Optimized Biocatalytic Synthesis of 2-Selenopyrimidine Nucleosides by Transglycosylation**

Selenium-modified nucleosides are powerful tools to study the structure and function of nucleic acids and their protein interactions. The widespread application of 2-selenopyrimidine nucleosides is currently limited by low yields in established synthetic routes. Herein, we describe the optimization of the synthesis of 2-Se-uridine and 2-Se-thymidine derivatives by thermostable nucleoside phosphorylases in transglycosylation reactions using natural uridine or thymidine as sugar donors. Reactions were performed at 60 or 80 °C and at pH 9 under hypoxic conditions to improve the solubility and stability of the 2-Se-nucleobases in aqueous media. To optimize the conversion, the reaction equilibria in analytical transglycosylation reactions were studied. The equilibrium constants of phosphorolysis of the 2-Se-pyrimidines were between 5 and 10, and therefore differ by an order of magnitude from the equilibrium constants of any other known case. Hence, the thermodynamic properties of the target nucleosides are inherently unfavorable, and this complicates their synthesis significantly. A tenfold excess of sugar donor was needed to achieve 40−48 % conversion to the target nucleoside. Scale-up of the optimized conditions provided four Se-containing nucleosides in 6–40 % isolated yield, which compares favorably to established chemical routes.     

Dynamic light scattering and ultrasonic investigations during the cure reaction of an epoxy resin

Brillouin scattering (BS), photon correlation spectroscopy (PCS), and ultrasonic (US) measurements were conducted to study the curing process of diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A with butane-1,4-diol at a curing temperature of 100°C. The experimental techniques probe the primary glass-rubber transition during the curing reaction. The primary relaxation time τ obtained from the BS and US velocity and absorption increases with curing time and hence the BS experiment measures τ at earlier stages of cure than the US experiment. The relaxation times at a different extent of reaction and for different measuring temperatures are consistent with BS, US, PCS, and DSC measurements and conform to a single reduced Vogel–Fulcher–Hesse–Tamann equation. Furthermore, the US experiments show evidence of secondary relaxations in the epoxy system.     

Influence of Molybdenum Silicide Additions on High-Temperature Oxidation Resistance of Silicon Nitride Materials

The influence of additions of molybdenum disilicide (MoSi₂) on the microstructure and the mechanical properties of a silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) material, with neodymium oxide (Nd₂O₃) and aluminum nitride (AIN) as sintering aids, was studied. The composites, containing 5, 10, and 17.6 wt% MoSi₂, were fabricated by hot pressing. All materials exhibited a similar phase composition, detected by X-ray diffractometry. Up to MoSi₂ additions of 10 wt%, mechanical properties such as strength, fracture toughness, or creep at 1400°C were not affected significantly, in comparison to that of monolithic Si₃N₄. The oxidation resistance of the composites, in terms of weight gain, degraded. After 1000 h of oxidation at 1400° and 1450°C in air, a greater weight gain (by a factor of approximately three) was obtained, in comparison to that of the material without MoSi₂. Nevertheless, after 1000 h of oxidation, the degradation in strength of the composites was considerably less severe than that of the material without MoSi₂. An additional layer was formed, caused by processes at the surface of the Si₃N₄ material, preventing the formation of pores, cracks, or glassy-phase-rich areas, which are common features of oxidation damage in Si₃N₄ materials. This surface layer, containing Mo₅Si₃ and silicon oxynitride (Si₂ON₂), was the result of reactions between MoSi₂, Si₃N₄, and the oxygen penetrating by diffusion into the material during the hightemperature treatment.     

Sustainability in Web server systems

The exponential growth of Internet during the last decade leads us to make more efforts in the researching and developing of sustainable Web servers in order to decrease the global energy demand. In this paper, we cover, as a first step, a proper review of the literature related to the energy efficiency research in Web server systems to depict the state of the art to plan further contributions as more research in sustainable Web systems. We also propose and implement an energy metric that permits to establish a relation between the Quality of Service (QoS) obtained by the system and the power it consumes.     

Data and models for metonymy resolution

We describe the first shared task for figurative language resolution, which was organised within SemEval-2007 and focused on metonymy. The paper motivates the linguistic principles of data sampling and annotation and shows the task’s feasibility via human agreement. The five participating systems mainly used supervised approaches exploiting a variety of features, of which grammatical relations proved to be the most useful. We compare the systems’ performance to automatic baselines as well as to a manually simulated approach based on selectional restriction violations, showing some limitations of this more traditional approach to metonymy recognition. The main problem supervised systems encountered is data sparseness, since metonymies in general tend to occur more rarely than literal uses. Also, within metonymies, the reading distribution is skewed towards a few frequent metonymy types. Future task developments should focus on addressing this issue.

Designing Personalized Garments with Body Movement

The standardized sizes used in the garment industry do not cover the range of individual differences in body shape for most people, leading to ill-fitting clothes, high return rates and overproduction. Recent research efforts in both industry and academia, therefore, focus on virtual try-on and on-demand fabrication of individually fitting garments. We propose an interactive design tool for creating custom-fit garments based on 3D body scans of the intended wearer. Our method explicitly incorporates transitions between various body poses to ensure a better fit and freedom of movement. The core of our method focuses on tools to create a 3D garment shape directly on an avatar without an underlying sewing pattern, and on the adjustment of that garment's rest shape while interpolating and moving through the different input poses. We alternate between cloth simulation and rest shape adjustment based on stretch to achieve the final shape of the garment. At any step in the real-time process, we allow for interactive changes to the garment. Once the garment shape is finalized for production, established techniques can be used to parameterize it into a 2D sewing pattern or transform it into a knitting pattern.