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Research question: What implications for policy and practice can be derived from outcomes and trends observed across 8 years of a surrogacy programme in two UK-regulated IVF centres (London, Cardiff)?\ud Design: Retrospective cohort study analysing surrogacy treatments undertaken between 2014 and September 2021.\ud Results: Surrogacy continues to rise in popularity in the UK despite the inability of those supporting safe and professional practice to advertise to recruit surrogates. In two IVF centres regulated by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), both the number of surrogacy treatments and the proportion of those undertaken on behalf of same-sex male intended parents increased year on year in the period studied. From a cohort of 108 surrogates, 71 babies were born to 61 surrogates (with five pregnancies ongoing) by February 2022. No statistically significant difference in live birth rates (LBR) was observed between the heterosexual couples and same-sex male couples. Sample sizes of single and transgender intended parents were too small (n < 5) to compare. The use of vitrified oocytes in surrogacy treatments has increased year on year, while fresh oocyte use has declined since peaking in 2019. There was no significant difference in LBR between fresh and vitrified oocyte usage across the cohort.\ud Conclusions: The number of surrogacy treatments steadily increased, with clear evidence that the proportion of same-sex male couples accessing surrogacy is a major contributor to this growth. Vitrified/warmed oocyte use now outstrips the use of fresh oocytes in the surrogacy treatment cycles studied here. The results represent a strong basis for supporting the liberalization of regulatory reform expected to be introduced in the UK later in 2022.

Cryogenic pressure vessels are containers used to handle fluids that are compressible, highly toxic, and work at extremely high pressure. It has high applications in various industries to store, handle and transportation of cryogenic fluids. It creates a highly adverse effect on the environment and industries when failure happens. Hence regulatory body regulates the design specification to meet the required design for its safety during handling and storage. There are many design parameters based on which cryogenic pressure vessels are designed. In this paper, overall view has been given on the cryogenic pressure vessel.

Replay attack poses a great threat to the Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) system. This paper introduces Amplitude Modulation and Frequency Modulation-based features for replay Spoof Speech Detection (SSD) task. In this context, we propose Instantaneous Amplitude (IA) and Instantaneous Frequency (IF) features using Energy Separation Algorithm (ESA). The speech signal is passed through bandpass (subband) filters to obtain narrowband components because speech is a combination of several monocomponent signals. To obtain a narrowband filtered signal, we have used linearly-spaced Butterworth and Gabor filterbanks. The instantaneous modulations helps to understand the local characteristics of a non-stationary signal. These IA and IF components are able to capture the information present in a slowly-varying amplitude envelope and fast-varying frequency. The slow-varying temporal modulations for replay speech have the distorted amplitude envelope, and the fast-varying temporal modulation do not preserve the harmonic structure compared to the natural speech signal. For replay speech signal, the intermediate device characteristics and acoustic environment distorts the spectral energy compared to the natural speech energy. Experiments were performed on the ASVspoof 2017 challenge version 2.0 database with Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as a classifier. When ESA-IACC and ESA-IFCC feature sets are fused with Constant Q Cepstral Coefficients (CQCC) feature set at the score-level, the % EER further reduces to 11.93% and 10.12%, respectively, on the evaluation set. In addition, for evaluation set, we have also studied the performance of proposed feature sets on different Replay Configurations (RC), namely, acoustic environments, playback, and recording devices. For all the levels of threat conditions (i.e., low, medium, and high-level) to the ASV system, the proposed feature sets performed better compared to the existing state-of-the-art feature sets. In addition to the ASVspoof 2017 Challenge database, we also performed experiments on other spoofing databases, namely, BTAS 2016, ASVspoof 2019 Challenge database, and Real PA of ASVspoof 2019 Challenge database. For all the spoofing databases used in this study, the proposed ESA-based feature sets perform significantly better than the other feature sets.

Agonist stimulation of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) typically leads to phosphorylation of GPCRs and binding to multifunctional proteins called β-arrestins (βarrs). The GPCR-βarr interaction critically contributes to GPCR desensitization, endocytosis, and downstream signaling, and GPCR-βarr complex formation can be used as a generic readout of GPCR and βarr activation. Although several methods are currently available to monitor GPCR-βarr interactions, additional sensors to visualize them may expand the toolbox and complement existing methods. We have previously described antibody fragments (FABs) that recognize activated βarr1 upon its interaction with the vasopressin V2 receptor C-terminal phosphopeptide (V2Rpp). Here, we demonstrate that these FABs efficiently report the formation of a GPCR-βarr1 complex for a broad set of chimeric GPCRs harboring the V2R C terminus. We adapted these FABs to an intrabody format by converting them to single-chain variable fragments (ScFvs) and used them to monitor the localization and trafficking of βarr1 in live cells. We observed that upon agonist simulation of cells expressing chimeric GPCRs, these intrabodies first translocate to the cell surface, followed by trafficking into intracellular vesicles. The translocation pattern of intrabodies mirrored that of βarr1, and the intrabodies co-localized with βarr1 at the cell surface and in intracellular vesicles. Interestingly, we discovered that intrabody sensors can also report βarr1 recruitment and trafficking for several unmodified GPCRs. Our characterization of intrabody sensors for βarr1 recruitment and trafficking expands currently available approaches to visualize GPCR-βarr1 binding, which may help decipher additional aspects of GPCR signaling and regulation.

Today in every industry weather, it is ISP, IT products, social network or mobile services there is the problem of customer churn (Customers changing their services from one service provider to another). However, in telecommunication the customers churning very frequently. As the market in telecom is fiercely competitive, in that case, companies proactively have to determine the customers churn by analyzing their behavior and try to put effort and money in retaining the customers. In this proposed model, two machine-learning techniques were used for predicting customer churn Logistic regression and Logit Boost. Experiment was carried out in the WEKA Machine-learning tool, along with a real database from an American company Orange. The result were shown in different evaluation measures.