Soft neighborhood substitutability (SNS) is a powerful technique to automatically detect and prune dominated solutions in combinatorial optimization. Recently, it has been shown in [26] that enforcing partial SNS (PSNS) during search can be worthwhile in the context of Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problems (WCSP). However, for some problems, especially with large domains, PSNS is still too ...

A theoretical and experimental study of the acoustic properties of porous materials containing dead-end (or partially opened) porosity was recently proposed by Dupont, Leclaire, Sicot, Gong, and Panneton [J. Appl. Phys. 110, 094903 (2011)]. The present article provides a description of partially opened porosity systems and their numerous potential applications in the general context of the stud...

Full genome sequences of 20 strains of Clostridium chauvoei, the etiological agent of blackleg of cattle and sheep, isolated from four different continents over a period of 64 years (1951-2015) were determined and analyzed. The study reveals that the genome of the species C. chauvoei is highly homogeneous compared to the closely related species C. perfringens, a widespread pathogen that affects...

MOTIVATION Dead-End Elimination (DEE) is a powerful algorithm capable of reducing the search space for structure-based protein design by a combinatorial factor. By using a fixed backbone template, a rotamer library, and a potential energy function, DEE identifies and prunes rotamer choices that are provably not part of the Global Minimum Energy Conformation (GMEC), effectively eliminating the m...

To explore the possibility of self-organized criticality, we look for CFTs without any relevant scalar deformations (a.k.a. dead-end CFTs) within power-counting renormalizable quantum field theories with a weakly coupled Lagrangian description. In three dimensions, the only candidates are pure (Abelian) gauge theories, which may be further deformed by Chern-Simons terms. In four dimensions, we ...

Drug research: dead end or new horizon? Industrial drug research is facing a crisis. Higher investments are necessary for the discovery of fewer drugs, and the return on investment shrinks.1 2 Regulatory constraints3 and financial pressures4 have been blamed for slowing the development of new drugs at a time when truly new discoveries have become rare events. Among the new drugs established in ...