Search

Recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology have revolutionized the medical field, particularly in the treatment and prevention of disease. Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are considered one of the best supreme and most important nanomaterials with a variety of compulsive nanomaterial having diverse array of multifunctional bioapplications. The current study focuses on the green biosynthesis of AgNPs using polysaccharides extracted from Olea europaea leaves. The synthesized AgNPs were thoroughly analyzed and characterized using various spectroscopic and microscopic techniques including, UV-Vis spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction, Energy dispersive X-ray (EDX), and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The absorption peak at 440 nm showed a high plasmon resonance band, confirming the formation of green AgNPs by the reduction of Ag+ ions to Ag0. FTIR analysis showed the appearance and extension of different functional groups. The results of EDX and SEM confirmed the synthesis of AgNPs with spherical shape, crystalline structure, and an average size of 64.42 nm. The biosynthesized AgNPs possessed improved antimicrobial activities, indicating the importance of biosynthesized NPs in the pharmaceutical industry. In addition, the biosynthesized AgNPs were biocompatible and exhibited anti-inflammatory activity (86.29%), almost similar to that of a standard drug (87.78%) at a concentration of 500 µL/mL. The polysaccharides obtained from O. europaea could be considered as effective reducing agent, leading to an environmentally friendly synthesis of stable and biologically important AgNPs with a wide range of applications.

Conventional teaching is rapidly changing, and online and simulated software are adding up in teaching. Simulations on spreadsheets have become popular due to their ubiquitous and easily understandable. In this paper, we demonstrate three physics topics: the motion of a charged particle in a uniform magnetic field, the motion of a projectile, and the simple harmonic motion of a simple pendulum. The third example is a demonstration of an experiment on a simple pendulum to find the time period of a simple pendulum and study the amplitude's effect on it. Students can perform the whole experiment on the spreadsheet in real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every individual in our technologically evolved world needs proper data security. The procedure of exchanging medical information is increasingly concerned with data privacy. Many techniques have been offered for preserving data security. These techniques use approaches such as k‐anonymity, l‐diversity, and others. However, such solutions are vulnerable to attribute disclosure, homogeneity, and background knowledge risks due to their syntactic nature. In this work, we describe a safe and secure architecture and semantic approach for data sharing that is based on blockchain, local differential privacy (LDP), and federated learning (FL). The proposed framework generates an atmosphere devoid of trust in which data owners are no longer required to have trust in the controllers. The FL models enable the whole network to decentralize its data‐driven learning. Interplanetary file system (IPFS) is used to provide data security in a distributed environment because each file in IPFS has a digital fingerprint that is computed using a cryptographic hash function on the file's whole contents. Due to the rigorous privacy guarantee, data owners no longer need to be worried about the security of their data. The proposed model's assessment parameters include latency, throughput, privacy, and accuracy. The data privacy of the proposed model is protected via LDP and FL, and its latency and throughput communication transactions on permissioned blockchain are calculated and compared with those of the benchmark model. The findings indicate that the proposed model delivers 85% more accurate privacy than the benchmark model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A contagious disease transmits from human to human or animal to human. At present world is encountered with such a disease, known as COVID-19. More than half a million people have died due to this pandemic. The pandemic started in China and spread within no time to other parts of the world. Italy and USA are the most unfortunate countries as a large number of deaths occurred in these two countries. No doubt this contagious disease has created social as well as economic problems all over the world, especially in underdeveloped countries. The disease easily transmits to a healthy person during social contact. An epidemic model was developed known as the Kermack-McKendrick model described as SIR (Susceptible Infected and Recovered) model, it deals with the rate of transmission of disease and rate of infection. It gives a trend of infectious disease in a large population. The model helps epidemiologists and health policymakers to understand the probable transmission of disease and to take possible and effective measures to control or reduce the spread of the virus. The factor Ro, known as the reproductive number, can be considered as a threshold value for the disease to be an epidemic. In this study, we used the SIR model to study the effect of COVID-19 in Pakistan. Three coupled differential equations of the SIR model have been solved by numerically using COVID-19 data for Pakistan. The Ro estimated by the current Pakistan COVID-19 data is found to be 2.656 from which control measures will cause a decrease in Ro. Due to the reduction in Ro, the apex of the infected population curve predicted to be range from 26 % to 3 %, and the time to reach the apex ranges from 161 to 710 days. Also, the current data is compared with the numerical values by solving the SIR model. However, the model has limitations due to which parameters can be approximately calculated that might match the actual values to some extent. The application of the model is simple and students can easily learn about the computational techniques used to solve the coupled differential equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a response to a previously published note about using spreadsheets to simulate experiments. The authors have developed a simulation program on Excel that allows students to understand RC circuits by recording the potential across a capacitor as it charges or discharges. This innovative use of spreadsheets and real-time simulations provides an engaging and practical exploration of RC circuits for students. The simulation details, spreadsheet file, and video explanation can be accessed in the online supplementary material. [Extracted from the article]