Performance of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers with Cosmic Rays

The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) constitute the primary muon tracking device in the CMS endcaps. Their performance has been evaluated using data taken during a cosmic ray run in fall 2008. Measured noise levels are low, with the number of noisy channels well below 1%. Coordinate resolution was measured for all types of chambers, and fall in the range 47 microns to 243 microns. The efficiencies for local charged track triggers, for hit and for segments reconstruction were measured, and are above 99%. The timing resolution per layer is approximately 5 ns

Genomic structure and insertion sites of Helicobacter pylori prophages from various geographical origins

We present the full genomic sequences, insertion sites and phylogenetic analysis of 28 prophages found in H. pylori isolates from patients of distinct disease types, ranging from gastritis to gastric cancer, and geographic origins, covering most continents. The gentic diversity of H pylori is known to be influenced by these genomic elements including prophages who’s geneomes range from 22.6 to 33.0 Kbp. There was a high conservation of integration site shared in over 50% of cases with greater than 40% or prophage genomes harbouring insertion sequences (IS). Furthermore prophage genomes present a robust phylogeographic pattern, revealing four distinct clusters: one African, one Asian and two European prophage populations. There was evidence of recombination within the genome of some prophages, which resulted in genome mosaics composed by different populations, which may yield additional H. pylori phenotypes

Search for CP violation in the decay B0->D*+-D-+

We report a search for CP-violating asymmetry in B0 -> D*+- D-+ decays. The analysis employs two methods of B0 reconstruction: full and partial. In the full reconstruction method all daughter particles of the B0 are required to be detected; the partial reconstruction technique requires a fully reconstructed D- and only a slow pion from the D*+ -> D0 pi_slow+ decay. From a fit to the distribution of the time interval corresponding to the distance between two B meson decay points we calculate the CP-violating parameters and find the significance of nonzero CP asymmetry to be 2.7 standard deviations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined. For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4, while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than 90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Honey health benefits and uses in medicine

The generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and other free radicals during metabolism is an essential and normal process that ideally is compensated through the antioxidant system. However, due to many environmental, lifestyle, and pathological situations, free radicals and oxidants can be produced in excess, resulting in oxidative damage of biomolecules (e.g., lipids, proteins, and DNA). This plays a major role in the development of chronic and degenerative illness such as cancer, autoimmune disorders, aging, cataract, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative diseases (Pham-Huy et al. 2008; Willcox et al. 2004). The human body has several mechanisms to counteract oxidative stress by producing antioxidants, which are either naturally synthetized in situ, or externally supplied through foods, and/or supplements (Pham-Huy et al. 2008).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined. For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta) < 2.4, while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than 90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Rice_Phospho 1.0: a new rice-specific SVM predictor for protein phosphorylation sites

Experimentally-determined or computationally-predicted protein phosphorylation sites for distinctive species are becoming increasingly common. In this paper, we compare the predictive performance of a novel classification algorithm with different encoding schemes to develop a rice-specific protein phosphorylation site predictor. Our results imply that the combination of Amino acid occurrence Frequency with Composition of K-Spaced Amino Acid Pairs (AF-CKSAAP) provides the best description of relevant sequence features that surround a phosphorylation site. A support vector machine (SVM) using AF-CKSAAP achieves the best performance in classifying rice protein phophorylation sites when compared to the other algorithms. We have used SVM with AF-CKSAAP to construct a rice-specific protein phosphorylation sites predictor, Rice-Phospho 1.0 (http://bioinformatics.fafu.edu.cn/rice-phospho1.0). We measure the Accuracy (ACC) and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of Rice-Phospho 1.0 to be 82.0% and 0.64, significantly higher than those measures for other predictors such as Scansite, Musite, PlantPhos and PhosphoRice. Rice-Phospho 1.0 also successfully predicted the experimentally identified phosphorylation sites in LOC-Os03g51600.1, a protein sequence which did not appear in the training dataset. In summary, Rice-phospho 1.0 outputs reliable predictions of protein phosphorylation sites in rice, and will serve as a useful tool to the community

Overview of biologically digested leachate treatment using adsorption

Biological process is effective in treating most biodegradable organic matter present in leachate; however, a significant amount of ammonia, metals and refractory organic compounds may still remain in this biologically digested leachate. This effluent cannot be released to receiving bodies until the discharge limit is met. Several physical/chemical processes have been practiced as post-treatment to remove the remaining pollutants including coagulation–flocculation, oxidation and adsorption. Adsorption is often applied in leachate treatment as it enhances removal of refractory organic compounds. This chapter will focus on works related to adsorption as one of the commonly used methods to treat biologically digested leachate further down to acceptable discharge limit

Overview of biologically digested leachate treatment using adsorption

Biological process is effective in treating most biodegradable organic matter present in leachate; however, a significant amount of ammonia, metals and refractory organic compounds may still remain in this biologically digested leachate. This effluent cannot be released to receiving bodies until the discharge limit is met. Several physical/chemical processes have been practiced as post-treatment to remove the remaining pollutants including coagulation–flocculation, oxidation and adsorption. Adsorption is often applied in leachate treatment as it enhances removal of refractory organic compounds. This chapter will focus on works related to adsorption as one of the commonly used methods to treat biologically digested leachate further down to acceptable discharge limit