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"nBackground: There is a growing interest in understanding the biological effects of time-tested folk medicinal plants including the green leafy vegetables, which supply minerals and vitamins to the diet. Trigonella foenum-graecum L (fenugreek) is a dietary vegetable and there are reports concerning its antinociceptive effects in Iranian traditional medicine. Its seeds are also known for their carminative, tonic, antidiabetic, antineoplastic and restorative properties. These reports and the hypoglycemic effect of fenugreek leaf extract encouraged us to assay fenugreek aqueous extract for cytotoxicity on NIH3T3 mouse fibroblast cells. "nMethods: The NIH3T3cell line was purchased from National Research Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology of Iran. The cells were plated in 24-well microtiter plates with DMEM+F12 medium containing 10% fetal calf serum supplemented with 445 mg/L L-glutamine and maintained at 37oC with 5% CO2/95% air. Following a 24-hr incubation period, various concentrations (0.01-20 mg) of the extract to the culture wells. Cell viability was assessed using trypan blue and MTT assays after five days of incubation. "nResults: The results show that the IC50 of the fenugreek extract as calculated from the trypan blue and MTT assays were 1.25 and 2.5 mg/mL, respectively. "nConclusions: Our findings, therefore, suggest that the aqueous extract of fenugreek is classified as nontoxic. This observed cytotoxicity is not specific and could be due to membrane disturbances.

Calcium–silicate–hydrate (C–S–H) is the most important product of cement hydration. Despite this importance, its formation mechanism is not well-understood. Here, we describe the novel application of a coupled thermodynamic-kinetic computational model based on a population balance equation in order to unravel the overall mechanism of synthetic C–S–H precipitation. The framework, embracing primary nucleation, true secondary nucleation, and molecular growth as the constituting sub-processes, is regressed to experimental Ca2+(aq) concentration vs. time data collected on a model synthetic C–S–H with Ca : Si = 2. Upon the critical appraisal of the model's adjustable parameters, which turn out to adopt rational values, simulations were performed to estimate various characteristics of the aforementioned model system (e.g., the kinetic speciation during the precipitation process, or the mechanisms and activation free energies of nucleation and growth phenomena). We mechanistically account for the evolution of the C–S–H mesostructure which is made up of defective crystallites around 3–6 nm thick, nematically packing together in two dimensions giving rise to foil-like polycrystalline particles around 100 nm in breadth, close to the experimentally observed values. The computational framework is generic and can be applied to other precipitation systems and cement hydration scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-individual differences in the gut microbiome are linked to alterations in inflammation and blood-brain barrier permeability, which may increase the risk of depression in people with HIV (PWH). The microbiome profile of blood, which is considered by many to be typically sterile, remains largely unexplored. We aimed to characterize the blood plasma microbiome composition and assess its association with major depressive disorder (MDD) in PWH and people without HIV (PWoH). In this cross-sectional, observational cohort, we used shallow-shotgun metagenomic sequencing to characterize the plasma microbiome of 151 participants (84 PWH and 67 PWoH), all of whom underwent a comprehensive neuropsychiatric assessment. The microbial composition did not differ between PWH and PWoH or between participants with MDD and those without it. Using the songbird model, we computed the log ratio of the highest and lowest 30% of the ranked classes associated with HIV and MDD. We found that HIV infection and lifetime MDD were enriched in a set of differentially abundant inflammatory classes, such as Flavobacteria and Nitrospira. Our results suggest that the circulating plasma microbiome may increase the risk of MDD related to dysbiosis-induced inflammation in PWH. If confirmed, these findings may indicate new biological mechanisms that could be targeted to improve treatment of MDD in PWH.

Background: Blood groups appear to be markers for various human diseases and their distribution among different communities, ethnic groups and geographical boundaries varies over time., Aims: We aimed to investigate the frequency of ABO and Rh blood groups and their relationship with demographic and anthropometric characteristics among Iranian residents in Mashad., Methods: ABO and Rh blood groups were determined among 7268 participants from the MASHAD cohort study and their relationships with demographic and anthropometric parameters were evaluated. This part of the study was done in January 2017. Student t-test, ANOVA, Bonferroni' and Chi-squared were used for comparison of quantitative and qualitative variables., Results: The most common blood group was O (33.8%); AB was the least common (8.3%). The prevalence of Rh-positive and Rh-negative was 88.2% and 11.8% respectively. There were statistically significant associations between ABO blood groups and demi-span (P = 0.03), even after correction for multiple comparisons., Conclusion: Our findings showed there was no relationship between ABO blood groups and demographic characteristics although there was an association with anthropometric measurements such as demi-span., (Copyright © World Health Organization (WHO) 2020. Open Access. Some rights reserved. This work is available under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/igo).)

Grayscale logo watermarking is a quite well-developed area of digital image watermarking which seeks to embed into the host image another smaller logo image. The key advantage of such an approach is the ability to visually analyze the extracted logo for rapid visual authentication and other visual tasks. However, logos pose new challenges for invisible watermarking applications which need to keep the watermark imperceptible within the host image while simultaneously maintaining robustness to attacks. This paper presents an algorithm for invisible grayscale logo watermarking that operates via adaptive texturization of the logo. The central idea of our approach is to recast the watermarking task into a texture similarity task. We first separate the host image into sufficiently textured and poorly textured regions. Next, for textured regions, we transform the logo into a visually similar texture via the Arnold transform and one lossless rotation; whereas for poorly textured regions, we use only a lossless rotation. The iteration for the Arnold transform and the angle of lossless rotation are determined by a model of visual texture similarity. Finally, for each region, we embed the transformed logo into that region via a standard wavelet-based embedding scheme. We employ a multistep extraction stage, in which an affine parameter estimation is first performed to compensate for possible geometrical transformations. Testing with multiple logos on a database of host images and under a variety of attacks demonstrates that the proposed algorithm yields better overall performance than competing methods.