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2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 1125-1144
Author(s):  
Yuliy I. Drobyshev

The article discusses the relationships of the Mongols with Tibet in the short period between the first Mongol campaign against the Tangut state of Western Xia (Xi Xia) in 1205 and the Great Kurultai of 1235 to resolve the issue of the intentions of the two first Mongol khans to subjugate Tibet. Tibetan and late Mongolian historiographies are full of reports about an invasion of Tibet by Genghis Khan himself and about his successfully implemented plans to annex this country, as well as about his adoption of Buddhism; however, this information is legendary. An analysis of the whole set of sources at our disposal as well as the experts’ opinions reveals the following. Most likely, during the lifetime of Genghis Khan and Ogedei, the Mongols had no plans to seize Tibet, and all reports concerning Mongol military operations in this country refer only to the border areas in Eastern Tibet, through which nomads encompassed the hostile states of Jin and later – Southern Song from the right flank. The results fully confirm the conclusions already made by some scholars: the vast, desolate, remote from trade routes and poor lands of Tibet were not of primary interest to the Mongols. Despite the decision taken in 1235 to conquer most of the countries known to the Mongols, the first reconnaissance recorded in the literature took place only in 1240, and the real inclusion of the “Land of Snows” into the Mongol Empire dates back even later.


Marine Drugs ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Sean Macdonald Miller ◽  
Raffaela M. Abbriano ◽  
Anna Segecova ◽  
Andrei Herdean ◽  
Peter J. Ralph ◽  
...  

Microalgal biotechnology shows considerable promise as a sustainable contributor to a broad range of industrial avenues. The field is however limited by processing methods that have commonly hindered the progress of high throughput screening, and consequently development of improved microalgal strains. We tested various microplate reader and flow cytometer methods for monitoring the commercially relevant pigment fucoxanthin in the marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Based on accuracy and flexibility, we chose one described previously to adapt to live culture samples using a microplate reader and achieved a high correlation to HPLC (R2 = 0.849), effectively removing the need for solvent extraction. This was achieved by using new absorbance spectra inputs, reducing the detectable pigment library and changing pathlength values for the spectral deconvolution method in microplate reader format. Adaptation to 384-well microplates and removal of the need to equalize cultures by density further increased the screening rate. This work is of primary interest to projects requiring detection of biological pigments, and could theoretically be extended to other organisms and pigments of interest, improving the viability of microalgae biotechnology as a contributor to sustainable industry.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhao Yang ◽  
C. Mary Schooling ◽  
Man Ki Kwok

Selection bias is increasingly acknowledged as a limitation of Mendelian randomization (MR). However, few methods exist to assess this issue. We focus on two plausible causal structures relevant to MR studies and illustrate the data-generating process underlying selection bias via simulation studies. We conceptualize the use of control exposures to validate MR estimates derived from selected samples by detecting potential selection bias and reproducing the exposure–outcome association of primary interest based on subject matter knowledge. We discuss the criteria for choosing the control exposures. We apply the proposal in an MR study investigating the potential effect of higher transferrin with stroke (including ischemic and cardioembolic stroke) using transferrin saturation and iron status as control exposures. Theoretically, selection bias affects associations of genetic instruments with the outcome in selected samples, violating the exclusion-restriction assumption and distorting MR estimates. Our applied example showing inconsistent effects of genetically predicted higher transferrin and higher transferrin saturation on stroke suggests the potential selection bias. Furthermore, the expected associations of genetically predicted higher iron status on stroke and longevity indicate no systematic selection bias. The routine use of control exposures in MR studies provides a valuable tool to validate estimated causal effects. Like the applied example, an antagonist, decoy, or exposure with similar biological activity as the exposure of primary interest, which has the same potential selection bias sources as the exposure–outcome association, is suggested as the control exposure. An additional or a validated control exposure with a well-established association with the outcome is also recommended to explore possible systematic selection bias.


Author(s):  
Helen Blade ◽  
Peter N. Horton ◽  
James A. Morrison ◽  
James B. Orton ◽  
Rachel A. Sullivan ◽  
...  

During the racemization of a novel pharmaceutical spirocyclic imidazole–amine compound, namely, 6′-bromo-N-(6′-bromo-4-methoxy-4′′-methyl-3′H-dispiro[cyclohexane-1,2′-indene-1′,2′′-imidazol]-5′′-yl)-4-methoxy-4′′-methyl-3′H-dispiro[cyclohexane-1,2′-indene-1′,2′′-imidazol]-5′′-imine, C36H41Br2N5O2, two impurities were isolated. These impurities were clearly dimers from mass spectroscopic analysis, however single-crystal diffraction characterization was required for the assignment of stereochemistry. The single-crystal diffraction results revealed subtly different structures to those proposed, due to an unexpected proton transfer. The dimers contain four stereocentres, but two of primary interest, and are centrosymmetric, so after careful structure refinement and close inspection it was possible to unambiguously assign the stereochemistry of both the homochiral [(S),(S)- and (R),(R)-] and the heterochiral [(S),(R)- and (R),(S)-] compounds.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Ziegenhain ◽  
Rickard Sandberg

AbstractThe risks associated with re-identification of human genetic data are severely limiting open data sharing in life sciences, even in studies where donor-related genetic variant information is not of primary interest. Here, we developed BAMboozle, a versatile tool to eliminate critical types of sensitive genetic information in human sequence data by reverting aligned reads to the genome reference sequence. Applying BAMboozle to functional genomics data, such as single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) and scATAC-seq datasets, confirmed the removal of donor-related single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and indels in a manner that did not disclose the altered positions. Importantly, BAMboozle only removes the genetic sequence variants of the sample (i.e., donor) while preserving other important aspects of the raw sequence data. For example, BAMboozled scRNA-seq data contained accurate cell-type associated gene expression signatures, splice kinetic information, and can be used for methods benchmarking. Altogether, BAMboozle efficiently removes genetic variation in aligned sequence data, which represents a step forward towards open data sharing in many areas of genomics where the genetic variant information is not of primary interest.


SynOpen ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Addison M Duda ◽  
Michael T Giurini ◽  
Jason G Gillmore ◽  
Thomas F Guarr

Synthetic preparation of carbazoles can be challenging, requiring ring building strategies and/or precious metal catalysts. Presented herein is a method for preparation of carbazoles with the use of inexpensive and reliable hypervalent iodine chemistry. An oxidative single electron transfer (SET) event initiates cyclization for preparation of our trifluoromethyl carbazoles. This method has been shown to be useful for a variety of bis(trifluoromethyl)carbazole isomers that are of primary interest for use as battery materials.


Author(s):  
Eugen Kremer

The concept of vibrational mechanics was pioneered in the works by Professor I.I. Blekhman and developed by his numerous disciples and coleagues. It is a powerful tool for the study of such systems with fast excitations, in which slow motion is of primary interest. One important application of this approach is the stochastic resonance, the phenomenon of resonance-like response of slow variables to intensity of stochastic excitation. This phenomenon is considered within the framework of vibrational mechanics as forced lowfrequency oscillations near the natural frequency, which evolves under the influence of changing high-frequency stochastic excitation. We propose a generalization of this approach to the case when the evolution of low-frequency properties of the system leads not to the equality of the natural frequency and the frequency of the external slow force, but to the loss of stability in a certain interval of the stochastic excitation intensity. Since in this case, as for stochastic resonance, the external manifestation of the process is the resonance-like response of the system, the considered effect can be called stochastic quasi-resonance, As an example, we consider a rotor with anisotropy of bending stiffness under the action of stochastic angular velocity oscillations.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodoros Evrenoglou ◽  
Isabelle Boutron ◽  
Anna Chaimani

Abstract“Living” evidence synthesis is of primary interest for decision-makers to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-NMA provides open-access living meta-analyses assessing different therapeutic and preventive interventions. Data are posted on a platform (https://covid-nma.com/) and analyses are updated every week. However, guideline developers and other stakeholders also need to investigate the data and perform their own analyses. This requires resources, time, statistical expertise, and software knowledge. To assist them, we created the “metaCOVID” application which, based on automation processes, facilitates the fast exploration of the data and the conduct of analyses tailored to end-users needs. metaCOVID has been created in R and is freely available as an R-Shiny application. The application conducts living meta-analyses for every outcome. Several options are available for subgroup and sensitivity analyses. The results are presented in downloadable forest plots. metaCOVID is freely available from https://covid-nma.com/metacovid/ and the source code from https://github.com/TEvrenoglou/metaCovid.


Author(s):  
Nafeesa Bashir ◽  
JPS Joorel ◽  
T R Jan

Planning a highly reliable and efficient system has always been a primary interest for reliability engineers by devising the powerful design strategy and employing effective repair and replacement policy. Keeping in view this, the basic aim of this paper is to analyze the reliability of a system which comprised of two units A and B in which unit A is functional and B is held standby. Unit A after failure may be controlled or uncontrolled. The failed unit undergoes for repair in the controlled unit. If the repair of a unit is not controlled then it is replaced by a new one.  Upon the breakdown of operational unit A, unit B come becomes active instantaneously. Unit B after failure is repaired by regular repairmen. System failure takes place when both the units quit serving. The unit serves as good as a fresh after preventive repair and replacement policy. The regenerative point technique has been used to obtain the expression for several reliability measures. Finally, the graphical behavior of MTSF and profit of the present model has been observed for arbitrary values of parameters and costs.


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