CO₂ is a renewable source of carbon that has not yet been properly utilized. The reason for this is mostly due to its kinetic and thermodynamic stability. The potential renewability of CO₂, coupled with environmental concerns, has motivated scientists worldwide to develop new artificial carbon cycles for chemical fixation of CO₂. Unfortunately, the pronounced inertness ...

Background:<br> New Delhi Metallo-β-Lactamase (NDM-1) is one of the most recent additions to the β-lactamases family. Since its discovery in 2009, NDM-1 producing Enterobacteriaceae have disseminated globally. With few effective antibiotics against NDM-1 producers, there is an urgent need to design new drug inhibitors through the help of structural and mechanistic information available from ...

Due to its oblateness, the Sun carries a solar quadrupole moment playing a key role at the crossroad of fundamental solar physics, astrometry and celestial mechanics. There is nowadays a general agreement on its order of magnitude ( ≈2×10-7 ), but its temporal dependence is still poorly known. Helioseismology led to a variation within the solar cycle by less than 0.04%, not yet ...

Spot 42 was discovered in Escherichia coli nearly 40 years ago as an abundant, small and unstable RNA. Its biological role has remained obscure until recently, and is today implicated in having broader roles in the central and secondary metabolism. Spot 42 is encoded by the spf gene. The gene is ubiquitous in the Vibrionaceae family of gamma-proteobacteria. One member of this family, Aliivibrio ...

The ultrahigh-frequency observation during an ionospheric heating experiment on 11 March 2014 at the European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association Tromsø site illustrated a remarkable extension of observing altitudes of the enhanced plasma line and the ion line, implying that the enhanced ion acoustic wave and Langmuir wave should satisfy the Bragg condition within the extending altitude range. ...

This paper presents a generic software architecture for large-scale distributed applications where mobile agents are an integral part. We have devised this architecture through completion of a series of mobile agent systems and associated applications over the last 8 years.

We find that summer methane (CH4) release from seabed sediments west of Svalbard substantially increases CH4 concentrations in the ocean but has limited influence on the atmospheric CH4 levels. Our conclusion stems from complementary measurements at the seafloor, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere from land-based, ship and aircraft platforms during a summer campaign in 2014. We detected high ...

Nanophotonic waveguides are at the core of a great variety of optical sensors. These structures confine light along defined paths on photonic chips and provide light–matter interaction via an evanescent field. However, waveguides still lag behind free-space optics for sensitivity-critical applications such as trace gas detection. Short optical pathlengths, low interaction strengths, and spurious ...

Extreme space weather events are rare, and quantifying their likelihood is challenging, often relying on geomagnetic indices obtained from ground-based magnetometer observations that span multiple solar cycles. The Dst index ring-current monitor, derived from an hourly average over four low-latitude stations, is a benchmark for extreme space weather events, and has been extensively studied ...

We present a highly scalable DFT-based QM/MM implementation developed within MiMiC, a recently introduced multiscale modeling framework that uses a loose-coupling strategy in conjunction with a multiple-program multiple-data (MPMD) approach. The computation of electrostatic QM/MM interactions is parallelized exploiting both distributed- and shared-memory strategies. Here, we use the efficient CPMD ...