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In order to evaluate the effect of two isolates of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus in saffron rhizosphere on some of saffron agronomic traits under different irrigation regimes, an experiment was conducted as split plots factorial in a randomized completely design with three replications at the Institute of Soil and Water Research, Karaj, Iran. The treatments consisted of three irrigation regimes (normal irrigation (control), irrigation cut off at the beginning of the growing season and at the beginning and middle of the growing season) as the main factors, three organic planting media (no organic fertilizer, vermicompost (20 t.ha-1) and biochar (10 t.ha-1) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal in three levels (no application, isolate a and isolate b) as a sub factors. Molecular findings indicated that, both strains isolated from saffron rhizosphere belonged to Rhizophagus irregularis. The results showed that the interaction effect of water stress and planting media on economic yield and also, the interaction effect of water stress, planting media and R. irregularis fungus on leaf number, fresh and dry weights and corm weight and diameter per pot were significant. The highest yield (0.062 g/pot) belonged to the full irrigation with biochar. Meanwhile, the highest leaves number (180), fresh and dry weights (90.2 and 23.96 g, respectively) and corm weight (7.67 g) and diameter (2.38 cm) per pot were obtained at full irrigation with biochar and Rhizophagus irregularis isolate b. In general, the use of biochar fertilizer with Rhizophagus irregularis isolate b had the greatest effect on the measured traits of saffron in different irrigation regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilizing a plasma focus (PF) instrument, magnesium nitride (Mg3N2) thin films were synthesized on stainless steel substrates. Twenty five optimum focus shots at 8 cm distance from the anode tip were used to deposit the films at different angular positions regarded to the anode axis. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and X‐ray diffraction (XRD) analyses were performed to assess the surface morphology and structural characteristics of Mg3N2 films. Based on AFM images, these films were studied to understand the effect of angular position variation on their surfaces through morphological and fractal parameters. By increasing the angle, we verify that the grain size decreased from 130(0) nm to 75(5) nm and also the mean quadratic surface roughness of the films reduced in its average values from (28.97 ± 3.24) nm to (23.10 ± 1.34) nm. Power spectrum density analysis indicated that films become more self‐affine at larger angles. Furthermore, the corrosion behavior of the films was investigated through a potentiodynamic polarization test in H2SO4 solution. It was found that the ion energy and flux, varying with the angular positions from the anode tip, directly affected the nanostructured roughness and surface morphology of the samples. The electrochemical studies of films show that the uncoated sample presented the lowest corrosion resistance. The highest corrosion resistance was obtained for the sample deposited with 25 optimum shots and at 0° angular position reaching a reduction in the corrosion current density of almost 800 times compared to the pure stainless steel‐304 substrate. Highlights: Mg3N2/SS films have been deposited at different angles by plasma focus (PF) instruments.The effect of angular position on the surface microtexture, morphological parameters, and corrosion features of the films was studied.The RBS measurement and X‐ray diffraction are utilized to identify the crystalline phases and thickness of films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation Several recent studies showed that the application of deep neural networks advanced the state-of-the-art in named entity recognition (NER), including biomedical NER. However, the impact on performance and the robustness of improvements crucially depends on the availability of sufficiently large training corpora, which is a problem in the biomedical domain with its often rather small gold standard corpora. Results We evaluate different methods for alleviating the data sparsity problem by pretraining a deep neural network (LSTM-CRF), followed by a rather short fine-tuning phase focusing on a particular corpus. Experiments were performed using 34 different corpora covering five different biomedical entity types, yielding an average increase in F1-score of ∼2 pp compared to learning without pretraining. We experimented both with supervised and semi-supervised pretraining, leading to interesting insights into the precision/recall trade-off. Based on our results, we created the stand-alone NER tool HUNER incorporating fully trained models for five entity types. On the independent CRAFT corpus, which was not used for creating HUNER, it outperforms the state-of-the-art tools GNormPlus and tmChem by 5–13 pp on the entity types chemicals, species and genes. Availability and implementation HUNER is freely available at https://hu-ner.github.io. HUNER comes in containers, making it easy to install and use, and it can be applied off-the-shelf to arbitrary texts. We also provide an integrated tool for obtaining and converting all 34 corpora used in our evaluation, including fixed training, development and test splits to enable fair comparisons in the future. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to investigate the effect of biochar and biological fertilizer on photosynthetic pigments, yield, and nutrient content of peppermint (Mentha piperita L.) an experiment has been conducted as factorial, based on a randomized complete block design in three replications at Sari Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources University in 2017. The treatments include biochar on two levels (0 and 10 ton ha-1) and organic and biological fertilizers on five levels (no fertilizer (F0), vermicompost (10 ton ha-1) (F1), Pseudomonas fluorescens (F2), Azotobacter (F3), and Arbuscular mycorrhiza (Glomus mosseae, G. intradicces, and G. etunicatum) (F4)). Results from this study show that the use of biochar increases the chlorophyll a and chlorophyll content by 7.42% and 9.71%, respectively. Among fertilizer treatments, the highest amount of chlorophyll belongs to vermicompost (6.11 µg.ml-1), significantly better than other treatments. In addition, the main effect of biochar and bio-fertilizer have had a significant effect on leaf, stem, and total fresh weight of the plant. Results from comparing mean of fertilizer treatments show that the highest leaf fresh weight, stem fresh weight, and total fresh weight per square meter belong to the treatment of mycorrhiza (306.08, 361.15, and 663.03 g.m-2 respectively). Also, the use of biochar increases the leaf fresh weight, stem fresh weight, and total fresh weight (294.78, 366.73, and 661.46 g.m-2 respectively), compared to the conditions without using it. Based on the results of the comparison of the mean of the main effects, all treatments increase nitrogen content, compared to the control. The highest nitrogen content (1.83%) is related to Azotobacter treatment, not significantly different from vermicompost, mycorrhiza, and Pseudomonas. Results also suggest that the maximum amount of phosphorus (0.37%) have been seen in biochar + mycorrhiz and biochar + vermicompost. Therefore, with respect to the production of medicinal plants in the low-input cropping systems, it is recommended to protect the environmental and achieve sustainable agriculture to improve plant growth and photosynthesis of peppermint application of biochar + mycorrhiz along with biochar + vermicompost treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The G2 object has recently passed its pericentre passage in our Galactic Centre.While the Brγ emission shows clear signs of tidal interaction, the change in the observed luminosity is only of about a factor of 2, in contention with all previous predictions. We present high-resolution simulations performed with the moving mesh code, RICH, together with simple analytical arguments that reproduce the observed Brγ emission. In our model, G2 is a gas cloud that undergoes tidal disruption in a dilute ambient medium.We find that during pericentre passage, the efficient cooling of the cloud results in a vertical collapse, compressing the cloud by a factor of ∼5000. By properly taking into account the ionization state of the gas, we find that the cloud is UV starved and are able to reproduce the observed Brγ luminosity. For densities larger than ≈500 cm-3 at pericentre, the cloud fragments due to cooling instabilities and the emitted radiation is inconsistent with observations. For lower densities, the cloud survives the pericentre passage intact and its emitted radiation matches the observed light curve. From the duration of Brγ emission that contains both redshifted and blueshifted components, we show that the cloud is not spherical but rather elongated with a size ratio of 4 at year 2001. The simulated cloud's elongation grows as it travels towards pericentre and is consistent with observations, due to viewing angles. The simulation is also consistent with having a spherical shape at apocentre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is increasing evidence that visual impairment contribute to falling. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of vision impairment of old adult patients with cataract on the occurrence of falls and postural control. Methods: According to the results of screening ophthalmic examination, 48 cataract patients (mean±SD aged 68.5 ± 6.08 yrs.) and 50 individuals without any obvious eye disorders (mean age ± SD 70.7 ± 5.97 yrs.) were enrolled in this study. The postural control was determined using the clinical test of Sensory Interaction and Balance (CTSIB) and Timed up and Go (TUG) test. Results: The results of this study revealed that 18% (n = 9) of the normal individuals and 22.9% (n =11) of the cataract patients had at least two falls in the past 12 months. However, the result of chisquare test did not show any differences between the two groups (p= 0.36). The mean ± SD TUG times in cataract and control groups in our study were15.17 ± 3.58 and13.77 ± 4.90, respectively. However, no significant differences were found between the two groups (p= 0.12).The results of CTSIB test showed no significant differences between the two groups on standing on the floor with eyes open and eyes closed (p= 0.61, p= 0.89) and on standing on the foam with eyes open and eyes closed (p= 0.32, p= 0.74). Conclusion: According to the results of CTSIB and TUG tests, vision impairment of old adult patients with cataract is not associated with falls and balance disorders. Further work including assessment of postural control with advanced devices and considering other falls risk factors are also required to identify predictors of falls in cataract patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detection of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in hospitals provides an important measure of the burden of drug related morbidity on the healthcare system. Spontaneous reporting of ADRs is scare and several obstacles to such reporting have been identified formerly. This study aimed to determine the role of clinical pharmacy residents in ADR reporting within a hospital setting. Clinical pharmacy residents were trained to report all suspected ADRs through ADR-reporting yellow cards. The incidence, pattern, seriousness, and preventability of the reported ADRs were analyzed. During the period of 12 months, for 8559 patients, 202 ADR reports were received. The most frequently reported reactions were due to anti-infective agents (38.38%). Rifampin accounted for the highest number of the reported ADRs among anti-infective agents. The gastro-intestinal system was the most frequently affected system (21.56%) of all reactions. Fifty four of the ADRs were reported as serious reactions. Eighteen of the ADRs were classified as preventable. Clinical pharmacy residents involvement in the ADR reporting program could improve the ADR reporting system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]