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Abstract Grasslands are crucial ecosystems that provide numerous ecological services and support biodiversity conservation. Grasslands undergo significant threats from both anthropogenic and natural sources, compromising their ability to maintain biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being. However, grasslands are frequently ignored in sustainable development objectives. Adequate knowledge of how grassland degradation affects ecosystem services is essential for sustainable management and grassland ecological restoration. The Kachchh region in western India harbours a unique grassland ecosystem known as the Banni grassland, which once became the finest grassland in Asia. However, undesirable anthropogenic interventions have accelerated its degradation. This research paper aims to assess the suitability of different land areas in Banni for sustainable grassland restoration, considering ecological value as a primary criterion. In the present research, land suitability for grassland management was assessed using a geographical information system (GIS)-based multi criteria evolution (MCE) method with satellite data and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The ground truthing of the soil samples was carried out alongside. Slope, rainfall, infiltration rate, LULC, geomorphology, soil texture, soil organic carbon, water holding capacity, SAR, CEC, pH, EC, and soil nutrients were among the criteria used. The weights for each criterion were calculated using a pairwise comparison matrix, and the scores were allocated to sub criteria based on field work, expert opinions, and a literature review. The proposed method can be very useful for evaluating the state of the land and can help with the best possible planning for grassland development and conservation. Banni grassland has the potential to be developed into a critical zone observatory (CZO) in the future, and the present study, with further inputs, holds promise for furthering the cause of its sustainable management. Overall, this study underscores the importance of assessing land suitability for sustainable grassland management and highlights the potential for maximising the ecological value of grasslands in western India and beyond.

The lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery plays a crucial role in the performance of electric vehicles, owing to its unique properties and compact size. To ensure the prolonged lifespan of these batteries, it is imperative for users to exercise additional precautions. The variable load torque applied to the Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) drive, influenced by diverse road conditions, adds complexity to the scenario. Assessing the State of Charge (SoC) of the Li-ion battery proves to be a significant challenge, given the multitude of electrical sensors and mechanical components involved in the operation of electric vehicles (EVs). In such instances, the SoC may be subject to noisy measurements, leading to performance degradation of the battery over time. This paper proposes the utilization of the Kalman filter to estimate the actual SoC from the noisy measurements, relying on indirect measurements as a basis for improved accuracy.

The major health care problem in developing world is shifting from communicable diseases to non-communicable disease which causes morbidities more than mortality affecting the personal efficiency. Hypertension is a major health care burden in developing countries like India causing both morbidity and mortality. Few studies shows that the hypertension prevalence has raised from 2% to 15% in rural population and 2% to 25% in urban population in last six decades in India. This research work aims to enumerate the price of commonly available oral antihypertensive drugs in India. It also aims to study the cost variation of oral antihypertensive drugs. The present study was carried out in the department of Pharmacology in a tertiary care medical college in south India. The cost analysis of individual drugs by different manufacturers were done. Percentage of cost variation was analysed. The variation in cost of most of the antihypertensive drugs is more than 100%. It’s found maximum in Amlodipine (5mg) with cost variation of 625%, Atenolol 100 mg with cost variation of 413%. In India there is a wide price variation among antihypertensive drugs. The major gap in the cost variation of antihypertensive drugs to be narrowed for the benefit of the patients. So the government and the prescribing doctors should think about the huge difference in cost and work in the direction of benefitting the patient.

Introduction: The world has been under one vicious COVID-19 wave after the other for nearly 2 years, and the battle is still on. We know that the majority of serious infections have significant high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) changes; a predictor for them would be a vital tool in this battle! Aims and Objectives: The study aimed to assess the correlation between C-reactive protein (CRP) at the time of presentation and HRCT score in patients with severe COVID-19 infection. Methods: In this prospective, single-center study of 121 patients with severe COVID-19 infection in a tertiary COVID-19 care center. Patients were assessed for the relationship between CRP levels and chest radiography in COVID-19 patients. Results: In patients who survived in severe COVID-19 infection, CRP on admission had a significant correlation with HRCT score with P = 0.019, and in patients who did not survive, CRP on admission had a significant correlation with HRCT score with P = 0.005. CRP at day 5 was also significantly correlated to HRCT score with P = 0.035 in survivors and P = 0.001 in patients who did not survive. Conclusion: In centers where HRCT chest is not available or financial resources are a major concern, we suggest early CRP, repeated after 3–5 days, could be a very useful prognostic factor for significant lung involvement during the course of illness. This, in turn, could be a very useful tool in determining a need for admission, referral to higher centers, or more intensive therapy early on.

Abstract Magnetic resonance imaging offers unrivaled visualization of the fetal brain, forming the basis for establishing age-specific morphologic milestones. However, gauging age-appropriate neural development remains a difficult task due to the constantly changing appearance of the fetal brain, variable image quality, and frequent motion artifacts. Here we present an end-to-end, attention-guided deep learning model that predicts gestational age with R2 score of 0.945, mean absolute error of 6.7 days, and concordance correlation coefficient of 0.970. The convolutional neural network was trained on a heterogeneous dataset of 741 developmentally normal fetal brain images ranging from 19 to 39 weeks in gestational age. We also demonstrate model performance and generalizability using independent datasets from four academic institutions across the U.S. and Turkey with R2 scores of 0.81–0.90 after minimal fine-tuning. The proposed regression algorithm provides an automated machine-enabled tool with the potential to better characterize in utero neurodevelopment and guide real-time gestational age estimation after the first trimester.

The availability of an enormous quantity of multimodal data and its widespread applications, automatic sentiment analysis and emotion classification in the conversation has become an interesting research topic among the research community. The interlocutor state, context state between the neighboring utterances and multimodal fusion play an important role in multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion detection in conversation. In this article, the recurrent neural network (RNN) based method is developed to capture the interlocutor state and contextual state between the utterances. The pair-wise attention mechanism is used to understand the relationship between the modalities and their importance before fusion. First, two-two combinations of modalities are fused at a time and finally, all the modalities are fused to form the trimodal representation feature vector. The experiments are conducted on three standard datasets such as IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSEI, and CMU-MOSI. The proposed model is evaluated using two metrics such as accuracy and F1-Score and the results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the standard baselines.

Abstract The major crop nutrients determine the nutritional content and vigor of crops. The deficiency or occurrence below minimal level of any of the nutrients are often seen as a cause of poor growth or complete crop failure. The present study was an attempt to understand the impact of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) (A1)vis-à-vis conventional chemical intensive (A2)agriculture amendment systems in altering/modifying the nutrient dynamics of the soil with respect to nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) and sulphur (S), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg) levels in the pre, mid and post-harvest phases of crop in six cropping seasons spread across four years. The study area was a geo-ecologically unique terrain of Kachchh, Western India, a typical representative of allied arid and semi-arid tropics that are prone to various natural threats and stressors like drought, salinity and erratic rainfall pattern that affect the agri-management activities. Seasonal amendment data, clearly depicts that TEK based systems were efficient in soil organic carbon (SOC) accrual over seasons, an important trait required in challenging settings of tropical aridisols. The major primary (N, P, K) and secondary (S, Ca, Mg) nutrients were at par or higher than integrated chemical intensive systems. TEK based amendments ensured proper and timely management of nutrients in the soil. This inherent value addition offered by indigenous manure applications is an important step in climate change mitigation measures and overall agricultural sustainability.

Gopa Mahesh, Kotha Anil Kumar, Pallu Reddanna Department of Animal Biology, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, 500046, IndiaCorrespondence: Pallu Reddanna Tel +91-40-23134542Email preddanna@gmail.comAbstract: Inflammation is a protective response that develops against tissue injury and infection. Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, is the key player in the pathogenesis of many inflammatory disorders including cancer. The cytokine storm, an inflammatory response flaring out of control, is mostly responsible for the mortality in COVID-19 patients. Anti-inflammatory drugs inhibit cyclooxygenases (COX), which are involved in the biosynthesis of prostaglandins that promote inflammation. The conventional non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are associated with gastric and renal side-effects, as they inhibit both the constitutive COX-1 and the inducible COX-2. The majority of selective COX-2 inhibitors (COXIBs) are without gastric side-effects but are associated with cardiac side-effects on long-term use. The search for anti-inflammatory drugs without side-effects, therefore, has become a dream and ongoing effort of the Pharma companies. As PGE2 is the key mediator of inflammatory disorders, coming up with a strategy to reduce the levels of PGE2 alone without affecting other metabolites may form a better choice for the development of next generation anti-inflammatory drugs. In this direction the options being explored are on synthesis of PGE2-mPGES-1; PGE2 degradation through a specific PG dehydrogenase, 15-PGDH, and by blocking its activity mediated through a specific PGE receptor, EP4. As leukotrienes formed via the 5-lipoxygenase (5-LOX) pathway also play an important role in the mediation of inflammation, efforts are also being made to target both COX and LOX pathways. This review focuses on addressing the following three points: 1) How NSAIDs and COXIBs are associated with gastric, renal and cardiac side-effects; 2) Should the focus be on the targets upstream or downstream of PGE2; and 3) the status of alternative targets being explored for the discovery and development of anti-inflammatory drugs without side-effects.Keywords: inflammation, cyclooxygenase, COX, NSAIDs, COXIBs, microsomal PGE synthase-1, mPGES-1, 15-hydroxy prostaglandin dehydrogenase, 15-PGDH, 5-lipoxygenase, 5-LOX

Drying of onion is a moisture removal process to increase shelf life. Convection drying experiments are conducted at a drying temperature of 50 ℃, 60 ℃, 70 ℃, and at four high airflow velocity (2, 3.6, 5.7, and 7.7 m/s) for Indian dark red onion. The objective is to analyze the drying mechanism of Indian dark red onion slices at high velocity. The work diverges from the literature in analyzing the drying mechanism of Indian dark red onion slices at air velocity above 2 m/s. Moisture content removal curves for upper velocities (i.e., for 5.7 and 7.7 m/s), shows seamless logarithmic in nature. Dehydration process from Indian dark red onion accelerates as velocity increases. Air velocity 2, 3.6, and 5.7 m/s exhibit a better moisture removal rate at 60 ℃ than 50 and 70 ℃. It is observed that the weight basis moisture content per unit mass flow rate of air decreases as velocity increases. The effective moisture diffusivity averagely increases with an increase in air temperature and air velocity. The values for the arithmetic mean of effective moisture diffusivity lies between 1.096646×10-11 to 1.295467×10-11 and activation energy observed in the range of 10.8709 to 12.7719 kJ mol-1.

Heusler compounds are of great interest for spintronic applications. Here the authors report current driven domain wall motion in unit cell thick perpendicularly magnetized Heusler films with low current densities and show the velocity is dominated by the bulk chiral Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya exchange interaction.

Abstract Background Spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) in the mammalian testis are unipotent stem cells for spermatozoa. They show unique cell characteristics as stem cells and germ cells after being isolated from the testis and cultured in vitro. This review introduces recent progress in the development of culture systems for the establishment of SSC lines in mammalian species, including humans. Methods Based on the published reports, the isolation and purification of SSCs, identification and characteristics of SSCs, and culture system for mice, humans, and domestic animals have been summarized. Results In mice, cell lines from SSCs are established and can be reprogrammed to show pluripotent stem cell potency that is similar to embryonic stem cells. However, it is difficult to establish cell lines for animals other than mice because of the dearth of understanding about species‐specific requirements for growth factors and mechanisms supporting the self‐renewal of cultured SSCs. Among the factors that are associated with the development of culture systems, the enrichment of SSCs that are isolated from the testis and the combination of growth factors are essential. Conclusion Providing an example of SSC culture in cattle, a rational consideration was made about how it can be possible to establish cell lines from neonatal and immature testes.

Tetragonal Heusler compounds that exhibit large perpendicular magnetic anisotropy are promising materials for advanced spintronic devices. A prerequisite are thin films whose tetragonal axis is oriented perpendicular to the plane of the films. Here we show that highly textured, (001) oriented, tetragonal Mn3Sn layers can be prepared using metallic zinc-blende (ZB) MnN as underlayers. Moreover, we show that these layers can be deposited on amorphous substrates using reactive magnetron sputtering. The ferrimagnetic Mn3Sn layers exhibit perpendicularly magnetized hysteresis loops with coercive fields of ∼2 T. Stoichiometric ZB-MnN underlayers share an “equivalent” Mn-Mn layer at the interface with Mn3Sn, thus promoting their oriented growth. Other nitride underlayers are not effective due to their rock-salt (RS) crystal structure and the absence of Mn. Density functional theory calculations confirm that tetragonal Mn3Sn Heusler films are energetically stable when interfaced with ZB-MnN underlayers and not with any of the other RS nitride underlayers considered here. Such Heusler compounds have much promise as electrodes for magnetic tunnel junction memory elements for deeply scaled magnetic random access memories.

Heusler alloy thin films with a distorted tetragonal structure have potential spintronics applications given their bulk perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Here, the authors demonstrate large perpendicular magnetic anisotropy in Mn3Ge thin films accompanied by negative tunnelling magnetoresistance.

As the unit weight of conventional concrete ranges from 2200-2400 kg/m3. But, foam concrete unit weight ranges from 350-1900 kg/m3. Today the foam concrete becomes popular due to easily workable, low density and economical when compared to conventional concrete. The foam concrete is considered as sustainable construction material as it having low thermal conductivity and sound insulation. This investigation involves the preparation of foam concrete with a density of 1000 kg/m3 and mixed with hybrid fibers such as polypropylene fibers and Nylon fibers to reinforce the mix. This investigation studies the mechanical properties such as compressive and tensile strength at different volume fractions of Polypropylene fibers that is at 0%,0.5%, 0.75% and 1% also with a combination of hybrid fibers fraction such as (0.75% of PF + 0.25% of NF), (0.25% of PF + 0.75% of NF) and 1% of nylon fibers were used. The foam concrete was mixed with designed proportions and thereafter tested for flow ability that is workability, plastic density, dry density against standard specimens.

Heterodyning by a phase stable reference electric field is a well known technique to amplify weak nonlinear signals. For short wavelength, the generation of a reference field in front of the sample is challenging because of a lack of suitable beamsplitters. Here, we use a permanent grating which matches the line spacing of the transient grating for the creation of a phase stable reference field. The relative phase among the two can be changed by a relative translation of the permanent and transient gratings in direction orthogonal to the grating lines. We demonstrate the technique for a transient grating on a VO2 thin film and observe constructive as well as destructive interference signals.