My biochemical journey from a Cambridge undergraduate to the discovery of phosphotyrosine

The most notable moment in my career as a biochemist was the discovery of phosphotyrosine, a somewhat serendipitous finding that turned out to have some very important consequences, notably, in human cancer. My career as a biochemist which has spanned nearly 60 years, began when I was 16. At the time, I was in the sixth form at Felsted School, a boarding school in Essex England, and my biology master, David Sturdy, elected to teach me some extracurricular biochemistry, giving me one-on-one tutorials on glycolysis and the TCA cycle. These early biochemistry lessons turned out to be invaluable because I was able to regurgitate them to answer a question in the University of Cambridge scholarship exam in the autumn of 1960. As a result, I was lucky enough to be awarded an Exhibition at Gonville and Caius College, the college where my father had studied for a medical degree during World War II. When I arrived in Cambridge in October 1962 to read natural sciences (see Figure 1), it was a natural choice to take biochemistry as one of my three required first-year courses. The Part I biochemistry course was taught by a series of excellent lecturers, including Philip Randle (a prominent diabetes researcher who described the Randle Cycle), Brian Chappell (who discovered mitochondrial transporters) and Asher Korner (a pioneer of cell free systems to study protein synthesis). It quickly became clear that biochemistry was an exciting subject, and Brian Chappell, my biochemistry supervisor at Caius, made supervisions a lot of fun. I also took Part I courses in invertebrate zoology and, importantly, organic chemistry, which gave me insights into how the metabolites we were learning about in biochemistry worked as chemicals.

The Choice of Language for Note-taking for the Purposes of Consecutive Interpreting

The subject of the article is the choice of language that is used for notetaking for consecutive interpreting. The paper is based on a small-scale empirical case study analysis of note-taking by interpreting students. The analysis was aimed at determining which language – source language (SL) or target language (TL) – was preferred by students, who were given freedom of choice regarding the selection of language that they would use for the preparation of notes to help with consecutive interpreting tasks. The study group consisted of three cohorts of translation and interpreting students who were at the end of their first semester of work with consecutive. The students were asked to prepare notes for a regular consecutive task, from English into Polish; Polish was the mother tongue for all of the students. The outcomes of the analysis may show what might be the “natural” choice of language for notation and may provide suggestions about improving the system of teaching notation in the case of novice interpreters.

Multi-Self-Attention for Aspect Category Detection and Biomedical Multilabel Text Classification with BERT

Multilabel classification is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing, posing greater technical difficulties than single-label classification. At the same time, multilabel classification has more natural applications. For individual labels, the whole piece of text has different focuses or component distributions, which require full use of local information of the sentence. As a widely adopted mechanism in natural language processing, attention becomes a natural choice for the issue. This paper proposes a multilayer self-attention model to deal with aspect category and word attention at different granularities. Combined with the BERT pretraining model, it achieves competitive performance in aspect category detection and electronic medical records’ classification.

Chirality and the Origin of Life

The origin of life, based on the homochirality of biomolecules, is a persistent mystery. Did life begin by using both forms of chirality, and then one of the forms disappeared? Or did the choice of homochirality precede the formation of biomolecules that could ensure replication and information transfer? Is the natural choice of L-amino acids and D-sugars on which life is based deterministic or random? Is the handedness present in/of the Universe from its beginning? The whole biosystem on the Earth, all living creatures are chiral. Many theories try to explain the origin of life and chirality on the Earth: e.g., the panspermia hypothesis, the primordial soup hypothesis, theory of parity violation in weak interactions. Additionally, heavy neutrinos and the impact of the fact that only left-handed particles decay, and even dark matter, all have to be considered.

Deep learning based restoration of lost sections in Micro-CT core plugs

Lack of petrophysical information is critical for reservoirs development composed of poorly consolidated rocks or for zones bearing wells with core damaged by improper coring operations. The restoration complexity of the digital-core lost sections is associated with the need to consider an enormous amount of data from the existing core image and the necessity to include lithological expert knowledge. That makes deep learning methods a natural choice for solving such problems. We proposed, examined, and compared several deep learning methods convenient for analyzing micro-computed tomography digital core data. It was done under the most simplistic problem statement when the destroyed part (a set of slices) is completely lost. Here, we present the results of comparison interpolation/extrapolation procedures under proposed quality metrics. We discover that the variational autoencoder method can be trained to extract some petrophysical parameters from the digital core plug in an unsupervised manner.

OVERVIEW OF MODERN WOODEN HOUSING CONSTRUCTION IN RUSSIA

Wooden house building has centuries-old traditions, to which Russia has made a significant contribution. Historically, our country is rich in forests, hence the quite natural choice of wood as the main material for housing construction. Everyone knows the methods of building wooden houses by Russian architects of the early Middle Ages “with one ax and without a single nail.” Well, of course, we must understand here that there was more than one ax, there were auxiliary manual wood-cutting tools. Well, without nails – it does not mean at all that the connecting elements were not used, they just were also wooden. Some of these monuments of wooden architecture have survived to this day and we can observe them, for example, in Kizhi, Vologda, Arkhangelsk and many other cities.

COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY OF COPPER AND ALUMINUM TO PROCESSING IN WIRE DRAWING PROCESS

Modern technological solutions in electrical applications require, above all, high energy efficiency. This means that in such applications, materials with the highest possible electrical conductivity should be used for conductive elements. Of all metals, copper is the natural choice. Copper cables or wires used in electrical networks and installations provide better electrical and thermal conductivity and guarantee reliability - which translates into the quality of electricity. And bad quality of energy means tangible financial losses. On the other hand, apart from physical properties, an important factor is the price of cables and wires, which is partially dependent on the price of copper on the stock exchange. The last 20 years have seen a high increase in copper prices on the markets and at the same time the price is unstable. Therefore, cheaper substitutes for copper are being sought. The natural choice is aluminum, which is currently widely used in overhead power lines. At the same time, in the case of long cables, copper products still dominate. The paper presents a synthetic comparative analysis of technological processing problems in industrial drawing processes of aluminum and copper wires used in electrical applications.. In particular, comparative analysis applied the susceptibility into formability in the wire drawing process and susceptibility to recrystallization annealing of copper and aluminum wires. The drawing process and the annealing process are simple processes for the production of wires used for electrical purposes.

Study on Strength Properties of Pervious Concrete by Partial Replacement of Cement with Fly Ash

Pervious concrete is a concrete containing little or no fine aggregate; it consists of coarse aggregate and cement paste. It seems pervious concrete would be a natural choice for use in structural applications in this age of ‘green building’. It consumes less raw material than normal concrete (no sand), it provides superior insulation values when used in walls, and through the direct drainage of rainwater, it helps recharge groundwater in pavement applications. Due to increase in construction and demolition activities all over the world, the waste concrete after the destruction is not used for any purpose which leads to loss of economy of the country. India is a developing country where urbanization is increasing rapidly which in turn leading to increase of drainage facilities. Pervious concrete helps to allow the water flow into the ground due to interconnected pores. Natural aggregate is becoming scarce, production and shipment is becoming more difficult. In order to overcome this problem, there is need to find a by-product, which can be used to replace the aggregate in conventional concrete mix. Keywords: Pervious Concrete, Partial Replacement, Fly Ash, Cement, Compressive Strength,

Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning with Constrained Spatiotemporal Jigsaw

This paper proposes a novel pretext task for self-supervised video representation learning by exploiting spatiotemporal continuity in videos. It is motivated by the fact that videos are spatiotemporal by nature and a representation learned by detecting spatiotemporal continuity/discontinuity is thus beneficial for downstream video content analysis tasks. A natural choice of such a pretext task is to construct spatiotemporal (3D) jigsaw puzzles and learn to solve them. However, as we demonstrate in the experiments, this task turns out to be intractable. We thus propose Constrained Spatiotemporal Jigsaw (CSJ) whereby the 3D jigsaws are formed in a constrained manner to ensure that large continuous spatiotemporal cuboids exist. This provides sufficient cues for the model to reason about the continuity. Instead of solving them directly, which could still be extremely hard, we carefully design four surrogate tasks that are more solvable. The four tasks aim to learn representations sensitive to spatiotemporal continuity at both the local and global levels. Extensive experiments show that our CSJ achieves state-of-the-art on various benchmarks.

The Versatility of Autologous Fat Transplantation in Abnormalities of the Craniofacial-Complex and Facial Esthetics

In the historical pursuit of soft tissue augmentation, fat has seemed a natural choice for plastic surgeons. The use of fat transfer to replace volume or camouflage soft tissues is an increasingly popular method in craniofacial surgery and facial esthetics. Craniofacial malformations undoubtedly have a certain psychosocial effect. Children of early age are particularly vulnerable to comments, teasing, and harassment related to their appearance; therefore, improving the facial image is of great importance. We believe that volumetric lipoinjection represents an excellent alternative to obtain greater facial esthetic harmony, which directly increases patient self-esteem in children and adults.