Active Segregation Dynamics in the Living Cell

In this paper, we bring together our efforts in identifying and understanding nonequilibrium phase segregation driven by active processes in the living cell, with special focus on the segregation of cell membrane components driven by active contractile stresses arising from cortical actomyosin. This also has implications for active segregation dynamics in membraneless regions within the cytoplasm and nucleus (3d). We formulate an active version of the Flory-Huggins theory that incorporates a contribution from fluctuating active stresses. Apart from knitting together some of our past theoretical work in a comprehensive narrative, we highlight some new results, and establish a correspondence with recent studies on Active Model B/B+. We point to the many unusual aspects of the dynamics of active phase segregation, such as (i) anomalous growth dynamics, (ii) coarsening accompanied by propulsion and coalescence of domains that exhibit nonreciprocal effects, (iii) segregation into mesoscale domains, (iv) emergence of a nonequilibrium phase segregated steady state characterised by strong macroscopic fluctuations (fluctuation dominated phase ordering (FDPO)), and (v) mesoscale segregation even above the equilibrium Tc. Apart from its implications for actively driven segregation of binary fluids, these ideas are at the heart of an Active Emulsion description of the lateral organisation of molecules on the plasma membrane of living cells, whose full molecular elaboration appears elsewhere

CONTROLLED-POROSITY OSMOTIC PUMP TABLETS-AN OVERVIEW

Conventional drug delivery systems have little control over their drug release and almost no control over the effective concentration at the target site. This kind of dosing pattern may result in constantly changing, unpredictable plasma concentrations. Drugs can be delivered in a controlled pattern over a long period of time by the process of osmosis. Osmotic devices are the most promising strategy based systems for controlled drug delivery. They are the most reliable controlled drug delivery systems and could be employed as oral drug delivery systems. The present review is concerned with the study of drug release systems which are tablets coated with walls of controlled porosity. When these systems are exposed to water, low levels of water soluble additive is leached from polymeric material i.e. semipermeable membrane and drug releases in a controlled manner over an extended period of time. Drug delivery from this system is not influenced by the different physiological factors within the gut lumen and the release characteristics can be predicted easily from the known properties of the drug and the dosage form. In this paper, various types of osmotically controlled drug delivery systems and the basic components of controlled porosity osmotic pump tablets have been discussed briefly

A Numerical Study of Penetration in Concrete Targets by Eroding Projectiles of Different Materials

Numerical simulations have been performed to examine the effect of three different eroding rod materials on the penetration in concrete targets. Same kinetic energy is delivered to concrete target using cylindrical rods of Aluminium, Iron, and Copper of identical size. Impact velocities have been varied to keep the kinetic energy the same. Penetration characteristics like centerline interface velocity, penetrator deceleration, plastic strain in the target, and energy partitioning during penetration have been studied for the three different penetrator materials. In all three cases, penetration proceeds nearly hydrodynamically. It is seen that even though the steady-state penetration ceases before reaching the hydrodynamic limit, the secondary penetration takes the total penetration beyond the hydrodynamic value. Plastic strain in the target material is a measure of damage beyond the crater produced by penetration. The lateral extent of plastic strain in target is more for Aluminium penetrator compared to the other two. Energy partitioning during penetration provides details of the rate at which energy is entering into the target. Kinetic energy delivered to the target during impact is partitioned into internal energy and kinetic energy of the target. Finally, the influence of target thickness on the extent of plastic strain has been studied. The result shows that Aluminium penetrators inflict maximum damage to targets of finite thickness

PSoC Based Instrumentation for H2 Sensor in the Context of Fast Breeder Reactors

To monitor very low levels of hydrogen in cover gas plenum of fast breeder reactors, thin film sensors based on tin oxide doped with palladium are developed in IGCAR. The sensor patterns are integrated on a miniature alumina substrate and necessary electrical leads are incorporated in it. The conductivity of the sensor varies with H2 concentration. The useful range of the sensor is 5 ppm to 80 ppm and the base line resistance of the sensor is around 2.5MΩ. This paper gives an outline of the PSoC based electronics developed to measure the H2 concentration and associated signal processing. Low component count and feasibility of locating the sensor conditioning components remotely are emphasized in the design. The laboratory studies on the linearity performance of the various blocks of the system are discussed

Shock Wave Behaviour of Polymeric Materials for Detonation Waveshapers

This paper discusses the experimental determination of explosive shock attenuation parameters of four different polymers viz., Teflon, Phenol formaldehyde, Polyethylene foam and Polypropylene foam. These polymers are candidate materials for waveshapers in shaped charge warheads. Cylindrical specimens of the polymer materials were subjected to explosive shock loading by the detonation of RDX:Wax (95:5). Shock arrival time was measured using piezo-wafers positioned at known spatial intervals in the specimens. Initial shock velocity, stabilised shock velocity and attenuation constant were determined. These parameters are essential for the design of waveshapers. Foams have better shock attenuating properties compared to solids due to their cellular structure. Polypropylene foam has the highest shock attenuating characteristic among the four materials studied

MAXILLARY INFLAMMATORY MYOFIBROBLASTIC TUMOR

Inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor (IMT) is a benign disorder of locally aggressive nature. It is an indolent tumor with a slowly progressive course and varied manifestation presenting with a wide range of clinical manifestations depending on the site of origin. We present a case of IMT in the maxillary sinus presenting with hemifacial pain, oculomotor palsy and ptosis which was successfully treated with endoscopic local excision and oral steroid therapy.Keywords: Plasma cell granuloma, Maxillary pseudotumor, Maxillectomy, Steroid therapy, Radiotherapy

Learning Interpretable Style Embeddings via Prompting LLMs

Style representation learning builds content-independent representations of author style in text. Stylometry, the analysis of style in text, is often performed by expert forensic linguists and no large dataset of stylometric annotations exists for training. Current style representation learning uses neural methods to disentangle style from content to create style vectors, however, these approaches result in uninterpretable representations, complicating their usage in downstream applications like authorship attribution where auditing and explainability is critical. In this work, we use prompting to perform stylometry on a large number of texts to create a synthetic dataset and train human-interpretable style representations we call LISA embeddings. We release our synthetic stylometry dataset and our interpretable style models as resources