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Probing dense hadronic matter is thus far an uncharted field of physics. Here we give a brief summary of the highlights of what has been so far accomplished and what will be done in the years ahead by the World Class University III Project at Hanyang University in the endeavor to unravel and elucidate the multifacet of the cold dense baryonic matter existing in the interior of the densest visible stable object in the universe, i.e. neutron stars, strangeness stars and/or quark stars, from a modest and simplified starting point of an effective field theory modeled on the premise of QCD as well as from a gravity dual approach of hQCD. The core of the matter of our research is the possible origin of the ~ 99% of the proton mass that is to be accounted for and how the "vacuum" can be tweaked so that the source of the mass generation can be uncovered by measurements made in terrestrial as well as space laboratories. Some of the issues treated in the program concern what can be done — both theoretically and experimentally — in anticipation of what's to come for basic physics research in Korea.

Citizen Science (CS) initiatives have proliferated in different scientific and social fields, producing vast amounts of data. Existing CS projects usually adopt PPSR Core as a data and metadata standard. However, these projects are still not FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable)-compliant. We propose to use DCAT as a data and metadata standard since it helps to improve the interoperability of CS data catalogs and all the FAIR features. For this purpose, in this paper we present a model-driven approach to make CS data FAIR. Our approach has the following contributions: (i) the definition of a metamodel based on PPSR Core, (ii) the definition of a DCAT profile for CS, (iii) a definition of set of automated transformations from PPSR Core to DCAT. Finally, the implementation of the model-driven process has been validated by evaluating several FAIR metrics. The results show that our proposal has significantly improved the FAIR quality of CS projects.

The importance of open data has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Although the sharing and reuse of clinical data for translational research lags behind best practices in biological science, a number of patient-derived datasets exist and have been published enabling translational research spanning multiple scales from molecular to organ level, and from patients to populations. In seeking to replicate metabolomic biomarker results in Alzheimer’s disease our team identified three independent cohorts in which to compare findings. Accessing the datasets associated with these cohorts, understanding their content and provenance, and comparing variables between studies was a valuable exercise in exploring the principles of open data in practice. It also helped inform steps taken to make the original datasets available for use by other researchers. In this paper we describe best practices and lessons learned in attempting to identify, access, understand, and analyze these additional datasets to advance research reproducibility, as well as steps taken to facilitate sharing of our own data.

The Sequence Read Archive (SRA) contains over one million publicly available sequencing runs from various studies using a variety of sequencing library strategies. These data inherently contain information about underlying genomic sequence variants which we exploit to extract allelic read counts on an unprecedented scale. We reprocessed over 250,000 human sequencing runs (>1000 TB data worth of raw sequence data) into a single unified dataset of allelic read counts for nearly 300,000 variants of biomedical relevance curated by NCBI dbSNP, where germline variants were detected in a median of 912 sequencing runs, and somatic variants were detected in a median of 4,876 sequencing runs, suggesting that this dataset facilitates identification of sequencing runs that harbor variants of interest. Allelic read counts obtained using a targeted alignment were very similar to read counts obtained from whole-genome alignment. Analyzing allelic read count data for matched DNA and RNA samples from tumors, we find that RNA-seq can also recover variants identified by Whole Exome Sequencing (WXS), suggesting that reprocessed allelic read counts can support variant detection across different library strategies in SRA. This study provides a rich database of known human variants across SRA samples that can support future meta-analyses of human sequence variation.

On October 4th, 2010, nine countries signed the international agreement on the construction of the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR. The new facility is going to be constructed within the next eight years adjacent to the existing accelerator complex of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research at Darmstadt/Germany, expanding the research goals and technical possibilities substantially. Providing a broad spectrum of unprecedented fore-front research at worldwide unique accelerator and experimental facilities, FAIR will open the way for a large variety of experiments in hadron, nuclear, atomic and plasma physics as well as applied sciences which will be briefly described in this article.

As of the year 2018 the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) will offer access to exotic ion beams and beams of antiproton of unprecedented luminosity. The facility currently under construction in Darmstadt, Germany, adjacent to the existing accelerator at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy-Ion Research, will serve several collaborations and fields simultaneously: atomic, hadron, nuclear, and plasma physics.

NUSTAR comprises the current nuclear structure, astrophysics and reactions programme at GSI and its proposed continuation and extension at FAIR. NUSTAR relies on the availability of exotic rare-isotope beams produced by fragmentation reactions and fission of relativistic heavy ions. The fragment separator FRS and a versatile set of instruments, including gamma arrays, particle spectrometers and a storage ring, enable unique experiments at GSI. The Super-FRS at the FAIR facility will provide several orders of magnitude stronger beams, providing access to the extremes of nuclear stability. To exploit these opportunities novel experimental set-ups are in preparation. R&D efforts have already resulted in improved detectors and enable the NUSTAR collaboration to steadily enhance the sensitivity and selectivity limits of their experiments. Current NUSTAR physics highlights, as well as development projects and activities, will be discussed.