Scientific basis of fat requirement for Indians and recent trends in CVD

Dietary fats have several roles such as provision of metabolic energy, fat soluble vitamins and essential fatty acids (linoleic, LA and ?-linolenic, ALNA). Fats improve texture and palatability and have a satiety role. LA and ALNA and their long-chain polyunstaturated fatty acids (LC n-6 PUFA and LC n-3 PUFA respectively) are important structural membrane components and therefore essential for formation of new tissues. LC n-3 PUFA have specific role in vision and nervous system. Both n-6 and n-3 PUFA are essential for fetal and early infant growth and development and nervous tissue development.  The absolute levels and ratio of n-6 and n-3 PUFA in membrane affect a wide range of physiological processes either directly or through eicosanoids. The individual components of fats affect the risk of diet - related chronic diseases through the atherogenic effects of plasma lipids, insulin resistance, thrombosis, endothelial dysfunction as well as pathways of inflammation. The chain length/geometric configuration of double bonds and position of saturated (SFA), mono unsaturated (MUFA) or PUFA on glycerol backbone (triglyceride structure) modify the nutritional and metabolic effects of dietary fats. The non-glyceride components present in the vegetable oils have hypocholesterolemic and antioxidant effects. Several lines of evidence have documented that restrictions in SFA and cholesterol, negligible intake of trans fatty acids (TFA) on the one hand and preference for more than one type of vegetable oil (to ensure adequate absolute intakes of LA, ALNA and their ratio), adding n-3 PUFA from fish or plant sources, and ensuring moderate intake of  total fat in  the diet  substantially reduces the risk of diet-related chronic diseases. Studies were done at National Institute of Nutrition  on intake of individual  fatty acids, the pro/anti-athero-thrombogenic effects of different types of visible fats in Indian adults, insulin sensitivity and the antioxidant properties of  unique non glyceride components of some of the  commonly consumed edible oils. From the data generated, the quantity and combination of visible fats, foods to be preferred so as to increase ‘healthy fats', foods to be avoided/restricted to reduce ‘unhealthy fats' have  been worked out. Ensuring optimal intake of fat (quantity and quality) throughout life-span may contribute to the widely prevalent nutrition and health problems in India (low birth weight, chronic energy deficiency and diet-related chronic diseases). The rapid increase in prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases including type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension worldwide possess an immense public health and medical challenge for the implementation of successful preventive and treatment strategies.  Insulin resistance is an important risk factor for type 2 diabetes and is often associated with other metabolic abnormalities and cardiovascular risk factors. Moreover it is also an important risk factor for cardiovascular diseases (CVD).  Obesity when associated with abdominal adiposity is an important determinant of insulin resistance and represents the most important risk factor for type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome.  The explanation for the explosion of the epidemic of chronic diseases involve changes in dietary habits and or / increasing the sedentary life style, since our genetic pool remained stable.  Poor control of the life style risk factors results in metabolic dysregulation, endothelial dysfunction and increased adiposity which in turn together lead to dyslipidemia, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, systemic inflammation, thrombosis and risk of arrhythmia (1).  The ultimate result is sub clinical and then clinically apparent CVD including coronary heart disease (CHD), cardiac arrhythmia, heart failure and stroke.  The best way of preventing chronic diseases is to take a balanced diet that does not provide excess calories along with regular physical activity.  Over the past few decades evidences that has accumulated suggests that both the quality and quantity of dietary fat is associated with pathogenesis of several diet-related chronic diseases (2)

Parental Involvement In The Schooling Process For Students’ Academic Success: A Case Study In The State Of Katsina, Nigeria

Kajian ini didorong oleh isu penglibatan ibu bapa dalam proses persekolahan kanak-kanak di Katsina yang seolah-olah diabaikan. This study was encouraged by the issue of parental involvement in the schooling process of Katsina children, which seems to be neglected

Cryogenic Treatments of Hot Work Tool Steel (56NiCrMoV7)

The main objective of this paper is to study the effect of Cryogenic treatment of hot work tool steel type (56NiCrMoV7) on the microstructure and mechanical properties. Three different temperature (-50°C,-100°C & -150°C) were selected at different soaking time(1hr,2hr & 3hr) respectively. All cryogenic treatments were adopted after hardening by air & oil respectively. It was concluded that the property enhancement for this tool steel can be attributed by conversion most of retained austenite to martensite accompanied with higher dislocations density that leads to the precipitation of fine carbide during the cryogenic treatment especially at the samples quenched by oil & treated at (- 150°C) with soaking 1h

A Pervasive Computational Intelligence based Cognitive Security Co-design Framework for Hype-connected Embedded Industrial IoT

The amplified connectivity of routine IoT entities can expose various security trajectories for cybercriminals to execute malevolent attacks. These dangers are even amplified by the source limitations and heterogeneity of low-budget IoT/IIoT nodes, which create existing multitude-centered and fixed perimeter-oriented security tools inappropriate for vibrant IoT settings. The offered emulation assessment exemplifies the remunerations of implementing context aware co-design oriented cognitive security method in assimilated IIoT settings and delivers exciting understandings in the strategy execution to drive forthcoming study. The innovative features of our system is in its capability to get by with irregular system connectivity as well as node limitations in terms of scares computational ability, limited buffer (at edge node), and finite energy. Based on real-time analytical data, projected scheme select the paramount probable end-to-end security system possibility that ties with an agreed set of node constraints. The paper achieves its goals by recognizing some gaps in the security explicit to node subclass that is vital to our system’s operations

Larvicidal, nematicidal, antifeedant and antifungal, antioxidant activities of Mentha spicata (Lamiaceae) root extracts

Purpose: To evaluate the larvicidal, nematicidal, antifeedant, and antifungal effects of 10 solvent extracts of Mentha spicata root.Methods: Ten solvent extracts were investigated for their total flavonoid and phenolic content and screened for larvicidal, nematicidal, antifeedant, and antifungal activities. The total phenolic content of the extracts was determined using the Folin–Ciocalteu method, while total flavonoid content was determined by aluminium chloride (AlCl3) colorimetric assay. Four solvents extracts were screened for antifungal activity against Aspergillus niger, Candida albicans, recultured Cryptococcus neoformans, and Microsporum audouinii using the agar diffusion method. The nematicidal activity of the compounds was evaluated against the juvenile Meloidogyne javanica organism, while larvicidal properties were evaluated against the urban mosquito Culex quinquefasciatus using a standard bioassay protocol. The antifeedant activity of marine acclimated Oreochromis mossambicus was used for evaluating ichthyotoxic potential.Results: The total flavonoid content in the extracts ranged from 18.5 to 83.4 mg/g, and the amount of free phenolic compounds ranged from 14.7 to 91.9 mg/g of extract powder. The water extract of these plants exhibited significant antioxidant activity and significant levels of phenolics and flavonoids. The water extract exhibited higher larvicidal (LD50 = 11.77 μg/mL), nematicidal (LD50 = 11.78 μg/mL), antifeedant (LD50 > 40 μg/mL), and antifungal activities (minimum inhibitory concentration: 16 μg/mL) against M. audouinii compared with the other extracts.Conclusion: These results show that the water extract of Mentha spicata may be used as a potential natural alternative source of nutritional and pharmaceutical ingredients.Keywords: Mentha spicata, Larvicidal, Nematicidal, Antifeedant and Antifungal activities, Nutritional supplement, Pharmaceutical ingredient

ZIGBEE-BASED SMART FALL DETECTION AND NOTIFICATION SYSTEM WITH WEARABLE SENSOR (e-SAFE)

Fall is one of the serious health issues among elderly population in Malaysia. In the event of a fall, a strong impact may be inflicted on the elderly causing severe injuries or even death. Another research by the National Institutes of Health found that 67% of elderly who fall and fail to seek help within 72 hours are unlikely to survive. Current Personal Emergency Respond System (PERS) often employs the use of a manual emergency button. However this approach may not be useful if the fall victim become unconscious or even not be able to move to reach the emergency button. In addition, such as this approach also requires more time and inadequate to notify and seek for immediate help. This paper attempts to design and implement a smart fall detection system for real time notification known as e-SAFE. This system will automatically detect a fall and notifies the incident instantly to internal and external correspondence. The e-SAFE equipped with a wearable accelerometer sensor, microcontroller, ZigBee transceiver module and Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) device. The in-house correspondence will be notifies though the ZigBee technology, meanwhile the external correspondence will be notified through GSM. Once a fall has been detected by e-SAFE system, a Short Message Service (SMS) and an E-mail will be sent to predefined contacts which is stored in the system. This system will provide a path toward independent living for the elderly while keeping them save

An Enhancement of RTS/CTS Control Handshake in CSMA/CA Based MAC Protocol for an Efficient Packet Delivery over Multihop Wireless Mesh Network (WMN)

The Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol uses a short request-to-send (RTS) and clear-to-send (CTS) control packets prior of actual data packet transmission. The function of the CSMA/CA based MAC protocol in wireless communication is to facilitate wireless nodes (i.e. laptop, PC, smart phones and etc) to access a wireless medium efficiently. Besides, it is also efficiently manage the wireless medium when more wireless nodes involving in transmission activity in the network. This protocol allows all wireless nodes in the network to communicate between each other without collision. Since collisions may only occurred on the RTS control packets thus it can reduce the actual data collision on the medium. The RTS/CTS control handshake provides better performance and reduce the duration of collision especially when long data packets are transmitted over wireless medium. However, even though the CSMA/CA based MAC protocol working effectively and provides better throughput performance over single hop communication but it performance degrade significantly when directly applied in multihop Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). The reason behind this poor performance is due to the inefficient packet delivery of CSMA/CA based MAC protocol in multihop network. The exchange of RTS and CTS signaling that required at each hop throughout the multihop network eventually will cause the large overheads and subsequently degrade network throughput. Therefore, in this paper, an enhancement of RTS/CTS handshake has been proposed in order reduces the signaling overheads and ultimately allows a smooth packet delivery in the multihop network without any collision. In this work, the multihop network performances are evaluated analytically in terms of throughput and overhead. It is proven that the new method of RTS/CTS handshake provides significant improvement in throughput and overhead

Alleviate exposed node issues in Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) using a novel approach of Concurrent Medium Access Control (C-MAC) protocol

The importance and high growth of the communication infrastructure is clearly stated under the Malaysia Economic Transformation Programme (ETP). The most popular technology that used to provide the internet service to public is the IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n based WiFi. However, the coverage provided by the WiFi technology is only limited up to certain range. In addition, the performance of the WiFi network also will become poorer and poorer as the number of users associate with that WiFi network increases. In order to address these issues, the best topology configuration known as mesh is proposed by wireless research community. This technology is also called as Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) and it became an emerging technology which is plays an important role in the next generation wireless communication. However, the implementation of IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol in WMN significantly degrades the network performance due to the presence of exposed node problem. The presence of exposed nodes in WMN caused waiting delay (prevent the surrounding neighboring nodes to involve in transmission activity for entire duration of ongoing transmission) and it is subsequently leads to poor throughput achievement. The significance of this research is to investigate the cause of exposed nodes that degrade the performance of WMN and proposed a novel protocol to solve it to provide better network performance and throughput

A review on various types of Software Defined Radios (SDRs) in radio communication

Software Defined Radio (SDR) promises to deliver a cost effective and flexible solution by implementing a wide variety of wireless protocols in software. The SDR became more popular in recent years because of its abilities to realize many applications without a lot of efforts in the integration of different component. This software based radio device allows engineers to add more features to the communication system and implement any number of different signal processing elements or protocols without changing the original system hardware and its architecture. It provides a customizable and portable communications platform for many applications, including the prototyping and realization of wireless protocols and their performances. It is also able to interface with a separate hardware module to communicate over a real channel. In this article we described and compared the various SDRs that currently has been using by the researchers to study the performance of wireless protocol. Among the SDRs that we focused in this article are USRP, SORA, Air blue, SODA, and WARP

Throughput Analysis of Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Real-Time Load Distribution in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

Wireless sensor network (WSNs) are self-organized systems that depend on highly distributed and scattered low cost tiny devices. These devices have some limitations such as processing capability, memory size, communication distance coverage and energy capabilities. In order to maximize the autonomy of individual nodes and indirectly the lifetime of the network, most of the research work is done on power saving techniques. Hence, we propose energy-aware load distribution technique that can provide an excellent data transfer of packets from source to destination via hop by hop basis. Therefore, by making use of the cross-layer interactions between the physical layer and the network layer thus leads to an improvement in energy efficiency of the entire network when compared with other protocols and it also improves the response time in case of network change