Fluorescent artificial receptor-based membrane assay (FARMA) for spatiotemporally resolved monitoring of biomembrane permeability

The spatiotemporally resolved monitoring of membrane translocation, e.g., of drugs or toxins, has been a long-standing goal. Herein, we introduce the fluorescent artificial receptor-based membrane assay (FARMA), a facile, label-free method. With FARMA, the permeation of more than hundred organic compounds (drugs, toxins, pesticides, neurotransmitters, peptides, etc.) through vesicular phospholipid bilayer membranes has been monitored in real time (µs-h time scale) and with high sensitivity (nM-µM concentration), affording permeability coefficients across an exceptionally large range from 10$^{-9}$–10$^{-3}$ cm s$^{-1}$. From a fundamental point of view, FARMA constitutes a powerful tool to assess structure-permeability relationships and to test biophysical models for membrane passage. From an applied perspective, FARMA can be extended to high-throughput screening by adaption of the microplate reader format, to spatial monitoring of membrane permeation by microscopy imaging, and to the compartmentalized monitoring of enzymatic activity

An innovative design of actuation mechanism for active seat suspension of an off-road vehicle

In recent years human-machine interaction attracts scientific community attention because of human quality and health issues. Driver seat should be designed so that it would ensure occupational health as well as increase work efficiency. The aim of this research is to maintain seat height at constant level with regard to chassis excitation at different levels of frequency and amplitude by means of new design of pneumatic actuation circuit. Sinusoidal function was used for base vibration since almost all of excitation functions can be derived from it. System response shows in low frequency/high amplitude and high frequency/low amplitude chassis vibration, transmissibility decreased about 60% and 40% compared to solid suspension respectivel

EVALUATING PUBLIC URBAN GREEN SPACES: A COMPOSITE GREEN SPACE INDEX FOR MEASURING ACCESSIBILITY AND SPATIAL QUALITY

Greenspaces (GSs) available to the public for recreational, environmental, and aesthetic purposes are termed Public Urban Green Spaces (PUGS). Accessibility to PUGS is one of the main pre-requisite for their frequent use. With rising urbanization and inequitable distribution of GSs, a significant portion of the population remains inaccessible to the benefits provided by PUGS. Therefore, it is essential to have tools to evaluate these GSs. This study evaluates the accessibility and spatial quality of various hierarchies of PUGS using GIS-based analysis in Dehradun, India. Accessibility is assessed using network analysis, aesthetics is determined by the presence of bird population and waterbody, the surface index is determined based on NDVI thresholding, and affordability, and spaciousness are computed based on survey and GIS data. The indices are combined to form a composite green space index (CGSI) using analytical hierarchy process. CGSI shows that most of the PUGS in Dehradun have relatively poor accessibility and quality. As per World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines for providing a minimum of 9m2 of GS for each person, Dehradun lies way behind, providing 2.02m2/person. The lower hierarchy PUGS, notably totlots, which are crucial for young children’s physical, mental, and cognitive development, is quite limited. On the contrary, city parks are well distributed with moderate to good accessibility and quality. CGSI is a comprehensive index encompassing different characteristics of GSs and serves as a valuable tool for setting goals, prioritizing investments, identifying areas in need of improvement, and potential locations for future GS development

40-Years of Lake Urmia Restoration Research: Synthesis and Next Steps

Lake Urmia’s desiccation and recent nascent recovery have garnered international and Iranian attention. Lake restoration at this scale requires integration across many sciences, technology, engineering, management, and governance topics. Here, we synthesized 544 peer-reviewed articles on Lake Urmia indexed in the Scopus database, answered nine restoration questions of scientific and popular interest, and recommended next steps for consequential lake restoration. We find: (1) research on diverse topics is fragmented and needs more integration. (2) Ecological and limnological studies have mostly focused on salinity, Artemia, and Flamingos. (3) Dust from the dry lakebed and nearby regions has negatively impacted human health. (4) Most research seeks to restore the lake to a single, uniform level of 1274.1 m thought to recover Artemia. (5) The lake’s north and south arms have different chemical and physical properties but researchers disagree on how newly breaching the causeway that separates the arms will impact salinities, evaporation, and ecosystems. (6) Expanding irrigated agriculture, dam construction, and mismanagement had a larger impact on lake decline than temperature increases and precipitation decreases. (7) The Iranian government’s 5-year recovery effort helped raise lake level about 1 m and immobilize lakebed dust. (8) Only one study publicly shared data, and only three studies described engagement with stakeholders or managers. (9) Numerous suggestions to improve economic conditions, work with farmers, or change farmer-government processes require varying effort and most still require implementation. We see next steps for lake recovery to monitor ungauged or poorly characterized water flows throughout the basin; develop alternative livelihoods beyond agriculture; describe the entire food web that supports migratory birds; manage for diverse ecosystem objectives and their associated lake levels; adapt basin water management to available water and lake evaporation; build capacity to share data, models, and code; train researchers in data-sharing tools and best practices; and better connect research topics, researchers, stakeholders, and managers. All of our findings and next steps encourage Lake Urmia managers to extend restoration efforts beyond five years and cultivate more public support

How Can Researchers and Managers Better Collaborate on Lake Urmia Restoration?

The large decline in Lake Urmia\u27s level since 1995 has prompted a correspondingly large increase in research to help inform lake restoration. Here we synthesize results from 451 English-language articles (Figure 1) to answer four lake restoration questions of interest to the public and lake managers. We ask: 1) What lake restoration levels were considered besides the ecological level of 1274.1 m? 2) How has the causeway affected lake conditions? 3) Do we know enough about lake limnology and ecology to facilitate recovery? And 4) what to learn from Great Salt Lake management? We seek to share these findings with Lake Urmia managers, solicit feedback, and identify next steps for restoration and collaborative work

Pregnancy Outcome in Women Having Oligohydramnios in Gandaki Medical College Teaching Hospital, Pokhara, Nepal

Background: Amniotic fluid index is one of the most commonly used methods of amniotic fluid volume assessment and is a predictor of adverse maternal and perinatal outcome. Objectives: To compare the maternal and perinatal outcome in women with singleton term pregnancies having amniotic fluid index (AFI) ≤5 cm to those having AFI ≥5 to 20 cm. Methods: This is a prospective, case-control study which was conducted at Gandaki Medical College Teaching Hospital over a period of one year from July 2017 to July 2018. It included 60 pregnant women at term pregnancy with amniotic fluid index ≤5 cm. The control group included 60 pregnant women at term pregnancy with amniotic fluid index ≥5 cm. The two groups were compared. Statistical analysis was done using the Chi-square test to calculate the P- value. Results: There was a significantly higher incidence of overall cesarean rates due to fetal distress, low birth weight babies and adverse neonatal outcome like 5 minute Apgar score ≤7, neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admission rates, and meconium aspiration syndrome in the group with oligohydramnios as compared to the group with normal liquor volume. Conclusion: Oligohydramnios adversely affects the perinatal outcome. However a favorable outcome can be expected by good antenatal and intrapartum surveillance and neonatal care

Task-based Parallel Computation of the Density Matrix in Quantum-based Molecular Dynamics using Graph Partitioning

Quantum-based molecular dynamics (QMD) is a highly accurate and transferable method for material science simulations. However, the time scales and system sizes accessible to QMD are typically limited to picoseconds and a few hundred atoms. These constraints arise due to expensive self-consistent ground-state electronic structure calculations that can often scale cubically with the number of atoms. Linearly scaling methods depend on computing the density matrix P from the Hamiltonian matrix H by exploiting the sparsity in both matrices. The second-order spectral projection (SP2) algorithm is an O(N) algorithm that computes P with a sequence of 40-50 matrix-matrix multiplications. In this paper, we present task-based implementations of a recently developed data-parallel graph-based approach to the SP2 algorithm, G-SP2. We represent the density matrix P as an undirected graph and use graph partitioning techniques to divide the computation into smaller independent tasks. The partitions thus obtained are generally not of equal size and give rise to undesirable load imbalances in standard MPI-based implementations. This load-balancing challenge can be mitigated by dynamically scheduling parallel computations at runtime using task-based programming models. We develop task-based implementations of the data-parallel G-SP2 algorithm using both Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC) as well as the Charm++ programming model and evaluate these implementations for future use. Scaling and performance results of our implementations are investigated for representative segments of QMD simulations for solvated protein systems containing more than 10,000 atoms