There is currently an intensive development of sugar-based building blocks toward the production of renewable high performance plastics. In this context, we report on the synthesis of a rigid diol with a spirocyclic structure via a one-step acid-catalyzed acetalation of fructose-sourced 5-hydroxymethylfurfural and pentaerythritol. Preliminary life cycle assessment (LCA) indicated that the spiro-di

Both in the humanities and in the sciences, researchers make mistakes, and this is an essential part of the creative process. In a wider historical perspective, dead-ends can turn out to be the way forward. Two fathers of scientific systems, Aristotle and Carl Linnaeus, serve as an argument for the thesis that errors, or what we later label as such, are a necessary element of scientific work. In

In this Article we describe the OpenMolcas environment and invite the computational chemistry community to collaborate. The open-source project already includes a large number of new developments realized during the transition from the commercial MOLCAS product to the open-source platform. The paper initially describes the technical details of the new software development platform. This is followe

Creating efficient public transport systems that attract users is a challenging task in contexts where the control of public transport is divided between various actors. Recent research on public transport has therefore seen increasing focus on issues like coordination, collaboration and steering in complex governance settings. However, more is known about what needs to be done than how to impleme

Negative impact of human activity-related emission of greenhouse gases on Earth's ecosphere has been known for decades, but has recently come into spotlight with unprecedented intensity. This is due to increasingly clear understanding that the global warming could soon spiral out of control. It is therefore essential to diminish the use of fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy sources. Despi

The public commonly associates microorganisms with pathogens. This suspicion of microorganisms is understandable, as historically microorganisms have killed more humans than any other agent while remaining largely unknown until the late seventeenth century with the works of van Leeuwenhoek and Kircher. Despite our improved understanding regarding microorganisms, the general public are apt to think

The search for a method that utilizes biological information to predict humans' place of origin has occupied scientists for millennia. Over the past four decades, scientists have employed genetic data in an effort to achieve this goal but with limited success. While biogeographical algorithms using next-generation sequencing data have achieved an accuracy of 700 km in Europe, they were inaccurate

The Neuregulin-ErbB4 pathway plays a crucial role in brain development and constitutes one of the most biologically plausible signaling pathways implicated in schizophrenia and, to a lesser extent, in bipolar disorder (BP). However, recent genome-wide association analyses have not provided evidence for common variation in NRG1 or ERBB4 influencing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder susceptibility.

Studies of the apportionment of human genetic variation have long established that most human variation is within population groups and that the additional variation between population groups is small but greatest when comparing different continental populations. These studies often used Wright's F(ST) that apportions the standardized variance in allele frequencies within and between population gr

Previous research has shown that female students sometimes benefit more than males when it comes to interacting with pedagogical agents. In our analysis we examined students' tendency to attend to and read feedback text that were visually signalled by a teachable agent (TA), or by an arrow (AR), or non-signalled in a control condition (CN). The results indicate that male learners may benefit from

Leaf-cutter ants are one of the most important herbivorous insects in the Neotropics, harvesting vast quantities of fresh leaf material. The ants use leaves to cultivate a fungus that serves as the colony's primary food source. This obligate ant-fungus mutualism is one of the few occurrences of farming by non-humans and likely facilitated the formation of their massive colonies. Mature leaf-cutter

Mendez and colleagues reported the identification of a Y chromosome haplotype (the A00 lineage) that lies at the basal position of the Y chromosome phylogenetic tree. Incorporating this haplotype, the authors estimated the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) for the Y tree to be 338,000 years ago (95% CI=237,000-581,000). Such an extraordinarily early estimate contradicts all previous

A determination of the top-quark mass is presented using 20.2 fb−1 of 8 TeV proton-proton collision data produced by the Large Hadron Collider and collected by the ATLAS experiment. The normalised differential cross section of top-quark pair production in association with an energetic jet is measured in the lepton+jets final state and unfolded to parton and particle levels. The unfolded distributi

A series of 3-deoxy-3-N-arylated-β-d-galactoside and -guloside derivatives have been synthesized by cesium fluoride/trimetylsilylaryl triflate-mediated benzyne generation and N-arylation of 3-deoxy-3-amino-β-d-galactosides and -gulosides, respectively. Evaluation as ligands to galectin-1, 2, 3, 4N (N-terminal domain), 4C (C-terminal domain), 7, 8N, 8C, 9C, and 9N revealed that the galactosides sel

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the leading cause of death among USA infants under 1 year of age accounting for ~2,700 deaths per year. Although formally SIDS dates back at least 2,000 years and was even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Kings 3:19), its etiology remains unexplained prompting the CDC to initiate a sudden unexpected infant death case registry in 2010. Due to their total depende

Background: Anxiety and depressive disorders are associated with problems with everyday occupations, including difficulties achieving occupational balance. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to describe occupational balance in people suffering from anxiety and/or depression and the factors that are associated with better self-rated occupational balance. Material: One hundred and eighteen pa

Recently, the geographical origins of Ashkenazic Jews (AJs) and their native language Yiddish were investigated by applying the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to a cohort of exclusively Yiddish-speaking and multilingual AJs. GPS localized most AJs along major ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey adjacent to primeval villages with names that resemble the word "Ashkenaz." These finding

The Druze are an aggregate of communities in the Levant and Near East living almost exclusively in the mountains of Syria, Lebanon and Israel whose ~1000 year old religion formally opposes mixed marriages and conversions. Despite increasing interest in genetics of the population structure of the Druze, their population history remains unknown. We investigated the genetic relationships between Isra

The isochore theory depicts the genomes of warm-blooded vertebrates as a mosaic of long genomic regions that are characterized by relatively homogeneous GC content. In the absence of genomic data, the GC content at third-codon positions of protein-coding genes (GC3) was commonly used as a proxy for the GC content of isochores. Oddly, in the postgenomic era, GC3 is still sometimes used as a proxy f