Search

This article presents an efficient hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for topology, layout and sizing optimization of truss structures. A new assimilation scheme is implemented in the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) in order to improve computational efficiency, the likelihood of occurrence and the neighborhood patterns are used, and the assimilation step of the ICA is enhanced. In this method, the probabilities are assigned to each alternative by the imperialist and its neighbors in the search space; then, the colonies construct new solutions (moving to the relevant imperialist) based on the likelihood of occurrence. Neighborhood patterns are proposed to gather information from the neighboring countries in order to extract features based on the local power variation. In this study, the extended abilities of the proposed algorithm are inspired from the dolphin echolocation (DE) algorithm and the cellular automata (CA) method, which the new algorithm is denoted as CA-ICEA. The optimization results obtained by ICA, DE and CA-ICEA methods are compared. Remarkably, the proposed algorithm outperforms its competitors in terms of optimum weights, their mean and standard deviation.

The adoption of renewable energy technologies (RETs) as a sustainable practice in the residential construction sector depends on promotional efforts. With a modeling-based contribution, this research aims to analyze advertising effectiveness in the context of RETs adoption regarding solar water heaters. The study is based on a survey of 398 Iranian citizens. A neural network analysis was employed to identify advertising effectiveness in terms of the AIDA framework. The results indicated that the neural network is able to predict the relationships among advertising effectiveness indices; namely attention, interest, desire in the RETs setting, and action. According to the neural network analysis, attention was found to be the most significant predictor of action, followed by interest and desire.

Background The plant kingdom represents an unlimited source of phytotherapeutics with promising perspectives in the field of anticancer drug discovery. Purpose In this view, epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) represents a novel and major target in anticancer therapy. Therefore, this narrative review aims to provide an updated overview on the bioactive phytochemicals with anti-EMT activity. Conclusion Among the plant products reviewed, phenylpropanoids were the most investigated at preclinical phase, thus exhibiting a promising potential as anticancer drugs, though an evidence-based clinical efficacy is still lacking.

Background Thymus genus has been used since ancient times for their valuable health properties, which could be attributed to their chemical components, especially essential oils (EOs). Among these species, T. vulgaris has a long history of use for different food and medicinal purposes. Scope and approach This paper reviews the chemical composition of Thymus plants EOs, including thyme, describes their antimicrobial and antioxidant properties as well as recent food applications as preservatives. The role of these plants in cancer is also covered, as well as the potential these plants have to manage and treat other diseases. Furthermore, clinical studies are also detailed. Key findings and conclusions Food preservation with naturally occurring compounds is gaining increasing importance due to the consumer demand for safe and high-quality products and to reduce the use of synthetic preservatives. For this purpose, not only thyme but also other thymus plants can be used as such and combined with high-pressure, cold nitrogen plasma, in edible films (active packaging), etc. Moreover, the potential of these plants have to treat several diseases and complications reinforce their use in nutraceuticals and functional foods, but further clinical evidence is required.

In living systems, a complex network of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) underlies most biochemical events. The human protein-protein interactome has been surveyed using yeast two-hybrid (Y2H)- and mass spectrometry (MS)-based approaches such as affinity purification coupled to MS (AP-MS). Despite decades of systematic investigations and collaborative multi-disciplinary efforts, there is no "gold standard" for documenting PPIs. A surprisingly large fraction of the human interactome remains uncharted, which we refer to as the "dark interactome." In this review, we highlight the complexity of the human interactome and discuss the current status of the human reference interactome maps. We discuss why a large proportion of the human interactome has remained refractory to traditional approaches. We propose an experimental model that can enable the identification of the dark interactome in a cell-type-specific manner. We also propose a framework to implement when embarking on studies designed to rigorously identify and characterize protein interactions.

Plant species have long been regarded as possessing the principal ingredients used in widely disseminated ethnomedical practices. Different surveys showed that medicinal plant species used by the inhabitants for the traditional treatment of diseases are inadequately screened for their therapeutic/preventive potential and phytochemical findings. The genus Nepeta L., which belongs to the family Lamiaceae, are widely used in traditional medicine. In this review, Nepeta species, which are used as traditional herbal medicine pursued indigenously, have reported several pharmacological effects as antimicrobial, antioxidant, antiinflammatory, sedative, relaxant, cholesterol lowering, antiasthmatic, carminative, diuretic, diaphoretic, febrifuge, vermifuge, herbicidal, insecticidal and insect repellent, all of them directly related to the specific chemical composition. According to the Nepeta genus phytochemistry, there exist two main essential oil chemotypes. The first is the nepetolactone chemotype, and the second is the 1,8-cineole and/or linalool chemotype. The active constituents from Nepeta genus may provide the opportunity for the production of antidepressive, antidiabetes, analgestic, anti-inflammatory, lipid-lowering and cardioprotective drugs. Due to the effects of Nepeta species on improving the complications of various diseases, the need for doing more extensive and comprehensive clinical trials for the use of Nepeta species in the treatment of diseases is necessary. Recommended future directives incurring the design and conduct of comprehensive trials are pointed out to validate the usefulness of these active plant species and bioactive secondary metabolites either alone or in combination with existing conventional therapies.

Salvia is one of the largest genera of the family Lamiaceae. It is widely distributed in the temperate, subtropical, and tropical regions all over the world. Besides its ethnobotanical importance, some species such as S. officinalis (sage, common sage), S. sclarea (clary sage), S. lavandulifolia (Spanish sage), S. miltiorrhiza (danshen), and S. hispanica (chia) are traded on the market as a food and because of the interest in their essential oils and/or popularity in traditional medicine. The high diversity of the Salvia genus and phytochemical richness generate great interest for discovering new biological active compounds, including those found in essential oils. Salvia plant essential oils exhibit broad-spectrum pharmacological activities and represent great interest for food preservation as potential natural products. Thus, this review describes the phytochemical composition of essential oils from different Salvia spp. according to the geographic regions, plant organ, and phenological stage. Moreover, the cultivation and growing conditions of Salvia plants have been also revised. Finally, the interest on Salvia plants for food and pharmaceutical applications has been covered, through reporting their biological properties, including as antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-alzheimer, hypotensive, anti-hyperglycemia, anti-hyperlipidemia, anti-cancer, and skin curative agents.

Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HetVNets) provide great potential for on-demand services. Such services require real-time request-reply routing between vehicles as clients and service providers as the source. One naive solution to deliver service is unicasting between service provider and each client. Unicasting consumes considerable bandwidth, since service provider requires establishing a separate communication path to each client. In contrast, the service provider can construct a multicast tree to simultaneously transmit multicast packets to all clients. We propose two approaches to model total bandwidth usage of a multicast tree: (1) Min Steiner Tree that considers the number of street segments involved in the multicast tree; and (2) Min Relay Intersections Tree that considers the number of intersections involved in the multicast tree. We propose a heuristic that incorporates the first approach to minimize delay of the multicast tree. We propose another heuristic that uses the second approach to minimize the number of relay intersections in the multicast tree. Extensive simulations show that the proposed approaches outperform existing contributions in terms of number of transmissions, delivery delay, packet delivery ratio, and overhead. We also show that the proposed approaches near-optimally minimize bandwidth usage while ensuring QoS (i.e. network connectivity and packet transmission delay).

Summary The LIM-homeodomain transcription factor ISL1 marks multipotent cardiac progenitors that give rise to cardiac muscle, endothelium, and smooth muscle cells. ISL1+ progenitors can be derived from human pluripotent stem cells, but the inability to efficiently isolate pure populations has limited their characterization. Using a genetic selection strategy, we were able to highly enrich ISL1+ cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. Comparative quantitative proteomic analysis of enriched ISL1+ cells identified ALCAM (CD166) as a surface marker that enabled the isolation of ISL1+ progenitor cells. ALCAM+/ISL1+ progenitors are multipotent and differentiate into cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells, and smooth muscle cells. Transplantation of ALCAM+ progenitors enhances tissue recovery, restores cardiac function, and improves angiogenesis through activation of AKT-MAPK signaling in a rat model of myocardial infarction, based on cardiac MRI and histology. Our study establishes an efficient method for scalable purification of human ISL1+ cardiac precursor cells for therapeutic applications., Highlights • Proteomics analysis identifies new lineage markers for ISL1+ cardiac progenitors derived from hESCs • ALCAM is a surface marker that can be utilized for prospective isolation of ISL1+ progenitors • ALCAM+ progenitors promote superior regeneration and functional recovery in infarcted rat hearts, In this article, Salekdeh and colleagues show that ISL1+ cardiac progenitors can be purified from a heterogeneous population of hESC-derived cardiomyocytes using ALCAM. Transplantation of multipotent ISL1+/ALCAM+ progenitors enhances tissue recovery, restores cardiac function, and improves angiogenesis in a rat model of myocardial infarction, based on cardiac MRI and histology.

Asphaltene precipitation and deposition are drastic issues in the petroleum industry. Monitoring the asphaltene stability in crude oil is still a serious problem and has been subject of many studies. To investigate crude oil stability by saturate, aromatic, resin and asphaltene (SARA) analysis seven types of crudes with different components were used. The applied methods for SARA quantification are IP-143 and ASTM D893-69 and the colloidal instability index (CII) is computed from the SARA values as well. In comparison between CII results, the values of oil compositions demonstrated that the stability of asphaltenes in crude oils is a phenomenon that is related to all these components and it cannot be associated only with one of them, individually.

Recycling of biosolids phosphorus (P) to agricultural systems is an economic and environmentally sustainable practice that has received more attention in recent years. However, the dynamics and bioavailability of biosolids P in acidic soils have not well documented. This study examined various soil test P (STP), including Mehlich 3 P (M3P), water extractable P (WEP), and the P saturation index (PSI), and total soil P as functions of the rate and frequency of application of an alkaline treated biosolids (ATB). The ATB (N-Viro) was produced from Advanced Alkaline Stabilization process, which was applied to grow corns in the sandy loam soil in the field trial. Treatments were arranged as split plot in a complete randomize block design with four replications and included a control, 2 Mg lime ha−1, 7, 14, 28 and 42 Mg ATB ha−1 on wet basis (DW = 67.5%). The management practices from 2008 to 2012 were annual vs. single ATB applications. The results show that applying high rates of ATB such as 28 and 42 Mg ATB ha−1 annually can increase approximately 30% Mehlich 3 P and 6.0% water extractable P concentrations, respectively, than low rates treatment. Although no significant soil P accumulation was observed in this study, applying high rates of ATB resulted in an 8.4% increase in soil total P (TP) compared with other treatments during the period 2010–2013 but not in 2009. The increasing ATB rates under annual applications resulted in higher soil PSI within each year, but the P related environmental concerns based on the current ATB application strategy at the research site were limited.

One of the main environmental issues associated with the blue mussel processing industry is the production of mussel sediments. However, this waste product can be used as a source of nutrients and soil amendment in agriculture. Sediments collected bi-weekly from the pool of a washing line of Prince Edward Aqua Farms in eastern Canada were analyzed for the consistency of macronutrient contents over time and nutrient availability using a grass and a vegetable crop. During the one-year period, macronutrient contents including nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and calcium followed different time-dependent patterns, yet levels remained high and consistent to meet crop needs. For annual ryegrass and tomato, shoot and root productions were increased with applications of mussel sediments, but not at the same extent as with synthetic fertilizers alone or mixture of mussel sediments and synthetic fertilizers. Macronutrients uptake by both test plants followed the same pattern as shoot and root production. Plant biomass production and uptake of macronutrients indicate the significant potential of this waste material in agriculture and demonstrate the feasibility of the application of mussel sediments as a source of nutrients. This is one of the first scientific works with mussel sediments as a source of nutrients and more results are expected with a range of other crops, thereby contributing to a series of studies in this field. The present study is of great importance to the blue mussel processing industry and to agriculture in Prince Edwards Islands because it contributes to the efforts of the industry to look for new and environmentally-friendly methods of refuse management. The study also provides local farmers' with scientific evidences on the nutrient-rich waste products, thereby reducing excessive mineral fertilizer use in conventional agriculture and offering an alternative source of nutrients in organic agriculture with limited access to organic nutrient sources.

The Nucleosome Remodeling and Deacetylase (NuRD) complex is essential for development in complex animals but has been refractory to biochemical analysis. We present the first integrated analysis of the architecture of the native mammalian NuRD complex, combining quantitative mass spectrometry, covalent cross-linking, protein biochemistry and electron microscopy. NuRD is built around a 2:2:4 pseudo-symmetric deacetylase module comprising MTA, HDAC and RBBP subunits. This module interacts asymmetrically with a remodeling module comprising one copy each of MBD, GATAD2 and CHD subunits. The previously enigmatic GATAD2 controls the asymmetry of the complex and directly recruits the ATP-dependent CHD remodeler. Unexpectedly, the MTA-MBD interaction acts as a point of functional switching. The transcriptional regulator PWWP2A modulates NuRD assembly by competing directly with MBD for binding to the MTA-HDAC-RBBP subcomplex, forming a ‘moonlighting’ PWWP2A-MTA-HDAC-RBBP complex that likely directs deacetylase activity to PWWP2A target sites. Taken together, our data describe the overall architecture of the intact NuRD complex and reveal aspects of its structural dynamics and functional plasticity.

Location and density based emergency message broadcasting has attracted researchers attention in vehicular ad-hoc networks. However, most of current approaches do not provide good performance, in terms of delay in both light and dense traffic scenarios. Reliability in message delivery is another significant performance metric, especially in dense traffic scenarios. In this paper, we have analyzed and implemented a reliable time-efficient and multi-hop broadcasting scheme, called Dynamic Partitioning Scheme (DPS), which works well in both dense and light traffic scenarios. Our solid analytical evaluation and simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme outperforms five efficient broadcasting protocols in VANETs in terms of delay and reliability in emergency message broadcasting.

a b s t r a c t The effects of cover crop mixtures combined with organic and industrial wastes on selected soil properties were assessed in a vineyard in Eastern Canada. The experimental treatments were randomly arranged in a nested design with three replicates. Four alleyway cover crop mixtures (control with no cover crop (CONT), oats + pea + hairy vetch (OPV), oats underseeded with red clover (ORCl), and timothy + alsike + red clover (TM)) were applied to main plots. Five fertility treatments (fertilizer without N (NDEF), full syn- thetic fertilizer (FERT), wood ash (WA), municipal solid food waste (MSFW), and mussel sediment (MS))

In this study contamination, ecological and health risk of potentially toxic elements (As, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn) were investigated in 22 surface sediments, 3 water and 8 fish (muscle and liver tissues) samples of the Khiav River. Results showed that mean concentration of As, Cr, Cu, Ni and Zn in sediments, and As in water samples are higher than local background and standard values. Moderate to significant enrichment of As in river and very high enrichment in sediments of pollution hotspots were observed, while Zn, Cr, Cu, Ni and Pb showed low to moderate enrichment. Based on mean probable effect level (PEL) quotient, river and hotspot sediments were classified as slightly toxic and heavily toxic, respectively. Potential ecological risk index (PER) indicated low risk and high risk for river sediments and pollution hotspots, respectively. Based on factor analysis, Moiel iron mine and geothermal/hot springs are the main sources of Cr, Zn, Pb and As. Limonite as a secondary mineral accumulated As from hydrothermal or geothermal sources. Concentrations of As, Cr and Pb in fish muscle samples are higher than liver, while higher Cu, Ni and Zn concentrations observed in liver of fish samples. The Mann-Whitney U test revealed significant differences in As, Cu and Zn concentrations between different organs. The average target hazard quotient (THQ) in fish muscle followed the order of As > Cr > Cu > Pb > Zn > Ni, and hazard index (HI) values indicate an alarm for public health concern. Consumption of these fish can cause carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic effects for local people and consumers in long term.

Beam wander of an electromagnetic partially coherent flat-topped (EPCFT) beam propagating through turbulent atmosphere is studied. The analytical expression of beam wander effect is obtained. The influence of source size, source spatially coherent lengths, degree of polarization, and beam flatness order are studied in detail. It has been shown that by adjusting these parameters appropriately, the beam wander effects could be greatly reduced. Compared with increasing the degree of polarization, the beam wander could be reduced much more effectively by increasing the beam flatness order. The EPCFT beam can greatly reduce the beam wander effect and the parameters should be chosen very carefully for different applications.

The boundary layer flow of a viscoelastic fluid of the second-grade type over a rigid continuous plate moving through an otherwise quiescent fluid with constant velocity U is studied. Assuming the flow to be laminar and two-dimensional, local similarity solution is found with fluid's elasticity and plate's withdrawal speed as the main variables. Results are presented for velocity profiles, boundary layer thickness, wall skin friction coefficient and fluid entrainment in terms of the local Deborah number. A marked formation of boundary layer is predicted, even at low Reynolds numbers, provided the Deborah number is sufficiently large. The boundary layer thickness and the wall skin friction coefficient are found to scale with fluid's elasticity—both decreasing the higher the fluid's elasticity. The amount of fluid entrained is also predicted to decrease whenever a fluid exhibits elastic behavior.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease declared a global health emergency by the World Health Organization, with approximately one third of the world's population being latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis treatment consists in an intensive phase and a continuation phase. Unfortunately, the appearance of multi drug-resistant tuberculosis, mainly due to low adherence to prescribed therapies or inefficient healthcare structures, requires at least 20 months of treatment with second-line, more toxic and less efficient drugs, i.e., capreomycin, kanamycin, amikacin and fluoroquinolones. Therefore, there exists an urgent need for discovery and development of new drugs to reduce the global burden of this disease, including the multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. To this end, many plant species, as well as marine organisms and fungi have been and continue to be used in various traditional healing systems around the world to treat tuberculosis, thus representing a nearly unlimited source of active ingredients. Besides their antimycobacterial activity, natural products can be useful in adjuvant therapy to improve the efficacy of conventional antimycobacterial therapies, to decrease their adverse effects and to reverse mycobacterial multi-drug resistance due to the genetic plasticity and environmental adaptability of Mycobacterium. However, even if some natural products have still been investigated in preclinical and clinical studies, the validation of their efficacy and safety as antituberculosis agents is far from being reached, and, therefore, according to an evidence-based approach, more high-level randomized clinical trials are urgently needed.