Search

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the rising problems in the whole world in wild animals. As we know, countries like India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Pakistan, etc. are considered the home of many endangered wildlife species like the Asian elephant, Rhinoceros, Markhor, Snow Leopard, and Bengal tiger. These countries carry 44% of the burden of TB in the form of human TB, livestock TB, and wildlife TB. The TB pathogen is having a wide host range, therefore it is of great importance and need of the hour to work under one health concept to construct a composite TB control program in the medical as well as veterinary fields. Moreover, further researches are yet to be made on this challenging arena. Globally, many studies have been conducted to discover the types of tuberculosis in wild animals. Recent studies had declared that Mycobacterium tuberculosis is not only the causative agent of tuberculosis in wild animals but other mycobacterium species are also a growing threat. It was demonstrated that a wide variety of mycobacterium strains are present in the whole region, particularly in developing countries pointing out its endemic distribution. Tuberculosis in the free-ranging Rhinoceros in South Africa, Nepal, and Sri Lanka is associated with the M. bovis and M. orygis that also signify the threats of TB in other wild animal species including chances of unknown maintenance host. Some other research has revealed that there is a rising challenge of TB in the elephants too in different countries of the World. Being a major reservoir host of tuberculosis, wildlife has become a conservation and public health challenge all over the World.

Background:Chronic kidney disease is a major public health problem worldwide.Kidney failure is becoming increasingly common and is associated with poor health outcomes and high medical expenditures. Objective:To determine the frequency of hypocalcemia among patients with chronic kidney disease. Setting:Department of General Medicine, Hayatabad Medical Complex, Peshawar. Duration of study:Six months 6/5/2019 to 6/11/2019. Study design:Cross sectional study. Materials and Methods: Total 194 patients were included in the study. Detail history, clinical examination and laboratory investigation was preformed for the confirmation of CKD. From all the patients at admission, 3cc of blood was obtained under strict aseptic technique and was immediately sent to hospital laboratory to detect hypocalcaemia and hypocalcaemia was considered positive if the serum corrected calcium level Results:Stages of CKD was analyzed as 17(9%) patients had CKD stage 1, 29(15%) patients had stage 2, 54(28%) had stage 3, 51(26%) had stage 4, 43(22%) had stage 5 respectively. More over 50(26%) patients had hypocalcemia while 144(74%) patients didnt. Seventy four 74(38%) patients had duration of CKD ≤ 6 months while 120(62%) patients had duration of CKD >6 month. Mean duration of CKD was 7 months with standard deviation ± 3.78. One hundred and forty 140 (72%) patients had weight ≤80 Kgs while 54(28%) patients weight >80 Kgs. Mean weight was 76 Kgs with standard deviation ± 15.29. Conclusion:Frequency of hypocalcemia was found about 26% in patients with chronic kidney disease.

Discovering what other people think has always been a key aspect of our information-gathering strategy. People can now actively utilize information technology to seek out and comprehend the ideas of others, thanks to the increased availability and popularity of opinion-rich resources such as online review sites and personal blogs. Because of its crucial function in understanding people's opinions, sentiment analysis (SA) is a crucial task. Existing research, on the other hand, is primarily focused on the English language, with just a small amount of study devoted to low-resource languages. For sentiment analysis, this work presented a new multi-class Urdu dataset based on user evaluations. The tweeter website was used to get Urdu dataset. Our proposed dataset includes 10,000 reviews that have been carefully classified into two categories by human experts: positive, negative. The primary purpose of this research is to construct a manually annotated dataset for Urdu sentiment analysis and to establish the baseline result. Five different lexicon- and rule-based algorithms including Naivebayes, Stanza, Textblob, Vader, and Flair are employed and the experimental results show that Flair with an accuracy of 70% outperforms other tested algorithms., Comment: Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Urdu language, polarity assessment, lexicon-based method

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Analysis of the simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in the chloroplast genome of Z. hajarensis and compared cp genomes of related species. (A) Frequency of SSRs in coding and intergenic regions (B) Frequency of SSRs in inverted repeats (IR) small single copy (SSC) and large single copy (LSC) regions. Figure S2. Phylogenetic trees were constructed for 36 species from seven families representing 15 genera using different methods and the tree is shown for 66 protein coding shared genes (A) and matK (B) data sets. These sequences data sets were used with four different methods: Bayesian inference (BI), maximum parsimony (MP), neighbour joining (NJ) and maximum likelihood (ML). The branches above represent bootstrap values in the ML, NJ and MP, and posterior probabilities in the BI trees. Table S1. Gene composition in Z. hajarensis chloroplast genome.

In this paper, we propose an efficient approximate sum of absolute differences (SAD) hardware with very small maximum and average error for FPGAs. The proposed approximate SAD hardware utilizes the unused LUT inputs to reduce area and power consumption while providing an almost accurate result. The proposed approximate SAD hardware has smaller maximum and average error than the approximate SAD hardware in the literature. It uses up to 20% less LUTs than the smallest approximate SAD hardware in the literature. It consumes up to 38% less power than the lowest power consuming approximate SAD hardware in the literature.

The study investigated the impact of the affordance of computer assisted language learning (CALL) and mobile assisted language learning (MALL) on EFL reading comprehension at tertiary level. Pre-formed intact groups were used to conduct this quasi-experimental study. It used a pretest and post-test control group design. The participants were 122 first year university students. Computer-based reading comprehension exercises were used as intervention that lasted for six weeks. Vocabulary was pre-taught through WhatsApp. Post-test results of the reading comprehension achievement test revealed that the treatment group outperformed their counterparts in the control group. The results indicate the significance of technology incorporation in language learning process. The study shows the effective use of technology in EFL reading instruction. It works best when integrated in the instructional scheme. Results of the study also suggest that freely available technological resources can be used to create a conducive reading environment. The study needs to be replicated with bigger sample and longer period of intervention for more accurate results.

Event Tree (ET) analysis is a widely used forward deductive safety analysis technique for decision-making at a system design stage. Existing ET tools usually provide Graphical Users Interfaces (GUI) for users to manually draw system-level ET diagrams, which consist of nodes and branches, describing all possible success and failure scenarios. However, these tools do not include some important ET analysis steps, e.g., the automatic generation and reduction of a complete system ET diagram. In this paper, we present a new Event Trees Modeling and Analysis (ETMA) tool to facilitate users to conduct a complete ET analysis of a given system. Some key features of ETMA include: (i) automatic construction of a complete ET model of real-world systems; (ii) deletion/reduction of unnecessary ET nodes and branches; (iii) partitioning of ET paths; and (iv) probabilistic analysis of the occurrence of a certain event. For illustration purposes, we utilize our ETMA tool to conduct the ET analysis of a protective fault trip circuit in power grid transmission lines. We also compared the ETMA results with Isograph, which is a well-known commercial tool for ET analysis., Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables, The 14th Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SYSCON 2020)

Event Tree (ET) analysis is widely used as a forward deductive safety analysis technique for decision-making at the critical-system design stage. ET is a schematic diagram representing all possible operating states and external events in a system so that one of these possible scenarios can occur. In this report, we propose to use the HOL4 theorem prover for the formal modeling and step-analysis of ET diagrams. To this end, we developed a formalization of ETs in higher-order logic, which is based on a generic list datatype that can: (i) construct an arbitrary level of ET diagrams; (ii) reduce the irrelevant ET branches; (iii) partition ET paths; and (iv) perform the probabilistic analysis based on the occurrence of certain events. For illustration purposes, we conduct the formal ET stepwise analysis of an electrical power grid and also determine its System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), which is an important indicator for system reliability., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures

Formation of Aβ plaques from peptide oligomers and development of neurofibrillary tangles from hyperphosphorylated tau are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). These markers of AD severity are further associated with impaired glucose metabolism. However, the exact role of glucose metabolism on disease progression has not been elucidated. In this study, the effects of glucose on Aβ and tau-mediated toxicity are investigated using a C. elegans model system. We find that addition of glucose or 2-deoxy-d-glucose (2DOG) to the growth medium delayed Aβ-associated paralysis, though it was unable to restore previously impaired acetylcholine neurotransmission in pre-existing Aβ-mediated pathology. Glucose also inhibited egg laying and hatching in the worms that express Aβ. The harmful effects of glucose were associated with an increase in toxic Aβ oligomers. Increased phosphorylation of tau is associated with formation of neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and increased severity of AD, but O-β-GlcNAcylation can inhibit phosphorylation of adjacent phosphorylation sites. We reasoned that high glucose levels might induce tau O-β-GlcNAcylation, thereby protecting against tau phosphorylation. Contrary to our expectation, glucose increased tau phosphorylation but not O-β-GlcNAcylation. Increasing O-β-GlcNAcylation, either with Thiamet-G (TMG) or by suppressing the O-GlcNAcase (oga-1) gene does interfere with and therefore reduce tau phosphorylation. Furthermore, reducing O-β-GlcNAcylation by suppressing O-GlcNAc transferase (ogt-1) gene causes an increase in tau phosphorylation. These results suggest that protective O-β-GlcNAcylation is not induced by glucose. Instead, as with vertebrates, we demonstrate that high levels of glucose exacerbate disease progression by promoting Aβ aggregation and tau hyperphosphorylation, resulting in disease symptoms of increased severity. The effects of glucose cannot be effectively managed by manipulating O-β-GlcNAcylation in the tau models of AD in C. elegans. Our observations suggest that glucose enrichment is unlikely to be an appropriate therapy to minimize AD progression.

The microtubule associated tau protein becomes hyperphosphorylated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While hyperphosphorylation promotes neurodegeneration, the cause and consequences of this abnormal modification are poorly understood. As impaired energy metabolism is an important hallmark of AD progression, we tested whether it could trigger phosphorylation of human tau protein in a transgenicC. elegansmodel of AD. We found that inhibition of a mitochondrial enzyme of energy metabolism, dihydrolipoamide dehydrogenase (DLD) resulted in elevated whole-body glucose levels as well as increased phosphorylation of tau. Hyperglycemia and tau phosphorylation were induced by either epigenetic suppression of thedld-1gene or by inhibition of the DLD enzyme by the inhibitor, 2-methoxyindole-2-carboxylic acid (MICA). Although the calcium ionophore A23187 could reduce tau phosphorylation induced by either chemical or genetic suppression of DLD, it was unable to reduce tau phosphorylation induced by hyperglycemia. While inhibition of thedld-1gene or treatment with MICA partially reversed the inhibition of acetylcholine neurotransmission by tau, neither treatment affected tau inhibited mobility. Conclusively, any abnormalities in energy metabolism were found to significantly affect the AD disease pathology.

The forward primers of qRT-PCR performed to validate the 20 selected differentially expressed miRNAs. (DOCX 20Â kb)

KEGG analysis of predicted target genes of known miRNAs in YAT/YACK. (DOC 34Â kb)

The significantly differentially expressed known miRNAs in the RT/RCK. (DOC 70Â kb)

KEGG analysis of predicted target genes of novel miRNAs in RT/RCK. (DOC 57Â kb)

The significantly differentially expressed known miRNAs in the RT/RCK. (DOC 70Â kb)

KEGG analysis of predicted target genes of novel miRNAs in YAT/YACK. (DOC 58Â kb)

The matching results of sRNAs among non-coding RNAs in the four libraries by Genbank search. (DOC 30Â kb)

KEGG analysis of predicted target genes of known miRNAs in RT/RCK. (DOC 58Â kb)

The primers of qRT-PCR performed to validate 23 selected miRNA target genes. (DOC 41Â kb)

Dynamic fault trees (DFTs) have emerged as an important tool for capturing the dynamic behavior of system failure. These DFTs are then analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively using stochastic or algebraic methods to judge the failure characteristics of the given system in terms of the failures of its sub-components. Model checking has been recently proposed to conduct the failure analysis of systems using DFTs with the motivation to provide a rigorous failure analysis of safety-critical systems. However, model checking has not been used for the DFT qualitative analysis and the reduction algorithms used in model checking are usually not formally verified. Moreover, the analysis time grows exponentially with the increase of the number of states. These issues limit the usefulness of model checking for analyzing complex systems used in safety-critical domains, where the accuracy and completeness of analysis matters the most. To overcome these limitations, we propose a comprehensive methodology to perform the qualitative and quantitative analysis of DFTs using an integration of theorem proving and model checking based approaches. For this purpose, we formalized all the basic dynamic fault tree gates using higher-order logic based on the algebraic approach and formally verified some of the simplification properties. This formalization allows us to formally verify the equivalence between the original and reduced DFTs using a theorem prover, and conduct the qualitative analysis. We then use model checking to perform the quantitative analysis of the formally verified reduced DFT. We applied our methodology to five benchmarks and the results show that the formally verified reduced DFT was analyzed using model checking with up to six times less states and up to 133000 times faster.

The statistics of types and total number of repetitive sequence of the sRNAs in the four libraries. (DOC 69Â kb)

The significantly differentially expressed novel miRNAs in the YAT/YACK. (DOC 32Â kb)

The filtering results of high-through sequencing data in the four libraries. (DOC 40Â kb)

Prediction of target genes of known and novel miRNAs. (DOC 30Â kb)

The statistics of types and total number of repetitive sequence of the sRNAs in the four libraries. (DOC 69Â kb)

The significantly differentially expressed novel miRNAs in the RT/RCK. (DOC 42Â kb)

The matching results of sRNAs among non-coding RNAs in the four libraries by Rfam search. (DOC 31Â kb)

The matching results of sRNAs among non-coding RNAs in the four libraries by Genbank search. (DOC 30Â kb)

The significantly differentially expressed known miRNAs in the YAT/YACK. (DOC 37Â kb)

The primers of qRT-PCR performed to validate 23 selected miRNA target genes. (DOC 41Â kb)

The filtering results of high-through sequencing data in the four libraries. (DOC 40Â kb)

The matching results of sRNAs among non-coding RNAs in the four libraries by Rfam search. (DOC 31Â kb)

KEGG analysis of predicted target genes of novel miRNAs in YAT/YACK. (DOC 58Â kb)

The forward primers of qRT-PCR performed to validate the 20 selected differentially expressed miRNAs. (DOCX 20Â kb)

The prediction results for partial target genes of differentially expressed miRNAs. (DOC 41Â kb)

Result of GC, GC-MS analysis for the identification of compounds in Ph.Cr of P.hydropiper. (DOCX 25Â kb)

Details of compounds identified in GC, GC-MS analysis of essential oils from flowers of Polygonum hydropiper. (DOCX 28 kb)

Details of compounds identified in GC, GC-MS analysis of essential oils from leaves of Polygonum hydropiper. (DOCX 29 kb)

Aircraft information management system (AIMS) requires a highly reliable backplane bus protocol for the communication between its line replaceable units (LRU) to ensure the safety critical hard real time control system operation. As the time driven protocol is more reliable than the event driven protocols, this backplane bus needs to be implemented with time division control protocol. For that matter, more attention is needed to ensure the synchronization issues between LRUs. This paper addresses the controller implementation for bus interface unit (BIU) for the ARINC 659 backplane bus as an example, which controls all the BIU operations. This controller needs to fetch the commands from the table memory, decode them and then execute them to drive the bus for the BIU operations including message operations and synchronization handling. We have designed the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for table commands and implemented three Finite State Machines (FSM) for designing this controller along with some glue logic. First FSM is meant for managing commands, second for managing the BIU current state for synchronization needs, and the third for controlling the BIU operations. The aforesaid design has been modeled by using Verilog, Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL) and implemented in Altera Cyclone II board. Results of Modelsim and Quartus proved the cycle accurate implementation of controller in compliance with ARINC 659 specifications.

Data Transfer on a shared resource for hard real­time safety-critical functions is a challenging task and demands extremely high reliability. The data bus is the main shared resource for Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) inter-cabinet or intra-cabinet communication. The ARINC 659 (Aeronautical Radio, Inc.) is a proven standard for digital data transfer on backplane data bus within an IMA cabinet for commercial transport Aircraft. In this paper the design and implementation of data transfer, data decoding/encoding, data comparison, data validation, sync pulse detection, generation and measurement for ARINC 659 is presented. Hardware Description Language (HDL) Verilog is used to model the Design. Computer-aided Design (CAD) tools such as ModelSim, nLint, Debussy and Quartus are used for simulation, verification and implementation purpose. The results show that this implementation for data transfer and sync pulse operation is fully capable of providing desired interface to the Backplane Data Bus for ARINC 659.

Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) architecture provides means for integrating multiple safety-critical applications on a shared hardware in an airborne system. Error free data transfer between different modules of an IMA cabinet is an issue of critical importance. ARINC 659 has proven to be one of the most comprehensive standards for intra-cabinet data transfer within an IMA cabinet of commercial aircrafts. This paper presents a Hardware Descriptive Language (HDL) based modular design and implementation details of the ARINC 659 Line Replaceable Modules (LRM) for backplane data bus communication. LRM consists of two major modules; Bus Interface Unit (BIU) and Host. BIU is used to achieve control functions, state management, synchronization and data transfer on the backplane data bus. Modular approach has been adopted in the design of BIU. Whereas, the functionality of Host is to provide the data to be transferred, monitor BIU activities and ensure error free transmission of the required data through BIU. Altera's NIOS soft processor core is configured to realize the functionality of the Host. A Direct Memory Access (DMA) interface is used to manage data transfer tasks from Host to Inter Module Memory (IMM) of BIU. The results show that it is highly probable to use FPGA with safety critical soft microprocessor core for practical implementation of the said standard.

Download the PDF file

Download the PDF file

Due to surge in energy demand, recent discoveries of two-dimensional (2D) materials have sparked an enormous interest in green and affordable energy. This paper is focused on numerically investigation of two-dimensional C2N-based solar cell with a novel heterostructure (Ni/SnS/C2N/TiO2/ITO/Al) using SCAPS-1D simulator. Aim of this study is to examine the impact of SnS hole-transport layer (HTL) and TiO2 electron-transport layer (ETL) on our proposed device. Based on the device structure, the energy band alignment, thickness, and doping density of C2N, SnS, TiO2, C2N defect density, back-contact electrode (BCE) work function, and operating temperature are examined to improve the cell performance. According to simulations, the suitable thickness and doping concentration for the C2N are obtained at 1000 nm and 1015 cm-3 , respectively. It is found that increasing the acceptor doping density of SnS contributes more to device efficiency than increasing its thickness. Further, the back-contact electrode (BCE) work function above 5.0 eV significantly enhanced the cell efficiency. The optimized results reveal that the solar cell performance significantly improved with the presented cell configuration, reaching to highest PCE of 23.41%. This work would have a positive impact on the production of emerging solar cells.