Neisseria meningitidis causes invasive meningococcal disease in infants, toddlers, and adolescents worldwide. DNA sequence-based typing, including multilocus sequence typing, analysis of genetic determinants of antibiotic resistance, and sequence typing of vaccine antigens, has become the standard for molecular epidemiology of the organism. However, PCR of multiple targets and consecutive Sange...

In direct alcohol fuel cells (DAFCs), the oxidation of alcohols happens at expenses oxygen reduction reaction cathode. DAFCs' cathodes use a significant amount platinum that is an expensive critical raw material. Moreover, oxidizes alcohols, fact combined with crossover, decreases significantly performance cells. The Fe-based (FeNC) group metal–free (PGM-free) convenient strategy to overcome th...

In this work, platinum group metal (PGM) free-based cathode active layers were prepared using different printing techniques. The membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) integrate a PGM free catalyst based on Fe, N and C atoms at the side. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of MEA cross sections showed strong impact fabrication process structure, porosity ionomer repartition. MEAs characteri...

Water scarcity is compelling mining houses to not only recycle process water but also identify alternative sources of make-up in concentrators. South Africa has significant volumes acid mine drainage (AMD) generated from vast operations. This study investigated the viability using AMD as a replacement for potable flotation platinum-group-minerals (PGM)-bearing Merensky ore. Rougher and cleaner ...

Two syntopic morphotypes of the genus Hypostomus - H. nigromaculatus and H. cf. nigromaculatus (Atlântico Stream, Paraná State) - were compared through the allozyme electrophoresis technique. Twelve enzymatic systems (AAT, ADH, EST, GCDH, G3PDH, GPI, IDH, LDH, MDH, ME, PGM and SOD) were analyzed, attributing the score of 20 loci, with a total of 30 alleles. Six loci were diagnostic (Aat-2, Gcdh...

It is important for service-oriented architectures to consider about how the composition of web services affects business processes. For instance, a single service may not have been adequate most complex operations, needing use multiple services. This paper proposed novel technique optimal partitioning and execution using decentralized environment. The designed developed genetic algorithm with ...

Chemically modified single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with varying degrees of functionalization were utilized for the fabrication of SWNT thin film catalyst support layers (CSLs) in polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), which were suitable for benchmarking against the US DOE 2017 targets. Use of the optimum level of SWNT -COOH functionality allowed the construction of a prototy...

--The lubricating properties of commercially available mucins originating from different animal organs, namely bovine submaxillary mucin (BSM) and porcine gastric mucin (PGM), have been characterized at polymeric surfaces for biomedical applications. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and pin-on-disk tribometry have been employed for tribological studies at nanoscale and macroscale contacts, respect...

We use a hybrid strategy to obtain anharmonic frequency shifts and lifetimes of phonon quasiparticles from first principles molecular dynamics simulations in modest size supercells. This approach is effective irrespective of crystal structure complexity and facilitates calculation of full anharmonic phonon dispersions, as long as phonon quasiparticles are well defined. We validate this approach...

In the Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) community there is an interest around tractable models, i.e., those that can guarantee exact inference even at the price of expressiveness. Structure learning algorithms are interesting tools to automatically infer both these architectures and their parameters from data. Even if the resulting models are efficient at inference time, learning them can be...