A kinetic study on soybean oil transesterification without a catalyst in subcritical and supercritical methanol was made at pressures between 8.7 and 36 MPa. It was found that the conversion of soybean oil into the corresponding methyl esters was enhanced considerably in the supercritical methanol. The apparent activation energies of the transesterification are different with the subcritical and the supercritical states of methanol, which are 11.2 and 56.0 kJ/mol (molar ratio of methanol to oil: 42, pressure: 28 MPa), respectively. The reaction pressure considerably influenced the yield of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) in the pressure range from ambient pressure up to 25 MPa (280°C, 42:1). The reaction activation volume of transesterification in supercritical methanol is approximately -206 cm 3 /mol. The PDV " term accounts for nearly 10% of the apparent activation energy, and can not be ignored (280°C, 42:1).

OBJECTIVETo determine if autologous nonmyeloablative hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT) was beneficial for type 1 diabetic adolescents with diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) at diagnosis.RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODSWe enrolled 28 patients with type 1 diabetes, aged 14–30 years, in a prospective AHSCT phase II clinical trial. HSCs were harvested from the peripheral blood after pretreatment consisting of a combination of cyclophosphamide and antithymocyte globulin. Changes in the exogenous insulin requirement were observed and serum levels of HbA1c, C-peptide, and anti-glutamic acid decarboxylase antibody were measured before and after the AHSCT.RESULTSAfter transplantation, complete remission (CR), defined as insulin independence, was observed in 15 of 28 patients (53.6%) over a mean period of 19.3 months during a follow-up ranging from 4 to 42 months. The non-DKA patients achieved a greater CR rate than the DKA patients (70.6% in non-DKA vs. 27.3% in DKA, P = 0.051). In the non-DKA group, the levels of fasting C-peptide, peak value during oral glucose tolerance test (Cmax), and area under C-peptide release curve during oral glucose tolerance test were enhanced significantly 1 month after transplantation and remained high during the 24-month follow-up (all P < 0.05). In the DKA group, significant elevation of fasting C-peptide levels and Cmax levels was observed only at 18 and 6 months, respectively. There was no mortality.CONCLUSIONSWe have performed AHSCT in 28 patients with type 1 diabetes. The data show AHSCT to be an effective long-term treatment for insulin dependence that achieved a greater efficacy in patients without DKA at diagnosis.

Efficient high-dimensional performance modeling of today's complex analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits with large-scale process variations is an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel performance modeling algorithm that is referred to as Bayesian Model Fusion (BMF). Our key idea is to borrow the simulation data generated from an early stage (e.g., schematic level) to facilitate efficient high-dimensional performance modeling at a late stage (e.g., post layout) with low computational cost. Such a goal is achieved by statistically modeling the performance correlation between early and late stages through Bayesian inference. Several circuit examples designed in a commercial 32nm CMOS process demonstrate that BMF achieves up to 9× runtime speedup over the traditional modeling technique without surrendering any accuracy.