Effects of endometriosis on sleep quality of women: Does life style factor make a difference?

Background: This study aimed to compare the lifestyle factors and SQ between women with and without endometriosis. Also in this essay, the influence of food intake, socio-demographic and clinical characteristics on sleep quality of women with endometriosis was determined. Methods: Of the 156 infertile women approached for the study, 78 women had endometriosis and 78 were included in the control group. At first, each participant completed a checklist including questions about demographics, physical activity, reproductive and menstrual status. SQ was assessed by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Dietary data were collected using a validated 147-item semi-quantitative FFQ. Results: Irregular menstrual status, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhea, pelvic pain, history of abortion, family history of endometriosis were associated with endometriosis risk (P < 0.05). In women with physical activity more than 3 h per week, high consumption of the dairy product, and fruit endometriosis is less common (P < 0.05). The total PSQI score, and the scores for subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep disturbance domains were significantly different between the two groups (P < 0.05). In women with endometriosis, poor SQ was associated with dysmenorrhea, pelvic pain, dyspareunia, physical activity, and low consumption of the dairy product, fruit, and nut (p < 0.05). Conclusion: In endometriosis women, SQ was lower than healthy individuals. Lifestyle factors can effect on SQ of these patients. © 2020 The Author(s)

Effect of Glycine Betaine Nanocomposite Coated with Chitosan and Moderate Salinity Stress on In vitro Microtuberization of Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) cv. Agria

Introduction Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is an important food and cash crop having the first rank in the world from non grain crops to ensure food security. The tubers produced through the conventional propagation are characterized by low multiplication rate and susceptibility to pathogens. Microtubers are an ideal propagating material for producing high quality seed potatoes. Nowadays, the production, application, and biological risk assessment of nano-scaled products have attracted global concerns in various fields such as agricultural, biotechnological, medicinal, and plant sciences. Chitosan, a biocompatible polymer, has been widely utilized to improve the production of nano-chemicals, thereby improving crop growth, productivity, and immunity. Nanotechnology plays an important role in modern agriculture to address global challenges such as climate change, severity of plant diseases and the limited availability of important plant nutrients. Polymer-based nano-formulations have recently received the greatest attention with the key objectives of developing less harmful, plant growth promoting and protective agents of biodegradable and natural origin. Use of chitosan-based nanoparticles in agriculture field is still in a budding phase. Significant outcomes have been reported in in vitro and a few in vivo studies in plant growth and protection by chitosan-based nanomaterials.   Materials and Methods MS medium containing 80 g of sucrose, containing glycine betaine at concentrations of 20 and 40 mg/l, chitosan at a concentration of 240 mg/l, glycine betaine 20 and chitosan 240 mg/l, glycine betaine 40 and chitosan 240 mg/l, 120 mg/l, glycine betaine nanocomposite coated with chitosan 120 and 240 mg/l and control treatment, as well as nonsalinity treatments with the same compounds and concentrations mentioned for salinity were cultured. The study was performed in randomized complete block design with three replications and sixteen treatment. Glycine betaine nanocomposite coated with chitosan were prepared at Maragheh University as follows. Chitosan, glycine betaine, and triphosphate are major consumables. First, chitosan was dissolved well with acetic acid under the influence of temperature. Then, a certain amount of glycine betaine was dissolved in distilled water and added to the chitosan. Tri-polyphosphate (TPP) was dissolved in distilled water at a certain volume ratio and added dropwise to the mixture of chitosan and glycine betaine. The precipitate obtained under the freeze-drying process lead to the preparation of its powder.     Results and Discussion According to the comparison of the means, treatment of glycine betaine coated with chitosan nanocomposite at a concentration of 120 mg/l produced the highest number of microtuber during the experiment from the first month to the final month. The nanocomposite was more capable of improving growth and biomass than the bare ZnONPs in pepper. The application of the nanocomposite increased the concentration of chlorophylls (51%), carotenoids (70%), proline (2-fold), and proteins (about 2- fold). The supplementation of culture medium with the nanomaterials upregulated enzymatic antioxidant biomarkers (catalase and peroxidase) (Asgari-targhi et al., 2021). The highest mean microtuber weight was related to the nanocomposite treatment of 120 mg/l with a weight of 29 mg. In the microtuber diameter, this treatment had the highest value. The results of analysis of variance in Table 1 indicate that the effect of moderate salinity and the interaction of moderate salinity and nanocomposite treatments are not significant and the effect of experimental treatments is significant at the level of 5% probability. Due to the fact that the most important trait in the potato microtuberization is microtuber yield, so in the experiment, the highest microtuber yield was earned nanocomposite treatment with 131 mg and the lowest in control treatment with 87 mg. It seems that by using stress-reducing compounds such as glycine betaine and chitosan and nanocomposites, these compounds increase the amount of genes responsible for the formation of microtuber, and as a result, increasing the proteins involved in stresses induce more microtuberization. Also, nanocomposite materials, more assimilated materials may be transferred from the roots to microtuberization processes.   Conclusion  The microtuber produced in the glycine betaine coated with chitosan nanocomposite treatment produced the highest number of microtubers in the first, second, third, and final months. In treatments with moderate salinity in the first, second, third and final months, the number of microtuber and eyes and sprouted microtubers had the highest amount compared to the treatment without moderate salinity. Also, plants treated with glycine betaine voated with chitosan nanocomposite in the microtuber trate showed a greater effect than chitosan and glycine betaine with chitosan. According to the findings of this study, it seems that the use of nanocomposite materials in increasing the microtuber and reducing the vegetative growth of potato shoots has been made in Agria cultivar

RTLola Cleared for Take-Off: Monitoring Autonomous Aircraft

The autonomous control of unmanned aircraft is a highly safety-critical domain with great economic potential in a wide range of application areas, including logistics, agriculture, civil engineering, and disaster recovery. We report on the development of a dynamic monitoring framework for the DLR ARTIS (Autonomous Rotorcraft Testbed for Intelligent Systems) family of unmanned aircraft based on the formal specification language RTLola. RTLola is a stream-based specification language for real-time properties. An RTLola specification of hazardous situations and system failures is statically analyzed in terms of consistency and resource usage and then automatically translated into an FPGA-based monitor. Our approach leads to highly efficient, parallelized monitors with formal guarantees on the noninterference of the monitor with the normal operation of the autonomous system

Comparison of dietary micronutrient intake in PCOS patients with and without metabolic syndrome

Background: Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder in reproductive-age women. It is one of the risk factors of metabolic syndrome (MetS). These two syndromes have an inflammatory etiologic foundation along with oxidative stress. The present study aimed to compare the dietary intake of antioxidant micronutrients in PCOS women with and without MetS. Materials and methods: Overall, 42 participants eligible for this nested case control study were selected by the convenience sampling method. The case group included 14 PCOS patients with MetS and the control group included 28 PCOS patients without MetS. The dietary intake assessment of selenium, chromium, zinc, carotenoids, vitamin D and vitamin E was carried out by a 147-item Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). PCOS and MetS were diagnosed using the Rotterdam criteria and NCEP ATP III, respectively. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS16 software, T-test and Mann Whitney. Significant P-value was considered 0.05. Results: Dietary intake of antioxidant micronutrients (selenium, zinc, chromium, carotenoids and vitamin E) was significantly lower in the PCOS women with MetS than in the control group (P < 0.05). Conclusion: Since the PCOS patients without MetS had more intake of the aforementioned micronutrients than those with MetS, it is assumed that the dietary intake of these nutrients could probably have a protective effect on MetS. © 2021, The Author(s)

MAC and baseband processors for RF-MIMO WLAN

The article describes hardware solutions for the IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) layer and IEEE 802.11a digital baseband in an RF-MIMO WLAN transceiver that performs the signal combining in the analogue domain. Architecture and implementation details of the MAC processor including a hardware accelerator and a 16-bit MACphysical layer (PHY) interface are presented. The proposed hardware solution is tested and verified using a PHY link emulator. Architecture, design, implementation, and test of a reconfigurable digital baseband processor are described too. Description includes the baseband algorithms (the main blocks being MIMO channel estimation and Tx-Rx analogue beamforming), their FPGA-based implementation, baseband printed-circuit-board, and real-time test

ARMADA Middleware and Communication Services

Real-time embedded systems have evolved during the past several decades from small custom-designed digital hardware to large distributed processing systems. As these systems become more complex, their interoperability, evolvability and cost-effectiveness requirements motivate the use of commercial-off-the-shelf components. This raises the challenge of constructing dependable and predictable real-time services for application developers on top of the inexpensive hardware and software components which has minimal support for timeliness and dependability guarantees. We are addressing this challenge in the ARMADA project.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48061/1/11241_2004_Article_204024.pd

Mobile Consumer Behavior in Fashion m-Retail: An Eye Tracking Study to Understand Gender Differences

© 2020 ACM. With exponential adoption of mobile devices, consumers increasingly use them for shopping. There is a need to understand the gender differences in mobile consumer behavior. This study used mobile eye tracking technology and mixed-method approach to analyze and compare how male and female mobile fashion consumers browse and shop on smartphones. Mobile eye tracking glasses recorded fashion consumers' shopping experiences using smartphones for browsing and shopping on the actual fashion retailer's website. 14 participants successfully completed this study, half of them were males and half females. Two different data analysis approaches were employed, namely a novel framework of the shopping journey, and semantic gaze mapping with 31 Areas of Interest (AOI) representing the elements of the shopping journey. The results showed that male and female users exhibited significantly different behavior patterns, which have implications for mobile website design and fashion m-retail. The shopping journey map framework proves useful for further application in market research