-delay neural network structure has been applied. Wear-sensitive features are determined by wavelet packet analysis to provide information for tool wear estimation. The probability of a difference less than 5 percentage points between the flank wear estimation errors of above mentioned two processing strategies is at least 95 %. This suggests the viability of simultaneous monitoring and control by using a self-sensing actuator.     

Automatic learners with feedback queries

Automatic classes are classes of languages for which a finite automaton can decide whether a given element is in a set given by its index. The present work studies the learnability of automatic families by automatic learners which, in each round, output a hypothesis and update a long-term memory, depending on the input datum, via an automatic function. Many variants of automatic learners are investigated: where the long-term memory is restricted to be the current hypothesis whenever this exists, cannot be of length larger than the length of the longest datum seen, or has to consist of a constant number of examples seen so far. Learnability is also studied with respect to queries which reveal information about past data or past computation history; the number of queries per round is bounded by a constant.     

Ubicon and its applications for ubiquitous social computing

The combination of ubiquitous and social computing is an emerging research area which integrates different but complementary methods, techniques, and tools. In this paper, we focus on the Ubicon platform, its applications, and a large spectrum of analysis results. Ubicon provides an extensible framework for building and hosting applications targeting both ubiquitous and social environments. We summarize the architecture and exemplify its implementation using four real-world applications built on top of Ubicon. In addition, we discuss several scientific experiments in the context of these applications in order to give a better picture of the potential of the framework, and discuss analysis results using several real-world data sets collected utilizing Ubicon.