Search results for "MAI"
showing 10 items of 6279 documents
Heavy enzymes and the rational redesign of protein catalysts
2019
Abstract An unsolved mystery in biology concerns the link between enzyme catalysis and protein motions. Comparison between isotopically labelled “heavy” dihydrofolate reductases and their natural‐abundance counterparts has suggested that the coupling of protein motions to the chemistry of the catalysed reaction is minimised in the case of hydride transfer. In alcohol dehydrogenases, unnatural, bulky substrates that induce additional electrostatic rearrangements of the active site enhance coupled motions. This finding could provide a new route to engineering enzymes with altered substrate specificity, because amino acid residues responsible for dynamic coupling with a given substrate present…
Transnational bodies: Embodiment of transnational settings
2016
AbstractThe everyday life of more and more people is characterized by transnationalism. People increasingly interact across borders and in a network of transnational relationships. While interactions may be border-crossing, the actors’ body remains situated and limited in time and space. However, the thesis of this paper is that transnationalism processes are embodied. Thus, we speak of an embodiment of transnational settings. We focus on symbolic interactionism – Charles H. Cooley and George H. Mead in particular provide a large repertoire of concepts – to theoretically conceive transnational bodies. To show how transnational embodiment can manifest itself we use the example of young peopl…
High Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy of T Tauri Stars in the Taurus-Auriga Complex
2006
Differences have been reported between the X-ray emission of accreting and non-accreting stars. Some observations have suggested that accretion shocks could be responsible for part of the X-ray emission in Classical T Tauri stars (CTTS). We present high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy of nine pre-main sequence stars in order to test the proposed spectroscopic differences between accreting and non-accreting pre-main sequence stars. We use X-ray spectroscopy from the XMM-Newton Reflection Grating Spectrometers and the EPIC instruments. We interpret the spectra using optically thin thermal models with variable abundances, together with an absorption column density. For BP Tau and AB Aur we deriv…
Study of a sample of faint Be stars in the exofield of CoRoT
2013
International audience; Context. Be stars are probably the most rapid rotators among stars in the main sequence (MS) and, as such, are excellent candidates to study the incidence of the rotation on the characteristics of their non-radial pulsations, as well as on their internal structure. Pulsations are also thought to be possible mechanisms that help the mass ejection needed to build up the circumstellar disks of Be stars.Aims. The purpose of this paper is to identify a number of faint Be stars observed with the CoRoT satellite and to determine their fundamental parameters, which will enable us to study their pulsation properties as a function of the location in the HR diagram and to searc…
A review of environmental impacts of winter road maintenance
2019
Abstract The need for winter road maintenance (WRM) is changing in cold regions due to climate change. How the different modes of WRM will contribute to future overall emissions from infrastructure is therefore of great interest to road owners with a view to a more sustainable, low-carbon future. In the quest for near-zero-emissions transport, all aspects of the transport sector need to be accounted for in the search for possible mitigation of emissions. This study used 35 peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2018 to map available information on the environmental impacts and effect of WRM and reveal any research gaps. The articles were categorized according to their research th…
Controlled time integration for the numerical simulation of meteor radar reflections
2016
We model meteoroids entering the Earth[U+05F3]s atmosphere as objects surrounded by non-magnetized plasma, and consider efficient numerical simulation of radar reflections from meteors in the time domain. Instead of the widely used finite difference time domain method (FDTD), we use more generalized finite differences by applying the discrete exterior calculus (DEC) and non-uniform leapfrog-style time discretization. The computational domain is presented by convex polyhedral elements. The convergence of the time integration is accelerated by the exact controllability method. The numerical experiments show that our code is efficiently parallelized. The DEC approach is compared to the volume …
Environmental change during the Early Cretaceous in the Purbeck-type Durlston Bay section (Dorset, Southern England): a biomarker approach.
2007
20 pages; International audience; The Purbeck-type section (Durlston Bay, Dorset, UK) exhibits littoral lagoonal to lacustrine facies. It shows a gradual climatic/environmental change from semi-arid conditions associated with evaporites at the Jurassic–Cretaceous transition, to a more humid climate at the end of the Berriasian. Though generally organic-poor (total organic carbon, TOC, <1.3%), the Durlston Bay section shows an organic-rich episode (TOC up to 8.5%) located at the transition from evaporitic to more humid facies. A biomarker study was performed in order to determine the origin of the organic matter (OM) in the section and see if changes in organic sources accompanied the genera…
Pre- and syn-eruptive geochemistry of volcanic gases from Soufriere Hills of Montserrat, West Indies
1998
International audience; Soufriere Hills fumaroles contained magmaderived volatiles before and during the eruption initiated in 1995 but also preserved a typical and quite steady hydrothermal coinposition. Chemical changes due to increased boiling and a greater input of oxidizing magmatic gas occurred only at Galway's Soufriere, the most active fumarolic field. Hydrothermal buffering of the fumaroles has been favoured by their remote location (!-2 km) froin the eruptive vents and by a preferential degassing of the uprising magma through intrusive conduits under the crater. High temperature (720øC) gas collected froin the extruding lava dome in Feb. 1996 was chemically and isotopically repres…
Validation of SMAP surface soil moisture products with core validation sites
2017
Abstract The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has utilized a set of core validation sites as the primary methodology in assessing the soil moisture retrieval algorithm performance. Those sites provide well-calibrated in situ soil moisture measurements within SMAP product grid pixels for diverse conditions and locations. The estimation of the average soil moisture within the SMAP product grid pixels based on in situ measurements is more reliable when location specific calibration of the sensors has been performed and there is adequate replication over the spatial domain, with an up-scaling function based on analysis using independent estimates of the soil moisture distributio…
Phanerozoic geological evolution of Northern and Central Africa: An overview.
2005
61 pages; International audience; The principal paleogeographic characteristics of North and Central Africa during the Paleozoic were the permanency of large exposed lands over central Africa, surrounded by northerly and northwesterly dipping pediplanes episodically flooded by epicontinental seas related to the Paleotethys Ocean. The intra-continental Congo–Zaire Basin was also a long-lived feature, as well as the Somali Basin from Late Carboniferous times, in conjunction with the development of the Karoo basins of southern Africa. This configuration, in combination with eustatic sea-level fluctuations, had a strong influence on facies distributions. Significant transgressions occurred duri…