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ABSTRACTWe are introducing cost effective, easily available brick sand nano-particles (BSNP) (44.208 nm) as an adsorbent in batch process for removal of heavy toxic metals such as Pb, Cd, and Cr from aqueous solution. We used two types of adsorbents, one is acid treated BSNP and other one is untreated BSNP, and investigated adsorbent properties with function of contact time, temperature, and pH. The efficiency or performance of adsorbent was characterized by AAS for percentage of removal from solution, EDS for elemental analysis to confirm the metals adsorption. The Langmuir, Freundlich, Temkin, Hill De Boer, Elovich, and Redlich-Peterson adsorption isotherms were studies to find out the quality of the adsorbent. At 5.68 to 7.6 pH, the maximum removal percentages of Pb, Cd, and Cr were 97% from the aqueous solution. The temperatures at 40℃ to 60℃, the Pb, Cd, and Cr experiments were carried out at their highest possible percentages (98%). The reaction process was pseudo-second order model and several thermodynamic factors, including Intraparticle diffusion, Elovich kinetic model, Boyd kinetic model, activation energy, Gibbs free energy, enthalpy change, and entropy change ensured the adsorbent efficiency of brick sand nanoparticles. The results of present research indicated that Brick Sand Nano-Particles (BSNP) may play a vital role as a cost-effective, efficient, and easily available adsorbent for the removal of Pb, Cd, and Cr from wastewater.

Background and objectives: Diabetic kidney disease (DKD) is a leading complication of diabetes, contributing significantly to global cases of end-stage renal disease (ESRD). In Bangladesh, the rising prevalence of diabetes has made DKD a growing public health concern. An estimated 21.3% of diabetic patients in Bangladesh have some form of kidney impairment. The Diabetic Association of Bangladesh (BADAS) operates a network of healthcare centers that provide diabetes management across the country. Despite these efforts, significant gaps exist in DKD screening, patient education, and the use of renoprotective medications. This study aims to evaluate DKD in BADAS-affiliated healthcare centers, focusing on screening practices, management and patient education. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 8 BADAS-affiliated healthcare centers, representing diverse regions of Bangladesh. A total of 320 type 2 diabetic patients were selected using multi-stage sampling methods. Data were collected using structured questionnaires which included socio-demographic characteristics, clinical histories, comorbidities, body mass index (BMI), glycemic control status, blood pressure levels, medication usage, and diagnostic criteria for DKD. Blood samples were obtained to determine serum creatinine and HbA1c levels, and spot urine samples were collected to measure the urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (uACR). Results: The prevalence of DKD was found to be 34.1%, with most cases in the early stages (Stage1:33% and Stage2: 45%). Screening practices were inadequate, as 52.5% of participants had never been tested for uACR or eGFR. Only 21.1% of participants with DKD were receiving renoprotective medications like ACE inhibitors or ARBs, and 35.8% were using SGLT2 inhibitors. Glycemic and blood pressure control were also suboptimal, with 81.9% of total participants having HbA1c levels ≥7% and 69.1% having uncontrolled hypertension. Of the entire study population, only 0.3% met all six prevention targets. Conclusion: DKD is prevalent among diabetic patients in BADAS-affiliated healthcare centers, with poor screening practices and underutilization of renoprotective medications. Systematic improvements in DKD management, including enhanced screening, medication use, and patient education, are essential to prevent progression to ESRD. January 2025; Vol. 19(1):001. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55010/imcjms.19.001 *Correspondence: Wasim Md Mohosin Ul Haque, Department of Nephrology, Bangladesh Institute of Research and Rehabilitation in Diabetes, Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders (BIRDEM), 122 Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh. Email: wmmhaque@live.com; © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract The nexus between education and gender ideology is a debated issue worldwide, including in Bangladesh. This study aims to understand the educational influences on gender ideology. Authors have reviewed electronic databases, including Science Direct, Scopus, Google Scholar, and Web of Science, to collect published material from 2014 to 2023. Based on the research objectives, 20 studies were reviewed among 1438. The study found various theories and models, such as human capital theory, gender role theory, patriarchy theory, intersectionality theory, empowerment theory, gender identity theory, behavioral theory, and socialization and reproduction model, exploring the link between education and gender ideologies. This study also found that the quantitative methods dominate the research landscape, while qualitative and mixed-method approaches offer profound insights into the contextual factors that influence gender ideology. Additionally, findings from the studies indicate that education is positively associated with liberal gender ideology. This study suggests an insight for future researchers on the educational impact of gender ideology, its theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the current knowledge gap.

Abstract The first step in any dietary monitoring system is the automatic detection of eating episodes. To detect eating episodes, either sensor data or images can be used, and either method can result in false-positive detection. This study aims to reduce the number of false positives in the detection of eating episodes by a wearable sensor, Automatic Ingestion Monitor v2 (AIM-2). Thirty participants wore the AIM-2 for two days each (pseudo-free-living and free-living). The eating episodes were detected by three methods: (1) recognition of solid foods and beverages in images captured by AIM-2; (2) recognition of chewing from the AIM-2 accelerometer sensor; and (3) hierarchical classification to combine confidence scores from image and accelerometer classifiers. The integration of image- and sensor-based methods achieved 94.59% sensitivity, 70.47% precision, and 80.77% F1-score in the free-living environment, which is significantly better than either of the original methods (8% higher sensitivity). The proposed method successfully reduces the number of false positives in the detection of eating episodes.

The availability of hydrocarbons in the eastern part of Bangladesh indicates the presence of active petroleum systems in the Bengal basin. Although extensive research has been conducted in the Surma basin, the correlation between structural configuration, tectonostratigraphic framework, and hydrocarbon potentiality in the basin including Jaintiapur area has not yet been established. In this study, the hydrocarbon prospectivity of Jaintiapur and the adjoining Dupigaon area has been characterized through outcrop analogy with the subsurface interpretation of seismic data along L13-01, PK-SY-5, and L13-03 lines. The main three megasequences have been recognized based on sequence stratigraphy in the Sylhet region utilizing outcrop, seismic, and well-log data. The exposed Tertiary and Quaternary formations of Jaintiapur and adjoining areas can be classified into eleven litho-stratigraphic units. Detailed facies analyses indicate that these rock units were deposited in fluvial, deltaic, and shallow marine environments. The subsurface lithology of the study area has been inferred from the petrophysical data obtained from Sylhet-7, Kailashtila-4, and Jalalabad-1 wells. Jaintiapur area lies in a tectonically complex province and is controlled by the Dauki Fault System. Folding and faulting represent intense tectonic deformation in the area. Detailed analyses of surface and subsurface geology indicate that faults pass along the rivers and transverse faults segment the reservoirs. A total of seven horizons have been interpreted using Petrel software. The seismic attribute analysis identifies leads and prospects based on transverse faults and amplitude anomalies with distinct bright spots at the PK-SY-5 line. From seismic interpretation, attribute analysis, and lithofacies distribution of Sylhet-7 well and its surround area in the Dupigaon, it seems that same gas bearing sand. Gas sands of the Sylhet-7 well indicate the possibility of gas/oil in the equivalent sedimentary sequence in the Dupigaon structure as this area is located close to and more down-dip towards the kitchen area.

Introduction: This paper presents a novel Ear Canal Pressure Sensor (ECPS) for objective detection of food intake, chew counting, and food image capture in both controlled and free-living conditions. The contribution of this study is threefold: 1) Development and validation of a novel wearable sensor that uses changes in ear canal pressure and the device’s acceleration as an indicator of food intake, 2) A method to identify chewing segments and count the number of chews in each eating episode, and 3) Facilitation of egocentric image capture only during eating by triggering camera from sensor detection thus reducing power consumption, privacy concerns, as well as storage and computational cost.Methods: To validate the device, data were collected from 10 volunteers in a controlled environment and three volunteers in a free-living environment. During the controlled activities, each participant wore the device for approximately 1 h, and during the free living for approximately 12 h. The food intake of the participants was not restricted in any way in both part of the experiment. Subject-independent Support Vector Machine classifiers were trained to identify periods of food intake from the features of both the pressure sensor and accelerometer, and features only from the pressure sensor.Results: Results from leave-one-out cross-validation showed an average 5 sec-epoch classification F-score of 87.6% using only pressure sensor features and 88.6% using features from both pressure sensor and accelerometer in the controlled environment. For the free-living environment, both classifiers accurately detected all eating episodes. The wearable sensor achieves 95.5% accuracy in counting the number of chews with respect to manual annotation from the videos of the eating episodes using a pressure sensor classifier in the controlled environment.Discussion: The manual review of the images found that only 3.7% of captured images belonged to the detected eating episodes, suggesting that sensor-triggered camera capture may facilitate reducing the number of captured images and power consumption of the sensor.

Aquaculture has become one of the fastest-growing economic sub-sectors of the Bangladesh economy, providing protein-rich food, the source of employment and foreign currency earnings. Therefore, shrimp farming is very much common in the brackish water which affects the coastal natural ecosystem and livelihood of the coastal communities, prticularly in Chakaria Upazila of Cox’s Bazar district. Due to rapid and unplanned growth of this farming, socio-ecological systesms has been changing. This study aims to assess shrimp farming’s environmental, social, and economic impacts in Chakaria upazila in Bangladesh. Soil sample was collected to determine the environmental impacts of shrimp farming. Besides, we selected the shrimp farmers, rice producers, and alternative shrimp-rice producers through simple random sampling. Purposive sampling was conducted to choose the other stakeholders. A semi-structured questionnaire was developed for interviewing different stakeholders. We found that, because of the high economic benefit, high production rate in short time, and availability of brackish water, the people in this Upazila are attracted to continue the shrimp farming. As a result, mangrove forest and agricultural land converted into shrimp farming. Our soil analysis showed that organic matter content in was low (0.25-3.56%). In addition to this, most people suffer from water-borne diseases during the flooding period. We also found clear evidene of shortage of safe drinking water due to salinity intrusion in grounwater. The tendency of raring livestock such as cow, goat, and buffalo decreased due to insufficient grazing land. The study also revealed that some internal conflicts exist between different stakeholders in Chakararia Upazila. Most local shrimp fry collectors collect fry from the tidal river and use an unscientific traditional method which was harmful for the other aquatic fish population. Poor quality of larvae supply from hatchery caused various diseases in cultivated ghers and ponds. The findings from this study provide useful information for sustainable coastal zone management in Bangladesh to build a more resilient coastal communities.

BackgroundA fast rate of eating is associated with a higher risk for obesity but existing studies are limited by reliance on self-report and the consistency of eating rate has not been examined across all meals in a day. The goal of the current analysis was to examine associations between meal duration, rate of eating, and body mass index (BMI) and to assess the variance of meal duration and eating rate across different meals during the day.MethodsUsing an observational cross-sectional study design, non-smoking participants aged 18–45 years (N = 29) consumed all meals (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) on a single day in a pseudo free-living environment. Participants were allowed to choose any food and beverages from a University food court and consume their desired amount with no time restrictions. Weighed food records and a log of meal start and end times, to calculate duration, were obtained by a trained research assistant. Spearman's correlations and multiple linear regressions examined associations between BMI and meal duration and rate of eating.ResultsParticipants were 65% male and 48% white. A shorter meal duration was associated with a higher BMI at breakfast but not lunch or dinner, after adjusting for age and sex (p = 0.03). Faster rate of eating was associated with higher BMI across all meals (p = 0.04) and higher energy intake for all meals (p < 0.001). Intra-individual rates of eating were not significantly different across breakfast, lunch, and dinner (p = 0.96).ConclusionShorter beakfast and a faster rate of eating across all meals were associated with higher BMI in a pseudo free-living environment. An individual's rate of eating is constant over all meals in a day. These data support weight reduction interventions focusing on the rate of eating at all meals throughout the day and provide evidence for specifically directing attention to breakfast eating behaviors.

ObjectiveTo describe best practices for manual nutritional analyses of data from passive capture wearable devices in free-living conditions.Method18 participants (10 female) with a mean age of 45 ± 10 years and mean BMI of 34.2 ± 4.6 kg/m2 consumed usual diet for 3 days in a free-living environment while wearing an automated passive capture device. This wearable device facilitates capture of images without manual input from the user. Data from the first nine participants were used by two trained nutritionists to identify sources contributing to inter-nutritionist variance in nutritional analyses. The nutritionists implemented best practices to mitigate these sources of variance in the next nine participants. The three best practices to reduce variance in analysis of energy intake (EI) estimation were: (1) a priori standardized food selection, (2) standardized nutrient database selection, and (3) increased number of images captured around eating episodes.ResultsInter-rater repeatability for EI, using intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), improved by 0.39 from pre-best practices to post-best practices (0.14 vs 0.85, 95% CI, respectively), Bland–Altman analysis indicated strongly improved agreement between nutritionists for limits of agreement (LOA) post-best practices.ConclusionSignificant improvement of ICC and LOA for estimation of EI following implementation of best practices demonstrates that these practices improve the reproducibility of dietary analysis from passive capture device images in free-living environments.

Abstract Background Diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM) may impede immune responses in tuberculosis (TB) and thus contribute to enhanced disease severity. In this study, we aimed to evaluate DM-mediated alterations in clinical, radiological and immunological outcomes in TB disease. Methods Newly diagnosed pulmonary TB patients with or without DM (TB n = 40; TB-DM n = 40) were recruited in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Clinical symptoms, sputum smear and culture conversion as well as chest radiography were assessed. Peripheral blood and sputum samples were collected at the time of diagnosis (baseline) and after 1, 2 and 6 months of standard anti-TB treatment. Blood samples were also obtained from healthy controls (n = 20). mRNA expression of inflammatory markers in blood and sputum samples were quantified using real-time PCR. Results The majority of TB-DM patients had poor glycemic control (HbA1c > 8%) and displayed elevated pulmonary pathology (P = 0.039) particularly in the middle (P

Methods for measuring of eating behavior (known as meal microstructure) often rely on manual annotation of bites, chews, and swallows on meal videos or wearable sensor signals. The manual annotation may be time consuming and erroneous, while wearable sensors may not capture every aspect of eating (e.g. chews only). The aim of this study is to develop a method to detect and count bites and chews automatically from meal videos. The method was developed on a dataset of 28 volunteers consuming unrestricted meals in the laboratory under video observation. First, the faces in the video (regions of interest, ROI) were detected using Faster R-CNN. Second, a pre-trained AlexNet was trained on the detected faces to classify images as a bite/no bite image. Third, the affine optical flow was applied in consecutively detected faces to find the rotational movement of the pixels in the ROIs. The number of chews in a meal video was counted by converting the 2-D images to a 1-D optical flow parameter and finding peaks. The developed bite and chew count algorithm was applied to 84 meal videos collected from 28 volunteers. A mean accuracy (±STD) of 85.4% (±6.3%) with respect to manual annotation was obtained for the number of bites and 88.9% (±7.4%) for the number of chews. The proposed method for an automatic bite and chew counting shows promising results that can be used as an alternative solution to manual annotation.

People in the southwestern (SW) coastal part of Bangladesh are suffering from a severe freshwater crisis due to saline groundwater at a shallow depth. Fresh groundwater below a 200 m depth is an option, but it is costly to construct deep tubewells for the local inhabitants. The processes of salinization and freshening were previously identified using conventional methods. In this study, we brought new insight into these processes by analyzing existing datasets using multivariate statistics to identify the factors affecting groundwater chemistry. Cluster analysis (CA) revealed three major clusters. Cluster A corresponded to saline (NaCl-type) water. Cluster B was also saline (NaCl-type) water but showed mixing effects. Cluster C was fresh groundwater (NaHCO3-type) and isolated. The hydrochemical characteristics of clusters A, B and C compared remarkably well with the groundwaters from the upper shallow aquifer (USA), lower shallow aquifer (LSA) and deep aquifer (DA), respectively. Factor analysis (FA) showed that 75% of the total variance was influenced by evaporate dissolution, carbonate dissolution/precipitation, cation exchange and anthropogenic pollution to some extent. Therefore, the integrated approach showed the validity of applying multivariate statistical techniques to infer the dominant hydrochemistry and to characterize and understand a complicated hydrogeological system.

Abstract The negative trend of enrolment of Indigenous students into tertiary study indicates gaps between their current achievement and knowledge levels and university requirements for admission. This study was designed to determine the perceived needs, attitudes and knowledge of Indigenous secondary school students when considering admission to university; investigate remedial strategies in order to make university a more attractive choice for Indigenous students; and ascertain the types of assistance and support the Indigenous students would like to receive in order to meet the enrolment requirements as well as completion of study at university. Focus groups were conducted with 50 Indigenous students in Years 10 to 12 within the Toowoomba District and surveys conducted with 30 first year Indigenous undergraduate and Indigenous Higher Education Pathways Program (IHEPP) students at the University of Southern Queensland. The findings of the research illustrated that the school students were not aware of the IHEPP and university programs. Scholarships and bursaries need to be developed and publicised. Tutorial assistance and learning support (e.g., assignment preparation, multicultural activities, childcare facilities, group accommodation) needs to be promoted. Furthermore, there is a need for the university to establish and maintain relationships with local Indigenous communities and understand the “cultural dimension” impacting on Indigenous students and their families.