Some inconvenient truths about decarbonization, the hydrogen economy, and power-to-X technologies.

The decarbonization of the energy sector has been a subject of research and of political discussions for several decades, gaining significant attention in the last years. It is commonly acknowledged that the most obvious way to achieve decarbonization is the use of renewable energy sources. Within the context of the energy sector decarbonization, many mainly industrialized countries recently started developing national plans to establish a hydrogen-based economy in the very near future.

Exergy-Based Analysis and Optimization of an Integrated Solar Combined-Cycle Power Plant.

The transition towards higher shares of electricity generation from renewable energy sources is shown to be significantly slower in developing countries with low-cost fossil fuel resources. Integrating conventional power plants with concentrated solar power may facilitate the transition towards a more sustainable power production. In this paper, a novel natural gas-fired integrated solar combined-cycle power plant was proposed, evaluated, and optimized with exergy-based methods.

Advanced Exergy Analysis in the Dynamic Framework for Assessing Building Thermal Systems.

This work applies the Dynamic Advanced Exergy Analysis (DAEA) to a heating and domestic hot water (DHW) facility supplied by a Stirling engine and a condensing boiler. For the first time, an advanced exergy analysis using dynamic conditions is applied to a building energy system. DAEA provides insights on the components' exergy destruction (ED) by distinguishing the inefficiencies that can be prevented by improving the quality (avoidable ED) and the ones constrained because of technical limitations (unavoidable ED).

Permissible emission limit estimation via iterative back-calculation: Case of Assaluyeh energy zone, southern Iran.

In the present research work, an environmental policy procedure for setting a cap on emissions, as a crucial step in any total emission control system, has been provided and evaluated. It is shown that general regulations on emission intensities and rates do not guarantee that ambient air quality standards are met in intense industrial zones. Local emission limits are necessary to meet ambient air quality standards in these zones.

Reference intervals for plasma concentrations of adrenal steroids measured by LC-MS/MS: Impact of gender, age, oral contraceptives, body mass index and blood pressure status.

Background: Mass spectrometric-based measurements of the steroid metabolome have been introduced to diagnose disorders featuring abnormal steroidogenesis. Defined reference intervals are important for interpreting such data.

Methods: Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry was used to establish reference intervals for 16 steroids (pregnenolone, progesterone, 11-deoxycorticosterone, corticosterone, aldosterone, 18-oxocortisol, 18-hydroxycortisol, 17-hydroxyprogesterone, 21-deoxycortisol, 11-deoxycortisol, cortisol, cortisone, dehydroepiandrosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate, androstenedione, testosterone) measured in plasma from 525 volunteers with (n=227) and without (n=298) hypertension, including 68 women on oral contraceptives.

Discovering relations between indirectly connected biomedical concepts.

Background: The complexity and scale of the knowledge in the biomedical domain has motivated research work towards mining heterogeneous data from both structured and unstructured knowledge bases. Towards this direction, it is necessary to combine facts in order to formulate hypotheses or draw conclusions about the domain concepts. This work addresses this problem by using indirect knowledge connecting two concepts in a knowledge graph to discover hidden relations between them.

Formalizing biomedical concepts from textual definitions.

Background: Ontologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic.

An overview of the BIOASQ large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering competition.

Background: This article provides an overview of the first BIOASQ challenge, a competition on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering (QA), which took place between March and September 2013. BIOASQ assesses the ability of systems to semantically index very large numbers of biomedical scientific articles, and to return concise and user-understandable answers to given natural language questions by combining information from biomedical articles and ontologies.

Results: The 2013 BIOASQ competition comprised two tasks, Task 1a and Task 1b.

Prediction of drug gene associations via ontological profile similarity with application to drug repositioning.

The amount of biomedical literature has been increasing rapidly during the last decade. Text mining techniques can harness this large-scale data, shed light onto complex drug mechanisms, and extract relation information that can support computational polypharmacology. In this work, we introduce a fully corpus-based and unsupervised method which utilizes the MEDLINE indexed titles and abstracts to infer drug gene associations and assist drug repositioning.

Automated Patent Categorization and Guided Patent Search using IPC as Inspired by MeSH and PubMed.

Document search on PubMed, the pre-eminent database for biomedical literature, relies on the annotation of its documents with relevant terms from the Medical Subject Headings ontology (MeSH) for improving recall through query expansion. Patent documents are another important information source, though they are considerably less accessible. One option to expand patent search beyond pure keywords is the inclusion of classification information: Since every patent is assigned at least one class code, it should be possible for these assignments to be automatically used in a similar way as the MeSH annotations in PubMed.

A Maximum-Entropy approach for accurate document annotation in the biomedical domain.

The increasing number of scientific literature on the Web and the absence of efficient tools used for classifying and searching the documents are the two most important factors that influence the speed of the search and the quality of the results. Previous studies have shown that the usage of ontologies makes it possible to process document and query information at the semantic level, which greatly improves the search for the relevant information and makes one step further towards the Semantic Web. A fundamental step in these approaches is the annotation of documents with ontology concepts, which can also be seen as a classification task.

Advanced exergoenvironmental analysis of a near-zero emission power plant with chemical looping combustion.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) from power plants can be used to mitigate CO(2) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. However, CCS technologies are energy intensive, decreasing the operating efficiency of a plant and increasing its costs. Recently developed advanced exergy-based analyses can uncover the potential for improvement of complex energy conversion systems, as well as qualify and quantify plant component interactions.