Evaluation of androgenic activity of allium cepa on spermatogenesis in the rat

Allium cepa (onion) has a beneficial effect on disease treatment worldwide and has been used since ancient times as a medicinal and food source. Recently several reports have shown that onion has high antioxidant activity. As antioxidants have an essential effect on sperm health parameters, we investigated the effect of the fresh juice of onion bulbs on the spermatogenesis cycle in rats. Wistar male rats (n = 30) were allocated into 3 groups, control (n = 10) and two test groups (each of 10). The animals in the test groups were subdivided into groups of 2 that received fresh onion juice equivalent to 0.5 and 1 g/rat/ /day of fresh onion. The fresh onion juice was administered by gavage for 20 consecutive days. The animals were kept in standard conditions. On the twentieth day, the testes of rats in all groups were removed and sperm was collected from the epididymis and was prepared for analysis. Serum total testosterone significantly increased in all the test groups (p < 0.05), and levels of LH significantly increased only in the group that received the high dose of fresh onion juice (p < 0.05), but the level of FSH did not differ between the experimental and control groups. The percentage of sperm viability and motility in both test groups significantly increased (p < 0.05), but the sperm concentration significantly increased only in the group that received the high dose of freshly extracted onion juice (p < 0.05). It was evident that there was no difference on sperm morphology and testis weight in test groups compared to the control group. In our study, freshly prepared onion juice significantly affected the sperm number, percentage of viability, and motility; it seems that using 4 g/kg of freshly prepared onion juice is effective in sperm health parameters

The effects of an electromagnetic field on the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules of the rat: a light and transmission electron microscope study

Human beings are unavoidably exposed to ambient electromagnetic fields (EMF) generated from various electrical devices and from power transmission lines. Controversy exists about the effects of EMF on various organs. One of the critical issues is that EMF may adversely affect the reproductive system. In order to examine this 30 rat pups were exposed to 50 Hz EMF (non-ionising radiation) during in utero development (approximately 3 weeks) and postnatal life (5 weeks). Groups of exposed rats were subsequently left in an environment free of EMF in order to observe recovery, if any, from the changes induced by EMF on the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules. The materials were processed and observed under a light and a transmission electron microscope. In the experimental rats boundary tissue was found disrupted at various layers. This tissue showed infoldings, which were perhaps due to the loss of collagen and reticular fibrils from the inner and outer non-cellular layers. The outer non-cellular layer, which was thinner than that of the control, was stripped away from the myoid cell layer in multiple regions, giving a &#8220;blister-like&#8221; appearance. The myoid cells showed fewer polyribosomes, pinocytotic vesicles and glycogen granules. Most mitochondria were found to lack cristae. The connections between individual myoid cells were apparently lost. There were signs of recovery in the boundary tissue following withdrawal from EMF exposure. These results suggest that EMF exposure may cause profound changes in the boundary tissue of the seminiferous tubules. Therefore exposure to EMF may result in pathological changes that lead to subfertility and infertility

Investigating the Effect of Mechanical Activation Parameters on Structural Changes and Leaching Rate of Molybdenite Concentrate

AbstractIn this research, mechanical activation (MA) was employed for leaching rate improvement of molybdenite concentrate in nitric acid media. These experiments were performed in two groups: with and without aluminum oxide (alumina). A full factorial design was used for each group of experiments. Leaching rate increment up to 5 times was observed only in 2hours activation procedure. XRD analysis demonstrated structural disordering in activated MoS2. TEM images showed that particle size has been reduced to nanoscale. The initial powder size was 80% between 2-44μm and dropped to about 10nm and 140nm in MA experiments with and without alumina, respectively. This size reduction would be the main reason of leaching rate enhancement which is more achievable in MA in presence of alumina. The results demonstrate that alumina has a motivating effect in activation procedure to achieve a nanostructure molybdenite. Analysis of variance revealed milling speed is the main parameter in MA without alumina, while, ball to powder ratio is the most important factor in MA procedure in presence of alumina on leaching rate

A study on the dependence of structure of multi-walled carbon nanotubes on acid treatment

In the current research, the role of both concentrated nitric acid and ultrasound waves on oxidation of multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs) was studied. The functionalized MWCNTs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), thermogravimetric analyzer, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) techniques. It was found that desirable modifications to MWNTs occurred after acid treatment. Carboxylic acid groups were appeared on the side surfaces of MWNTs. FTIR presented the formation of oxygen-containing groups such as C=O and COOH after modification by concentrated nitric acid. The TEM images showed that the aspect ratio of opened MWCNTs was controlled by both ultrasonic waves and acid treatment time. It was also found that the exposure of about 4 h in nitric acid led to the highest removal of the impurities with the least destructive effect

A wandering spleen presenting as a pelvic mass: case report and review of the literature

Wandering spleens are rare clinical entities found more commonly in females. We report a young female patient found to harbour a pelvic spleen. The literature regarding this rare ectopia is reviewed. The wandering spleen should be considered in the differential diagnosis of pelvic masses

A rare variation of the vertebral artery

Variations of the vertebrobasilar arterial complex are important with regard to their potential clinical impact. We present an unusual case of the vertebral artery, in which the left vertebral artery in its ascent in the neck through the transverse foramina passed posteriorly between the transverse processes of C3 and C4 and supplied the posterior muscles of the neck without continuing intracranially. Albeit speculatively, we hypothesise that the variation of the vertebral artery reported here was caused by degeneration of the proximal portion of the left postcostal longitudinal anastomosis (i.e. C1 and C2 intersegmental arteries) in the context of a persistent third cervical intersegmental artery. Our case is unique in that the left vertebral artery terminated extracranially. Knowledge of the variations of the vertebrobasilar arterial complex is important for surgeons operating at the skull base, craniocervical junction, and cervical region, and for clinicians interpreting the imaging of this region

Recycled cobalt from spent Li-ion batteries as a superhydrophobic coating for corrosion protection of plain carbon steel

A new recycling and film formation scheme is developed for spent Li-ion batteries, which involves the combination of ascorbic-assisted sulfuric leaching and electrodeposition to fabricate a corrosion resistance superhydrophobic coating. The idea behind the simultaneous use of sulfuric and ascorbic is to benefit from the double effect of ascorbic acid, as a leaching reducing agent and as morphological modifier during electrodeposition. Quantum chemical calculations based on the density functional theory are performed to explain the cobalt-ascorbate complexation during the electrocristalization. The optimum parameters for the leaching step are directly utilized in the preparation of an electrolyte for the electrodeposition process, to fabricate a superhydrophobic film with a contact angle of > 150\ub0 on plain carbon steel. The potentiodynamic polarization measurments in 3.5 wt % NaCl showed that boric-pulsed electrodeposited cobalt film has 20-times lower corrosion current density and higher corrosion potential than those on the non-coated substrate

DataDAM: Efficient Dataset Distillation with Attention Matching

Researchers have long tried to minimize training costs in deep learning while maintaining strong generalization across diverse datasets. Emerging research on dataset distillation aims to reduce training costs by creating a small synthetic set that contains the information of a larger real dataset and ultimately achieves test accuracy equivalent to a model trained on the whole dataset. Unfortunately, the synthetic data generated by previous methods are not guaranteed to distribute and discriminate as well as the original training data, and they incur significant computational costs. Despite promising results, there still exists a significant performance gap between models trained on condensed synthetic sets and those trained on the whole dataset. In this paper, we address these challenges using efficient Dataset Distillation with Attention Matching (DataDAM), achieving state-of-the-art performance while reducing training costs. Specifically, we learn synthetic images by matching the spatial attention maps of real and synthetic data generated by different layers within a family of randomly initialized neural networks. Our method outperforms the prior methods on several datasets, including CIFAR10/100, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-1K, and subsets of ImageNet-1K across most of the settings, and achieves improvements of up to 6.5% and 4.1% on CIFAR100 and ImageNet-1K, respectively. We also show that our high-quality distilled images have practical benefits for downstream applications, such as continual learning and neural architecture search.Comment: Accepted in International Conference in Computer Vision (ICCV) 202

Association between nucleotide mutation of eNOS gene and serum level of vessel expansion factor (VEF) in non-smoker patients with vascular heart disease

Various mutation on endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOs) gene cause reduced production of NO, the expansion factor (VEF) and may accelerate the process of atherosclerosis. The study was designed to investigate the frequency of T-786C polymorphism of the gene or nucleotide mutation of eNOS gene in patients suffering from vascular heart disease (VHD) or coronary artery disease (CAD) in North West of Iran. 120 subjects including 60 patients with angiographically diagnosed CAD and 60 age and sex matched CAD-free subjects as control were studied. The levels of Nitric oxide in the samples were measured with the Griess method. The genotype studies were carried out using allele specific PCR. Comparing with the control reduced levels of NO were noticed in the patient group (P&lt;0.05) and significantly high frequency of eNOs -786C genotype was found in CAD patients (P&lt;0.05). The low levels of NO and increased frequency of T-786C polymorphism might be a risk factor in progression of coronary artery disease in the studied subjects.Keywords: Vascular heart disease, endothelial nitric oxide synthase gene, TC 786 SNP, vessel expansion factor (VEF), non-smokerAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(20), pp. 3023-302

Discontinuous Phase Transition in an Exactly Solvable One-Dimensional Creation-Annihilation System

An exactly solvable reaction-diffusion model consisting of first-class particles in the presence of a single second-class particle is introduced on a one-dimensional lattice with periodic boundary condition. The number of first-class particles can be changed due to creation and annihilation reactions. It is shown that the system undergoes a discontinuous phase transition in contrast to the case where the density of the second-class particles is finite and the phase transition is continuous.Comment: Revised, 8 pages, 1 EPS figure. Accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: theory and experimen