Search

Abiotic synthesis of ribonucleotides, mainly at the 5′ position, from the corresponding ribonucleosides within self-assembled supramolecular structures, based on guanosine:borate hydrogels, was carried out in the temperature range of 70–90 °C, using urea and a phosphate source (K2HPO4 or hydroxyapatite). Phosphorylation is possible at initial concentrations of guanosine lower than 20 mM and it is more efficient using wet/dry cycles. Monoamidophosphate (and, eventually, diamidophosphate), diamidodiphosphate and pyrophosphate are intermediates in the synthesis of ribonucleotides. These conclusions are supported by NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry analysis of samples. On the other hand, after reaction, hydrogels can produce globular aggregates by the addition of water and decreasing temperature, thus confirming that ribonucleotides, once activated under suitable conditions, could form polyribonucleotides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization of drug delivery from drug loaded contact lenses assumes understanding the drug transport mechanisms through hydrogels which relies on the knowledge of drug partition and diffusion coefficients. We chose, as model systems, two materials used in contact lens, a poly-hydroxyethylmethacrylate (pHEMA) based hydrogel and a silicone based hydrogel, and three drugs with different sizes and charges: chlorhexidine, levofloxacin and diclofenac. Equilibrium partition coefficients were determined at different ionic strength and pH, using water (pH 5.6) and PBS (pH 7.4). The measured partition coefficients were related with the polymer volume fraction in the hydrogel, through the introduction of an enhancement factor following the approach developed by the group of C. J. Radke ( Kotsmar et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2013 ). This factor may be decomposed in the product of three other factors E HS , E el and E ad which account for, respectively, hard-sphere size exclusion, electrostatic interactions, and specific solute adsorption. While E HS and E el are close to 1, E ad > > 1 in all cases suggesting strong specific interactions between the drugs and the hydrogels. Adsorption was maximal for chlorhexidine on the silicone based hydrogel, in water, due to strong hydrogen bonding. The effective diffusion coefficients, D e , were determined from the drug release profiles. Estimations of diffusion coefficients of the non-adsorbed solutes D = D e × E ad allowed comparison with theories for solute diffusion in the absence of specific interaction with the polymeric membrane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context. The properties of dust grains, in particular their size distribution, are expected to differ from the interstellar medium to the high-density regions within molecular clouds. Aims. We measure the mid-infrared extinction law produced by dense material in molecular cloud cores. Since the extinction at these wavelengths is caused by dust, the extinction law in cores should depart from what is found in low-density environments if the dust grains have different properties. Methods. We used the unbiased LINES method to measure the slope of the reddening vectors in color-color diagrams. We derived the mid-infrared extinction law toward the dense cores B59 and FeSt 1-457 in the Pipe Nebula over a range of visual extinction between 10 and 50 mag, using a combination of Spitzer/IRAC and ESO NTT/VLT data. Results. The mid-infrared extinction law in both cores departs significantly from a power law between 3.6 and 8 μm, suggesting that these cores contain dust with a considerable fraction of large dust grains. We find no evidence of any dependence in the extinction law with column density up to 50 mag of visual extinction in these cores, and no evidence of any variation between our result and those for other clouds at lower column densities reported elsewhere in the literature. This suggests either that large grains are present even in low column density regions or that the existing dust models need to be revised at mid-infrared wavelengths. We find a small but significant difference in the extinction law of the two cores, which we tentatively associate with the onset of star formation in B59. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frame rate upconversion (FRUC) is an important post-processing technique to enhance the visual quality of low frame rate video. A major, recent advance in this area is FRUC based on trilateral filtering which novelty mainly derives from the combination of an edge-based motion estimation block matching criterion with the trilateral filter. However, there is still room for improvement, notably towards reducing the size of the uncovered regions in the initial estimated frame, this means the estimated frame before trilateral filtering. In this context, proposed is an improved motion estimation block matching criterion where a combined luminance and edge error metric is weighted according to the motion vector components, notably to regularise the motion field. Experimental results confirm that significant improvements are achieved for the final interpolated frames, reaching PSNR gains up to 2.73 dB, on average, regarding recent alternative solutions, for video content with varied motion characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frame rate upconversion (FRUC) is an important post‐processing technique to enhance the visual quality of low frame rate video. A major, recent advance in this area is FRUC based on trilateral filtering which novelty mainly derives from the combination of an edge‐based motion estimation block matching criterion with the trilateral filter. However, there is still room for improvement, notably towards reducing the size of the uncovered regions in the initial estimated frame, this means the estimated frame before trilateral filtering. In this context, proposed is an improved motion estimation block matching criterion where a combined luminance and edge error metric is weighted according to the motion vector components, notably to regularise the motion field. Experimental results confirm that significant improvements are achieved for the final interpolated frames, reaching PSNR gains up to 2.73 dB, on average, regarding recent alternative solutions, for video content with varied motion characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context. The dominant formation channel of brown dwarfs (BDs) is not well constrained yet and a promising way to discriminate between scenarios is to test the environment-dependent efficiency in forming BDs. So far, the outcome of star formation, studied through the initial mass function, has been found to be very similar in all clusters that have been inspected. Aims. We aim to characterize the low-mass (sub)stellar population of the central portion (2.4 pc2) of the ∼2 Myr old cluster NGC 2244 using near-infrared spectroscopy. By studying this cluster, characterized by a low stellar density and numerous OB stars, we aim to explore the effect that OB stars may have on the production of BDs. Methods. We obtained near-infrared HK spectroscopy of 85 faint candidate members of NGC 2244. We derived the spectral type and extinction by comparison with spectral templates. We evaluated cluster membership using three gravity-sensitive spectral indices based on the shape of the H-band. Furthermore, we evaluated the infrared excess from Spitzer of all the candidate members of the cluster. Finally, we estimated the mass of all the candidate members of the cluster and derived the initial mass function, star-to-BD number ratio, and disk fraction. Results. The initial mass function is well represented by a power law (dN/dM ∝ M−α) below 0.4 M⊙, with a slope α = 0.7–1.1 depending on the fitted mass range. We calculated a star-to-BD number ratio of 2.2–2.8. We find the low-mass population of NGC 2244 to be consistent with nearby star-forming regions, although it is at the high end of BD production. We find BDs in NGC 2244 to be, on average, closer to OB stars than to low-mass stars, which could potentially be the first piece of evidence that OB stars affect the formation of BDs. We find a disk fraction of all the members with a spectral type later than K0 of 39 ± 9% which is lower than typical values found in nearby star-forming regions of similar ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wyner–Ziv (WZ) video coding is a particular case of distributed video coding (DVC), the recent video coding paradigm based on the Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv theorems which exploits the source temporal correlation at the decoder and not at the encoder as in predictive video coding. Although some progress has been made in the last years, WZ video coding is still far from the compression performance of predictive video coding, especially for high and complex motion contents. The WZ video codec adopted in this study is based on a transform domain WZ video coding architecture with feedback channel-driven rate control, whose modules have been improved with some recent coding tools. This study proposes a novel motion learning approach to successively improve the rate-distortion (RD) performance of the WZ video codec as the decoding proceeds, making use of the already decoded transform bands to improve the decoding process for the remaining transform bands. The results obtained reveal gains up to 2.3 dB in the RD curves against the performance for the same codec without the proposed motion learning approach for high motion sequences and long group of pictures (GOP) sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wyner–Ziv (WZ) video coding is a particular case of distributed video coding, the recent video coding paradigm based on the Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv theorems that exploits the source correlation at the decoder and not at the encoder as in predictive video coding. Although many improvements have been done over the last years, the performance of the state-of-the-art WZ video codecs still did not reach the performance of state-of-the-art predictive video codecs, especially for high and complex motion video content. This is also true in terms of subjective image quality mainly because of a considerable amount of blocking artefacts present in the decoded WZ video frames. This paper proposes an adaptive deblocking filter to improve both the subjective and objective qualities of the WZ frames in a transform domain WZ video codec. The proposed filter is an adaptation of the advanced deblocking filter defined in the H.264/AVC (advanced video coding) standard to a WZ video codec. The results obtained confirm the subjective quality improvement and objective quality gains that can go up to 0.63 dB in the overall for sequences with high motion content when large group of pictures are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present H- and -band imaging of three fields at the centre of 30 Doradus (30 Dor) in the Large Magellanic Cloud, obtained as part of the Science Demonstration programme with the Multiconjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) at the Very Large Telescope. Strehl ratios of 15–30 per cent were achieved in the band, yielding near-infrared images of this dense and complex region at unprecedented angular resolution at these wavelengths. The MAD data are used to construct a near-infrared luminosity profile for R136, the cluster at the core of 30 Dor. Using cluster profiles of the form used by Elson et al., we find the surface brightness can be fit by a relatively shallow power-law function over the full extent of the MAD data, which extends to a radius of ∼40 arcsec (∼10 pc). We do not see compelling evidence for a break in the luminosity profile as seen in optical data in the literature, arguing that cluster asymmetries are the dominant source, although extinction effects and stars from nearby triggered star formation likely also contribute. These results highlight the need to consider cluster asymmetries and multiple spatial components in interpretation of the luminosity profiles of distant unresolved clusters. We also investigate seven candidate young stellar objects reported by Gruendl & Chu from Spitzer observations, six of which have apparent counterparts in the MAD images. The most interesting of these ( 690552.3) appears related to a striking bow-shock-like feature, orientated away from both R136 and the Wolf–Rayet star Brey 75, at distances of 19.5 and 8 arcsec (4.7 and 1.9 pc in projection), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]