BACKGROUND Consolidated bioprocessing (CBP) of lignocellulosic biomass to ethanol using thermophilic bacteria provides a promising solution for efficient lignocellulose conversion without the need for additional cellulolytic enzymes. Most studies on the thermophilic CBP concentrate on co-cultivation of the thermophilic cellulolytic bacterium Clostridium thermocellum with non-cellulolytic thermo...

Prion infection induces conformational conversion of the normal prion protein PrPC, into the pathogenic isoform PrPSc, in prion diseases. It has been shown that PrP-knockout (Prnp0/0) mice transgenically reconstituted with a mouse-hamster chimeric PrP lacking N-terminal residues 23-88, or Tg(MHM2Δ23-88)/Prnp 0/0 mice, neither developed the disease nor accumulated MHM2ScΔ23-88 in their brains af...

The objective of this study was to quantify soil methane (CH(4)) and nitrous oxide (N(2)O) emissions when converting from minimum and no-tillage systems to subsoiling (tilled soil to a depth of 40 cm to 45 cm) in the North China Plain. The relationships between CH(4) and N(2)O flux and soil temperature, moisture, NH(4) (+)-N, organic carbon (SOC) and pH were investigated over 18 months using a ...

Clean hydrogen is the major energy carrier for power production. The conversion of CO to CO2 and zero emission during hydrogen energy production causes high capital cost. It is a matter of prestige to optimize the process in order to make zero emission and cost effective production of clean hydrogen energy and electric power. In this era, coal gasification is th...

This paper deals with new methods for phoneme-to-phoneme (P2P) alignment and conversion. Alignment is carried out by dynamic programming for Levenshtein distance calculation. Cost functions based on phoneme co-occurrence statistics and on distinctive feature vector distances accounting for connected speech processes are comparatively evaluated. Given the aligned data, decision trees for P2P con...

Density functional theory studies demonstrate that defective graphene-supported Cu nanoparticles can modify the structural and electronic properties of copper for enhancing electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) into hydrocarbon fuels (CH4, CO, and HCOOH). We not only provide improved understanding of CO2 conversion mechanisms on both Cu and the Cu nanoparticle system, but also expla...

support vector regression (svr) is a learning method based on the support vector machine (svm) that can be used for curve fitting and function estimation. in this paper, the ability of the nu-svr to predict the catalytic activity of the fischer-tropsch (ft) reaction is evaluated and the result is compared with two other prediction techniques including: multilayer perceptron (mlp) and subtractiv...

There a re few case reports in th e literature which discuss psychi atric di sturban ces in patients with pseudohypoparathyr oidism (P H P) (1,2) . PHP is a dis ease characte r ized by an inadequate response to parathyroid hor mone . Often th ese patients are obese with a short , stocky build and moon-shaped face . Mental retardation is present in as many as 10 % of these patients; a reversible...