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Background and Aims: Assessment of the severity of substance use disorders (SUDs) in a culture-sensitive manner can help gauge the current condition of the substance user and assess change with time. The present study aimed to develop a scale for the assessment of the severity of SUDs in the Indian clinical context. Methods: Based upon the review of literature on previously available instruments and a consultative meeting of experts, a clinician-rated scale was developed that finally comprised 41 items. A briefer 5-item scale with current and lifetime versions was also developed. The scales were applied to patients with SUDs at six different clinical sites. Results: The instrument was applied to 720 patients (98.2% males, mean age: 34.6 years). The Cronbach’s alpha of the full scale was 0.852. The inter-rater reliability Pearson correlation coefficient of the full-scale was r = 0.821 (P < 0.001), and the intra-class correlation coefficient single measure was 0.800 (95% confidence interval: 0.724–0.956). A four-factor solution was suggested to be the most tenable. The mean application duration of the full scale was 13.4 minutes, and that of the briefer version was 2 minutes. Conclusion: This validated scale could be a potentially useful assessment measure for the severity of SUDs in the Indian context. The utility lies in the simplicity of administration and scoring and the balance between brevity and thorough assessment.

Background and Objectives: The literature is limited on correlates of psychological well-being among Indian medical undergraduates. The study aimed to assess the psychological well-being, life satisfaction, self-efficacy, positive state of mind, and emotions among first-year medical undergraduates. Materials and Methods: It was a cross-sectional study assessing 121 first-year medical undergraduate students. Psychological well-being scale, satisfaction with life scale, general self-efficacy scale, positive state of mind scale, and positive and negative affect schedule revised version were used. Results: The majority of medical undergraduate students were satisfied with the life. Their life satisfaction was positively associated with general self-efficacy, positive state of mind, and positive affect score. These indicators were negatively associated with negative affect score. Male students had significantly greater self-efficacy. Conclusion: Medical students’ life satisfaction was found to be positively associated with other wellness indicators. Resilience-based positive psychology interventions should be implemented in medical colleges to enhance psychological well-being.

During the strategic military operations, the deployment of objects viz. tanks, rescue shelters, bunkers etc. need to masquerade from enemy sensors. The deployment of these objects with adaptive photochromic coatings with fast coloration & reversibility is highly effective way for their camouflaging. The present paper systematically reports the photochromic properties of W6+ transition metal doped TiO2 nanoparticles. Undoped as well as doped TiO2 nanoparticles have been synthesized by a one pot wet chemical method. The synthesized materials have been characterized by different techniques viz. XRD, AFM, Raman, SEM, EPR and UV–Vis spectroscopy. Photochromic behavior of functional material was studied by making its composite coatings in alkyd resin matrix. The effect of W6+ dopant ion concentration on photochromic properties has been explained. The coloration & reversibility characteristics of W6+: TiO2 is found superior as compared with V5+ & Mo6+ doped TiO2 nanomaterials, reported earlier.

Background: Alcohol use disorder has a substantial impact on patients' caregivers, leading to burden and adverse effects on their psychological health. Currently, there is limited literature which is available to suggest whether the burden and psychological distress of the family members change when patients with alcohol dependence undergo treatment. This study aimed to longitudinally examine the change in burden, depression, anxiety, and stress experienced by caregivers of patients with alcohol dependence undergoing treatment. Subjects and Methods: This prospective observational study recruited treatment-seeking men with alcohol dependence and their caregivers as dyads. The burden, depression, anxiety, and stress of caregivers were assessed at baseline and at six weeks, using the Family Burden Interview Schedule and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, respectively. Pre and post values were compared using paired t-test. Interaction effects of resumption of drinking were assessed using repeated measures test. Results: Of the 101 dyads recruited in the study, 60 could be followed up at six weeks. Significant decrements were seen in burden, depression, anxiety, and stress of caregivers at six weeks compared to baseline (mean 62.3%, 54.2%, 65.9%, and 53.4%, respectively, all P < 0.001). The decrement in burden and depression was lower in those caregivers where the patients had resumed alcohol use within the span of six weeks. Conclusions: Findings suggest that engagement in treatment by patients with alcohol dependence may reduce the burden and psychological distress among their caregivers, more so in situations where the patients had quit alcohol. However, the change in burden and psychological distress could be due to several other factors as well.

Abstract The polymerization/depolymerization dynamics of FtsZ play a pivotal role in cell division in the majority of the bacteria. Deinococcus radiodurans, a radiation‐resistant bacterium, shows an arrest of growth in response to DNA damage with no change in the level of FtsZ. This bacterium does not deploy LexA/RecA type of DNA damage response and cell cycle regulation, and its genome does not encode SulA homologues of Escherichia coli, which attenuate FtsZ functions in response to DNA damage in other bacteria. A radiation‐responsive Ser/Thr quinoprotein kinase (RqkA), characterized for its role in radiation resistance in this bacterium, could phosphorylate several cognate proteins, including FtsZ (drFtsZ) at Serine 235 (S235) and Serine 335 (S335) residues. Here, we reported the detailed characterization of S235 and S335 phosphorylation effects in the regulation of drFtsZ functions and demonstrated that the phospho‐mimetic replacements of these residues in drFtsZ had grossly affected its functions that could result in cell cycle arrest in response to DNA damage in D. radiodurans. Interestingly, the phospho‐ablative replacements were found to be nearly similar to drFtsZ, whereas the phospho‐mimetic mutant lost the wild‐type protein's signature characteristics, including its dynamics under normal conditions. The kinetics of post‐bleaching recovery for drFtsZ and phospho‐mimetic mutant were nearly similar at 2 h post‐irradiation recovery but were found to be different under normal conditions. These results highlighted the role of S/T phosphorylation in the regulation of drFtsZ functions and cell cycle arrest in response to DNA damage, which is demonstrated for the first time, in any bacteria.

Abstract This article studies and investigate the magnetic characteristics of a surface mounted permanent magnet (SPM)‐type brushless direct current (BLDC) motor when subjected to demagnetisation fault conditions. The proposed research subjugates the limitation of estimating the State of Health (SoH) of a BLDC motor drive when deployed in electric vehicle (EV) applications. Demagnetisation faults adversely affect the performance of a machine and indirectly the EV drive system, bringing significant transformation in the machine’s characteristics and quantities. The novel method of measuring the radial magnetic field (Bg) across the machine airgap assists in diagnosing and estimating the % severity of faults under the subjected fault conditions. A numerical co‐simulation‐based model of a BLDC motor is developed to investigate the performance of the machine under both healthy and fault conditions. The BLDC motor being studied is operated using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based control drive adopting a hysteresis current control (HCC) technique. The experimental investigation of a complete BLDC motor test drive is carried out with an FPGA‐based algorithm developed on the Xilinx ISE tool. The outcomes obtained are validated with the numerical results obtained through a finite element (FE) analysis. The proposed study uses a fluxgate sensor for experimental measurement of the flux density of a BLDC motor drive, which is vital for estimating the fault severity and scheduling the maintenance accordingly. The experimental investigations are found to be in validation with the proposed techniques in estimating the health of a BLDC motor‐driven EV drive system.

ABSTRACT Environmental DNA uptake by certain bacteria and its integration into their genome create genetic diversity and new phenotypes. DNA processing protein A (DprA) is part of a multiprotein complex and facilitates the natural transformation (NT) phenotype in most bacteria. Deinococcus radiodurans, an extremely radioresistant bacterium, is efficient in NT, and its genome encodes nearly all of the components of the natural competence complex. Here, we have characterized the DprA protein of this bacterium (DrDprA) for the known characteristics of DprA proteins of other bacteria and the mechanisms underlying the DNA-RecA interaction. DrDprA has three domains. In vitro studies showed that purified recombinant DrDprA binds to both single-strand DNA (ssDNA) and double-strand DNA (dsDNA) and is able to protect ssDNA from nucleolytic degradation. DrDprA showed a strong interaction with DrRecA and facilitated RecA-catalyzed functions in vivo. Mutational studies identified DrDprA amino acid residues crucial for oligomerization, the interaction with DrRecA, and DNA binding. Furthermore, we showed that both oligomerization and DNA binding properties of DrDprA are integral to its support of the DrRecA-catalyzed strand exchange reaction (SER) in vitro. Together, these data suggested that DrDprA is largely structurally conserved with other DprA homologs but shows some unique structure-function features like the existence of an additional C-terminal Drosophila melanogaster Miasto-like protein 1 (DML1) domain, equal affinities for ssDNA and dsDNA, and the collective roles of oligomerization and DNA binding properties in supporting DrRecA functions. IMPORTANCE Bacteria can take up extracellular DNA (eDNA) by natural transformation (NT). Many bacteria, including Deinococcus radiodurans, have constitutive competence systems and can take up eDNA throughout their growth phase. DprA (DNA processing protein A) is a transformation-specific recombination mediator protein (RMP) that plays a role in bacterial NT, and the absence of this gene significantly reduces the transformation efficiencies of both chromosomal and plasmid DNA. NT helps bacteria survive under adverse conditions and contributes to genetic diversity in bacteria. The present work describes the characterization of DprA from D. radiodurans and will add to the existing knowledge of DprA biology.

Abstract High‐frequency audible noise and high‐frequency vibrations (HFVs) in electrical vehicles are primarily caused by vibrations and ripples generated in the traction motor. The appositeness of permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) has been boosting in traction applications due to their high energy density, compact size and high torque to weight ratio. A novel and step‐by‐step design of medium power, high speed, surface PMSM, suitable for e‐bus or e‐truck applications, with suppressed torque ripples, is presented. Initially, a conventional machine design approach has been used to design 100 kW PMSM. In the next step, the design has been ameliorated by making it a fractional slot winding machine to suppress the winding harmonics. Finally, the effect of the permanent magnet embrace size on the torque ripple has been investigated. A nonlinear relationship between the torque ripple and PMSM magnetic embrace has been developed. The developed relationship has been validated in the finite element model of the machine. Gradient‐based nonlinear sequential programming has been used to find out the optimum magnetic embrace for the minimised torque ripple. The effectiveness of the optimised design has been revalidated in the FE software. The step‐by‐step design process described here can reduce the torque ripple by 85% of optimised design compared to the conventionally designed PMSM.

The availability of an enormous quantity of multimodal data and its widespread applications, automatic sentiment analysis and emotion classification in the conversation has become an interesting research topic among the research community. The interlocutor state, context state between the neighboring utterances and multimodal fusion play an important role in multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion detection in conversation. In this article, the recurrent neural network (RNN) based method is developed to capture the interlocutor state and contextual state between the utterances. The pair-wise attention mechanism is used to understand the relationship between the modalities and their importance before fusion. First, two-two combinations of modalities are fused at a time and finally, all the modalities are fused to form the trimodal representation feature vector. The experiments are conducted on three standard datasets such as IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSEI, and CMU-MOSI. The proposed model is evaluated using two metrics such as accuracy and F1-Score and the results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the standard baselines.

Dataset - an essential aspect and the requirement for any of the machine learning project. Collection / creation of dataset in the agriculture domain is highly challenging task because the domain itself is uncertain. Main objective of the present paper is to create an image dataset of pomegranate fruits of different grades. Accordingly, we have considered ‘Ruby’ cultivar of pomegranate and sincerely constructed the dataset. Fruits belonging to three grades are considered. The images for each fruit are covered from all the three angles. The dataset created also contains the weights of the fruits. The dataset consists of 12 folders named after their effective quality grades. The usage of this dataset is already proved in the works carried out by the authors in their previous studies. This dataset is highly helpful for the data science engineer / machine learning programmer or machine learning expert working in the field of precision agriculture.

Substantial survival benefits exist for patients with early-stage breast cancer who undergo treatment with single-modality ovarian suppression, but its value is uncertain. Expert oncologist discussed to determine whether additional benefits exist with ovarian suppression plus multiple adjuvant therapy which provides a new treatment option that reduces the risk of recurrence in early breast cancer. This expert group used data from published literature, practical experience and opinion of a large group of academic oncologists to arrive at this practical consensus recommendations for the benefit of community oncologists.

This manuscript provides a practical and easy to use consensus recommendation to community oncologists on how to use neoadjuvant chemotherapy in triple negative breast cancer patients.

The energy bands, density of states, charge density, Mulliken population, equation of state and elastic properties of α -CdP _2 have been studied. Exchange correlation functional PBEsol is utilized in this study. The optimized equilibrium lattice parameters of the conventional cell have been obtained. The present investigation indicates the existence of an indirect band gap of 1.76 eV in α -CdP _2 crystal. Elastic calculations show the mechanical stability of the alpha phase of CdP _2 crystal. This work provides an analysis of directional Young’s modulus and linear compressibility for α -CdP _2 . The study of the elastic anisotropy parameters shows that the alpha phase has a definite elastic anisotropy. The calculated Debye temperature of α -CdP _2 is 288.1 K.

ABSTRACT Deinococcus radiodurans, a highly radioresistant bacterium, does not show LexA-dependent regulation of recA expression in response to DNA damage. On the other hand, phosphorylation of DNA repair proteins such as PprA and RecA by a DNA damage-responsive Ser/Thr protein kinase (STPK) (RqkA) could improve their DNA metabolic activities as well as their roles in the radioresistance of D. radiodurans. Here we report RqkA-mediated phosphorylation of cell division proteins FtsZ and FtsA in vitro and in surrogate Escherichia coli bacteria expressing RqkA. Mass spectrometric analysis mapped serine 235 and serine 335 in FtsZ and threonine 272, serine 370, and serine 386 in FtsA as potential phosphorylation sites. Although the levels of FtsZ did not change during postirradiation recovery (PIR), phosphorylation of both FtsZ and FtsA showed a kinetic change during PIR. However, in an rqkA mutant of D. radiodurans, though FtsZ underwent phosphorylation, no kinetic change in phosphorylation was observed. Further, RqkA adversely affected FtsA interaction with FtsZ, and phosphorylated FtsZ showed higher GTPase activity than unphosphorylated FtsZ. These results suggest that both FtsZ and FtsA are phosphoproteins in D. radiodurans. The increased phosphorylation of FtsZ in response to radiation damage in the wild-type strain but not in an rqkA mutant seems to be regulating the functional interaction of FtsZ with FtsA. For the first time, we demonstrate the role of a DNA damage-responsive STPK (RqkA) in the regulation of functional interaction of cell division proteins in this bacterium. IMPORTANCE The LexA/RecA-type SOS response is the only characterized mechanism of DNA damage response in bacteria. It regulates cell cycle by attenuating the functions of cell division protein FtsZ and inducing the expression of DNA repair proteins. There are bacteria, including Deinococcus radiodurans, that do not show this classical SOS response. D. radiodurans is known for its extraordinary resistance to gamma radiation, and a DNA damage-responsive Ser/Thr protein kinase (RqkA) has been characterized for its role in radioresistance. RqkA phosphorylates a large number of proteins in solution. The phosphorylation of RecA and PprA by RqkA enhanced their activities. FtsZ phosphorylation is inducible by gamma radiation in wild-type D. radiodurans but not in an rqkA mutant. Phosphorylation affected the interaction of FtsZ and FtsA in this bacterium. This study, therefore, brought forth some findings that might lead to the discovery of a new mechanism regulating the bacterial cell cycle in response to DNA damage.

Crop biofortification is a cost-effective and sustainable agricultural strategy to reduce micronutrient malnutrition arising from iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) deficiencies. A large number of hybrids and open-pollinated varieties (OPVs) of pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] have been released and/or commercialized in India. Eighteen OPVs and 15 high-Fe candidate hybrids were evaluated in multi-location trials for Fe and Zn density to identify those with high density of these micronutrients. The Fe density in OPVs varied from 42 mg/kg to 67 mg/kg, and Zn density from 37 mg/kg to 52 mg/kg with ICTP 8203 having the highest Fe density (67 mg/kg) followed by ICMV 221 (61 mg/kg) and AIMP 92901 (56 mg/kg). While ICTP 8203 had also the highest level of Zn density (52 mg/kg), ICMV 221 and AIMP 92901 had 45-46 mg/kg Zn density. The Fe density in hybrids varied from 46 mg/kg to 56 mg/kg and Zn density from 37 mg/kg to 44 mg/kg. Four hybrids, viz. Ajeet 38, Proagro XL 51, PAC 903 and 86M86 had the highest Fe density of 55-56 mg/kg and 39-41 mg/kg Zn density. The six commercial cultivars (2 OPVs and 4 hybrids) identified in this study with high Fe and Zn densities can be undertaken for expanded cultivation in their recommended ecologies to specifically address the Fe and Zn deficiencies in India. This study also enabled to re-define base line for Fe density at 42 mg/kg for hybrids, the most dominant cultivar type grown in India.