Category: Featured Database

Insight into a natural Diels-Alder reaction from the structure of macrophomate synthase

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Author: Ose, Toyoyuki; Watanabe, Kenji; Mie, Takashi; Honma, Mamoru; Watanabe, Hiromi; Yao, Min; Oikawa, Hideaki; Tanaka, Isao Description: The Diels–Alder reaction, which forms a six-membered ring from an alkene (dienophile) and a 1,3-diene, is synthetically very useful for construction of cyclic products with high regio- and stereoselectivity under mild conditions. It has been applied to the synthesis of complex pharmaceutical and biologically active compounds. Although evidence on natural Diels–Alderases has been accumulated in the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, there has been no report on the structural details of the natural Diels–Alderases….

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How to rescue biofuels from a sustainable dead end

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Author: Fairley, Peter Description: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine squeezed global oil supplies and inflation increased prices at the pumps. Although petrol prices then started to fall after several months, the situation delivered a powerful reminder of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels … Subject headings: Biofuels; Biotechnology; Sustainable Development; Agriculture; Environmental sciences; Sustainability Publication year: 2022 Journal or book title: Nature Volume: 611 Issue: 7936 Pages: S15-S17 Find the full text: https://www.strategian.com/fulltext/Fairley2022.pdf Find more like this one (cited by): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=204846560647340686&as_sdt=1000005&sciodt=0,16&hl=en Serial number: 4007

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How Many People Were Killed by Windblown Dust Events in the United States?

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Author: Tong, D.; Feng, Irene Y.; Gill, Thomas E.; Schepanski, K.; Wang, J. Description: Windblown dust events, including dust storms and smaller blowing dust events, pose severe risks to public health and transportation safety. In the United States, the statistics of fatalities caused by dust events remains elusive. We developed a new dataset by merging dust fatality data from NOAA Storm Events Database and the Department of Transportation Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). There was a total of 232 deaths from windblown dust events from 2007 to 2017. This number…

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Protection of the human gene research literature from contract cheating organizations known as research paper mills

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Author: Byrne, Jennifer A.; Park, Yasunori; Richardson, Reese A. K.; Pathmendra, Pranujan; Sun, Mengyi; Stoeger, Thomas Description: Human gene research generates new biology insights with translational potential, yet few studies have considered the health of the human gene literature. The accessibility of human genes for targeted research, combined with unreasonable publication pressures and recent developments in scholarly publishing, may have created a market for low-quality or fraudulent human gene research articles, including articles produced by contract cheating organizations known as paper mills. This review summarises the evidence that paper mills…

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Timeliness and content of retraction notices for publications by a single research group

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Author: Grey, Andrew; Avenell, Alison; Bolland, Mark Description: Publications of expressions of concern and retractions should be timely, accurate and comprehensive. We assessed these characteristics for 292 publications by a research group about which we submitted concerns about publication integrity to 77 journals and 29 publishers between March 2013 and February 2020. By October 2020, 115 publications were corrected (3), had expressions of concern (18), or were retracted (94). The median (95% CI) time from submission of concerns to the first journal correction was 22.1 (18.2-26.9) months: this did not…

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Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature

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Author: Cabanac, Guillaume; Labbe, Cyril Description: In 2014 leading publishers withdrew more than 120 nonsensical publications automatically generated with the SCIgen program. Casual observations suggested that similar problematic papers are still published and sold, without follow-up retractions. No systematic screening has been performed and the prevalence of such nonsensical publications in the scientific literature is unknown. Our contribution is 2-fold. First, we designed a detector that combs the scientific literature for grammar-based computer-generated papers. Applied to SCIgen, it has a 83.6% precision. Second, we performed a scientometric study of the…

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The Transformation of the Scientific Paper: From Knowledge to Accounting Unit

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Author: Gingras, Yves Description: Since the mid-1990s, observers and actors in the scientific field—as defined in Bourdieu as a structured space of agents and institutions in competition for the accumulation of credit or “symbolic capital”—have commented on the many facets of an ongoing major transformation in the structural conditions of scientific practice: massification of research, mounting pressure to publish, relative decline of government investments, and the arrival into the research system of the ideology of “knowledge management” with its insistence on quantitative evaluation measures of productivity and “impact” of academic…

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A social network contagion theory of risk perception

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Author: Scherer, Clifford W.; Cho, Hichang Description: Risk perceptions have, to a great extent, been studied exclusively as individual cognitive mechanisms in which individuals collect, process, and form perceptions as atomized units unconnected to a social system. These individual-level theories do not, however, help explain how perception of risk may vary between communities or within a single community. One alternative approach is based on a network theory of contagion. This approach, emerging largely from organizational and community social network studies, suggests that it is the relational aspects of individuals and…

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Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

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Author: Everett, J.; Faber, N.; Crockett, M. Description: Ingroup favoritism–the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups–is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how…

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Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections

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Author: Supran, G.; Rahmstorf, S.; Oreskes, N. Description: Climate projections by the fossil fuel industry have never been assessed. On the basis of company records, we quantitatively evaluated all available global warming projections documented by-and in many cases modeled by-Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists between 1977 and 2003. We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming that is consistent with subsequent observations. Their projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models. Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp also correctly rejected…

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