Atmospheric concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) is higher than any time in the last 400000 years and growing faster than at any time in the past 18000 years. The high concentration of GHG generates radiative forcing that contributes to climate change. Energy production from fossil fuels has …
It is evident that the worldwide average temperature is rising and climate is changing (WMO, 2003) and it is believed that there is sufficient evidence that this is due to human activities (IPCC 2001). Human activities are primarily responsible for the release of carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants …
In language technologies, syntactic parsing represents one of the possible intermediate steps of text analysis in the applications such as machine translation, information extraction, question answering, etc. Syntactic trees are often used to demonstrate the structure of text. In the last decades, the dependency framework became a popular syntactic representation, …
Mercury (Hg) pollution has been investigated in the area of the Idrija mercury mine, Slovenia, where the second largest mercury mine in the world operated for more then 500 years. Although the production of mercury at the Idrija mercury mine stopped in 1994, centuries of mining and ore processing operations …
The study of PbZrO3 (PZ), PbTiO3 (PT) and La2Zr2O7 (LZ) prepared by alkoxide sol-gel synthesis is described. PZ and PT sols were prepared from lead acetate, zirconium and titanium n-butoxide, in n-butanol and hydrolysed with Rw (molar ratio of water per lead acetate) between 2 and 15 in neutral medium …
This thesis presents a study of different nanoscale functional properties of Mo6S9-XIx nanowires and demonstrates a straight-forward functionalization route based on self-assembly. In order to ascertain their basic functional properties, studies of dispersion and electromobility under different conditions were performed. It was found that the nanowire bundles, due to their …
Neutron activation analysis (NAA) is an analytical method used for determination of the elemental mass fractions in different samples. It is based on the measurement of characteristic radiation, usually γ-rays, emitted from radionuclides formed through the process of neutron irradiation of the target element. The k0-NAA method is an NAA …
Microarrays are at the center of a revolution in biotechnology, allowing researchers to simultaneously monitor the expression of tens of thousands of genes. The final aim of a typical microarray experiment is to find a molecular explanation for a given macroscopic observation (e.g., which pathways are affected by the loss …
Developing metaheuristics to solve optimization problems is a rapidly growing field of research. This is due to the importance of optimization problems in the scientific as well as the industrial world. The methods developed in this dissertation are based on stigmergy: a method of communication in emergent systems, where the …
Cysteine peptidases have been demonstrated to be important virulence factors of protozoan parasites, including Trypanosoma cruzi. With genome sequence determination the existence of several novel families of cysteine peptidases can be envisioned in this parasite. We focused on two families, metacaspases from the clan CD and autophagins (or Atg4 proteases) …