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Any optimization algorithm programming interface can be seen as a black-box function with additional free parameters. In this spirit, simulated annealing (SA) can be implemented in pseudo-code within the dimensions of a single slide with free parameters relating to the annealing schedule. Such an implementation, however, necessarily neglects much of the structure necessary to take advantage of advances in computing resources and algorithmic breakthroughs. Simulated annealing is often introduced in myriad disciplines, from discrete examples like the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) to molecular cluster potential energy exploration or even explorations of a protein’s configurational space. Theoretical guarantees also demand a stricter structure in terms of statistical quantities, which cannot simply be left to the user. We will introduce several standard paradigms and demonstrate how these can be “lifted” into a unified framework using object-oriented programming in Python. We demonstrate how clean, interoperable, reproducible programming libraries can be used to access and rapidly iterate on variants of Simulated Annealing in a manner which can be extended to serve as a best practices blueprint or design pattern for a data-driven optimization library.

Graphic abstract The popularity of traditional fermented food products is based on their healthiness. The addition of a starter brings consistent, desirable, and predictable food changes with improved nutritive, functional, and sensory qualities. The addition of a mixture of plant residues as a starter or source of microbes is an age-old practice to prepare traditional fermented food and beverages, and most of the reported data on traditional foods were based on the analysis of the final product. The contribution of an individual starter component (plant residue) is not experimentally substantiated for any traditional fermented food, but this data are very essential for the formulation of an effective starter. In this study, Asparagus racemosus, which used as a common ingredient of starter for preparation of rice fermented food in the Indian sub-continent, was used as a starter for the preparation of rice fermented food under laboratory scale, and its microbial and nutrient profile was evaluated. The fermented product was a good source of lactic acid bacteria, Bifidobacterium sp., yeast, etc. The food product was acidic and enriched with lactic acid and acetic acid with titratable acidity of 0.65%. The content of protein, fat, minerals, and vitamins (water-soluble) was considerably improved. Most notably, oligosaccharide (G3-matotriose), unsaturated fatty acids (ω3, ω6, ω7, and ω9), and a pool of essential and non-essential amino acids were enriched in the newly formulated food. Thus, the herbal starter-based rice fermented food would provide important macro- and micronutrients. They could also deliver large numbers of active microorganisms for the sustainability of health. Therefore, the selected plant part conferred its suitability as an effective starter for the preparation of healthier rice-based food products.

Hypercalcaemia is defined as a serum calcium level of more than 10.50 mg/dl. Although there are several causative factors for hypercalcaemia, primary hyperparathyroidism and malignancy are the two most common causes encountered in clinical practice. Other causes include vitamin D intoxication, granulomatous diseases like sarcoidosis, tuberculosis and some fungal infections, thyrotoxicosis, Addison’s disease, milk-alkali syndrome, vitamin A intoxication, therapy with thiazide diuretics and lithium, familial hypocalciuric hypercalcaemia and prolonged immobilization. All these account for fewer than 10 % of all causes of hypercalcaemia. These rare causes of hypercalcaemia are important to consider in certain clinical situations when the underlying cause of hypercalcaemia cannot be attributed to primary hyperparathyroidism or overt malignancy.[1]

The structure and solvation behaviour of binary liquid mixtures of Methanol (MeOH) and N, N-Dimethylformamide (DMF) are explored by ascertaining their intermolecular interactions with either Rhodamine-B (RhB) or Rhodamine101 (Rh101) dye through steady-state absorption, emission, and two-photon induced fluorescence. Specifically, in the present investigation, we examine the strong synergistic solvation observed for the combinations of hydrogen bond donating (MeOH) and accepting (DMF) solvent pairs. Solvatochromism causes the solvatochromic probe molecules to sense increased polarity compared to their bulk counterparts. The origin of synergism was explained in terms of solute-solvent and solvent-solvent interactions in binary solvent mixtures interactions, as evidenced by probe dependence. The solvation behaviour of the Methanol and DMF binary solvent mixture shows strong probe dependence, with Rh101 showing synergism while RhB does not.

This study deals with the effects of different sets of binary solvents on the Two-Photon Induced Fluorescence (TPIF), a non-linear process, of the Rhodamine-6G (Rh6G) dye, which is a well-known xanthene dye. This work examines the importance of inter-molecular interactions, which results in the modulation of the TPIF of the Rh6G. In this work, we have investigated three binary solvent mixtures representing varying polarity and intermolecular interactions. Specific solvent mixtures used are methanol-water, methanol-dimethyl formamide, and methanol-chloroform. Since the solvent polarity across these binary solvents differs, there are significant intermolecular interactions in the binary mixture solvents, which modulate the two-photon process of Rh6G when irradiated with high-intensity laser light at 780 nm. In our studies, we find that Rh6G in the MeOH-H2O binary solvent has maximum red-shift and minimum intensity as compared to other pairs of binary liquids when the volume fraction of methanol decreases due to more extensive hydrogen bonding between the two components. Additionally, at 1:1 ratio of binary mixtures, Rh6G is found to have the highest TPEACS value for methanol-chloroform binary solvent and reason for that is related to the formation of weak H-bond networks between proton donor chloroform and proton acceptor methanol.

BACKGROUND Anaemia is a very frequently occurring disorder associated with hypothyroidism especially in the elderly age group. Both conditions have similar presentations and are often confused with the nonspecific symptoms of old age. Although there is abundant data regarding relationships between hypothyroidism and anaemia in the general population, studies on the association between anaemia in hypothyroidism in the elderly population and the types of anaemia associated with elderly hypothyroidism are limited. In view of these considerations the current study, conducted at Gauhati Medical College, Guwahati, Assam, aims to seek the morphological types of anaemia associated with elderly hypothyroid patients. METHODS In the study, a total of 125 hypothyroid patients aged 60 years and above attending the outpatient and inpatient ward of the Department of Medicine, GMCH were examined clinically and through necessary investigations and the morphological types of anaemia associated with hypothyroidism were determined. RESULTS It was found that out of 125 elderly hypothyroid patients, the most common morphological type of anaemia was found to be normocytic normochromic type (59.4%) followed by macrocytic anaemia (21.6%) and microcytic hypochromic anaemia (19%). CONCLUSIONS Normocytic normochromic anaemia is the most common morphological type of anaemia associated in elderly hypothyroid patients, followed by macrocytic anaemia and microcytic anaemia.

Though a well-verified approach of quantifying quantum coherence is l1-norm, this is not normalized for a multi-qubit (multi-level) system. We propose a modification to show that the altered expression normalizes a multi-qubit (multi-level) system coherence with numerical studies.

We report Thermal Lens measurements on the binary liquid mixtures of Methanol and Phenol with femtosecond pulse excitations. The photothermal response is found to be strongly dependent on relative concentrations and the constituents’ molecular properties.

To highlight the advantage of femtosecond optical tweezers over conventional tweezers, we trapped 1µm diameter polystyrene beads suspended in water using a Ti:Sapphire laser.

The present study has been aimed at evaluating the antiobesity, antihyperglycemic, and antidepressive potentials of Asparagus racemosus starter-based rice fermented foods. High-throughput NGS technology has revealed a number of bacterial genera in the prepared fermented rice, such as Lactobacillus (29.44%), Brevundimonas (16.21%), Stenotrophomonas (6.18%), Pseudomonas (3.11%), Bacillus (2.88%), and others (Lactobacillus, and Bifidobacterium, as well as the suppressed growth rate of γ- and δ-Proteobacteria and Firmicutes in the gut after fermented food intake. In the intestine, the latter group of microorganisms possibly modulate short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) levels such as acetate, butyrate, and propionate more than twofold. The impairment of memory-learning and anxiety-like obesity-associated cognitive phenotypes is mitigated significantly (p < 0.01) by fermented food as well. Thus, the formulated fermented food could be used as a natural therapeutic to alleviate obesity and its associated psychological and pathophysiological ailments.

Fluid systems exhibit thermal lens effects due to laser irradiation accompanied by convection and in contrast primarily conductive heat dissipation is observed in solids. The presence of a significant convective mode modifies the temperature gradient in fluids resulting in a deviation of the experimental results from theories that are based on pure conduction. Herein, we present a carefully designed femtosecond laser experiment that keeps the heat generation process constant in order to account for the effect of molecular properties on thermal dissipation. We derive a theoretical model that introduces and characterizes the additional convective heat transfer in thermal lens (TL) spectroscopy which explains our observed experimental results. We measured the TL signal for a series of liquid aliphatic alkanes, ranging from hexane to decane, and their comparison has proven the validity of our model. The influence of convective heat transfer on the TL signal is predicted in terms of the dimensionless Peclet number (PE). The lower values of PE for alkanes with longer carbon chains indicate that the convective flow of heat slows down substantially for larger molecules.

Probing transient states in molecules having vibronic transitions with femtosecond (fs) laser pulses often results in coherent oscillations either in the ground state, the excited states, or both. We find such coherent oscillations are highly solvent-dependent and provide a holistic overview of the pump-probe experiments for ultrafast dye dynamics at interfaces. For molecules dissolved in single solvents, modulations in oscillations occur due to transitions in the sub-vibrational levels of the electronic state. For binary solvents, in particular, these modulations are strongly sensitive to solvent compositions. The changes induced by various solvent compositions are drastic enough to act as a control parameter for dynamical control processes. We demonstrate an end-to-end understanding of ground-state coherent oscillations, vibrational cooling, ground-state recovery processes, and excited-state dynamics through a series of experiments. We further present a methodology for establishing such control using near-infrared dyes to measure the oscillations with fs pump-probe techniques. In the case of immiscible binary solvents, the same method allows us to investigate the liquid–liquid interface. Our control methodology is validated by an experiment using a cyanine dye dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide, interfaced with neat diethyl-ether. The dye dynamics are retarded on moving from the bulk dye solution towards the interface with the neat diethyl-ether. When sampled along the direction of the vector pointing from the bulk towards the near interface, monotonically decreasing time constants are obtained. This result strongly suggests the importance of microheterogeneity in interfacial dynamics.

Systematic study of conventional and femtosecond optical tweezers demonstrates an interplay of thermal and optical nonlinearity due to tight focusing. Specifically, Brownian motion of the 250nm radius trapped bead is measured using a quadrant photodiode.

We use the femtosecond laser-induced thermal lens spectroscopy for sensitive detection of the liquid-gas phase interface, which can provide an accurate size measure of aerosols. Mapping microscopic aerosol distribution is critical for COVID-19 transmission. © OSA 2021, © 2021 The Author(s)

We performed a dual beam Z-Scan experiment to examine the thermal lensing effects in CBNP nanofluids. The photothermal characteristics and heat dissipation dynamics were observed for these nanofluids at different levels of their linear absorption.

Vibronic transitions of a molecular system in solution upon probing with ultrashort laser pulses (

Spatiotemporal control aspects of pulsed laser experiments rely on the ability to modulate the shape of the generated pulses efficiently. Drawing from current state-of-the-art theoretical aspects of computational simulations to reduce the sim-to-real bottlenecks, we devise a novel schematic for the generation of on-the-fly calibrated pulse trains with more accountability than existing techniques under the domain of optimal control theory. The techniques presented further diminish the divide between experiment and theory.

We use time-resolved thermal lens (TL) experiments to examine the convective heat transfer at microscale in the first eight members of the homologous series of primary alcohols. TL measurements enable a direct study of these primary alcohols without adding any chromophore as a function of varying heat loads created via femtosecond laser pulses at 1560 nm. Convective heat transfer leads to the asymmetrical and reduced thermal gradient, which substantially weakens the TL signal. The inflection in the time profile of the TL signal of methanol at higher powers is attributed to the greater molecular convection in methanol compared to other samples. This inflection dies out with a decrease in laser power. Our results demonstrate that the convection is more prominent at higher laser powers in all samples, and it modifies the trend in the steady-state TL signal of different alcohols with pump laser power. Methanol also has the highest steady-state TL among the primary alcohol series at low laser powers. The maxima in the TL signal are shifted systematically from methanol to ethanol and then to propanol as the laser power increases. Semiempirical analysis of time-resolved TL signal by using the latest theoretical TL model enabled us to extract the coefficient of convective heat transfer in methanol at different laser powers. In addition to that, analysis of other members of alcohol series at the highest (7.3 mW) laser power shows that convection is more facile in short-chain alcohols compared to the long-chain alcohols.