York University

About: York University is a education organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 18899 authors who have published 43357 publications receiving 1568560 citations.

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey of SDSS-III

Abstract: The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i=19.9 over 10,000 square degrees to measure BAO to redshifts z<0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Lyman alpha forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g<22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15

Inhibitor Binding Analysis of Dihydrofolate Reductases from Various Species

Abstract: Dihydrofolate reductases have been purified approximately 100-fold from Escherichia coil, Staphylococcus aureus, and Proteus vulgaris and to a lesser degree from rat, rabbitr guinea pig, and human liver. Average Michaelis constants of 2.3 x 10-5 M for dihydrofolic acid and 1.8 x 10-5 M for NADPH have been obtained for the three bacterial enzymes. NADPH is the preferred reductant but could be replaced by NADH with about 25% efficiency. pH-activity curves, in the case of the bacterial enzymes, show a single peak with maximum activity between pH 6.8 and 7.2. Strong correlations have been found between the binding of a drug by a particular dihydrofolate reductase and the capacity of that drug to inhibit the source organism in vitro. In addition, each dihydrofolate reductase was shown to possess a pattern of inhibition that is distinct for the species under investigation. These differences between and among bacterial and mammalian reductases may be due to changes in amino acid composition at the active sites.

Biochar as an exceptional bioresource for energy, agronomy, carbon sequestration, activated carbon and specialty materials.

Abstract: Biofuels and biomaterials are gaining increased attention because of their ecofriendly nature and renewable precursors. Biochar is a recalcitrant carbonaceous product obtained from pyrolysis of biomass and other biogenic wastes. Biochar has found many notable applications in diverse areas because of its versatile physicochemical properties. Some of the promising biochar applications discussed in this paper include char gasification and combustion for energy production, soil remediation, carbon sequestration, catalysis, as well as development of activated carbon and specialty materials with biomedical and industrial uses. The pyrolysis temperature and heating rates are the limiting factors that determine the biochar properties such as fixed carbon, volatile matter, mineral phases, surface area, porosity and pore size distribution, alkalinity, electrical conductivity, cation-exchange capacity, etc. A broad investigation of these properties determining biochar application is rare in literature. With this objective, this paper comprehensively reviews the evolution of biochar from several lignocellulosic biomasses influenced by pyrolysis temperature and heating rate. Lower pyrolysis temperatures produce biochar with higher yields, and greater levels of volatiles, electrical conductivity and cation-exchange capacity. Conversely, higher temperatures generate biochar with a greater extent of aromatic carbon, alkalinity and surface area with microporosity. Nevertheless, this coherent review summarizes the valorization potentials of biochar for various environmental, industrial and biomedical applications.

LetterWise: prefix-based disambiguation for mobile text input

Abstract: A new technique to enter text using a mobile phone keypad is described. For text input, the traditional touchtone phone keypad is ambiguous because each key encodes three or four letters. Instead of using a stored dictionary to guess the intended word, our technique uses probabilities of letter sequences --- "prefixes" --- to guess the intended letter. Compared to dictionary-based methods, this technique, called LetterWise, takes significantly less memory and allows entry of non-dictionary words without switching to a special input mode. We conducted a longitudinal study to compare LetterWise to Multitap, the conventional text entry method for mobile phones. The experiment included 20 participants (10 LetterWise, 10 Multitap), and each entered phrases of text for 20 sessions of about 30 minutes each. Error rates were similar between the techniques; however, by the end of the experiment the mean entry speed was 36% faster with LetterWise than with Multitap.