Smartphones are becoming comparable to desktop computers in terms of computational power, and offer diverse applications ranging from social media and gaming, to multimedia and banking. A particular class of mobile applications, mobile/cloud applications, are tightly coupled with the cloud. While executing on the mobile device, they communicate frequently with the cloud for crucial functionality. Use ...

Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere and its capacity to sustain complex life is the most paramount feature that distinguishes Earth from all other planets. The irreversible oxygenation of atmosphere occurred about half way through Earth’s history at ~2.3 Ga (the Great Oxidation Event – GOE) when for the first-time photosynthetic oxygen production surpassed the consumption by chemical reactions allowing ...

Bioinformatics has seen an extreme data growth in later years due to the reduction in cost per megabase of sequencing, which today is around 1/400,000th of the cost in 2001. This reduction in cost enables new types of studies, such as searching for novel enzymes in marine environments using metagenomic approaches. However, it also leads to an increase in volume of data, which shifts overall cost ...

Electrodialytic remediation (EDR) is a method for removing pollutants from different materials achieved by acidification and transport processes induced by application of an electric field of low intensity. In the thesis, EDR was shown to be a reliable technology for removal of heavy metals, PAH, PCB and TBT from harbour sediments. The final concentrations of heavy metals met the background criteria ...

Greenhouse gas methane is contained as gas hydrate, an icy structure, under the seabed in enormous amounts of Arctic regions. West Svalbard continental margin, which we investigated here, is one of these regions. Also, in the Russian Kara Sea the subsea permafrost is acting as a cap for the gas to be released in the future. But continuous expulsions of methane have been already observed in both ...

Upward mixing of remineralized nutrients is essential for photosynthesis in the upper ocean. Weak vertical mixing, which restricts nutrient supply, and sea ice, which leads to low light levels, conspire to severely inhibit marine primary productivity in the Arctic Ocean. However, little has been known about their relative contributions. No large-scale quantitative estimates of the vertical nutrient ...

Enzymes are protein molecules that accelerate, or “catalyze”, specific chemical reactions. The reacting molecules, or substrates, bind to the enzyme which then enables their effective conversion into different product molecules. Virtually all metabolic processes in the cell need enzymes to occur at speeds fast enough to maintain life. The kinases are a large group of phosphotransferases, i.e. enzymes ...

Antibiotic resistance is a topic that concerns everyone, and by 2050 deaths due to antibiotic resistant bacteria may surpass number of deaths due to cancer. The OXA-class of antibiotic resistance enzymes is a formidable threat, but has not received the same attention as other resistance enzymes. The goal of the project was to understand antibiotic resistance enzymes at an atomic scale and to develop ...

The efficiency of bacteria in acquiring resistance for their survival ensures a never-ending war against resistance. The only tactic to curtail the resistance crisis is to keep pace with it, e.g. by continuous development of new antibiotics with activity against resistant bacteria or revival of existing agents by inhibiting the mechanisms of resistance. β-lactams are the largest and most widely used ...

The research undertaken in this PhD project was part of a large EU interdisciplinary project named ECO2: Sub-seabed CO2 Storage: Impact on Marine Ecosystems. The overall goal of the ECO2 project was to understand the short-term and long-term impacts of CO2 storage on marine ecosystems. I concentrated my work on the Snøhvit site, which is located in the SW Barents Sea, on the Norwegian continental ...