Fabrication of inhaled hybrid silver/ciprofloxacin nanoparticles with synergetic effect against Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Ciprofloxacin (CFX) is a fluroquinolone antibiotic used as a first line treatment against infections caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Streptococcus pneumonia that are commonly acquired by cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. However, no inhalation formulation is currently available for ciprofloxacin. Hybrid silica coated silver nanoparticles were prepared using Stöber reaction and the optimum ratio of chitosan and sodium tripolyphosphate was used to encapsulate CFX. Particle deposition was assessed in vitro using twin stage impinger while antimicrobial activity was evaluated based on the planktonic growth of P. aeruginosa as well as against P. aeruginosa sp biofilm formation. In vitro deposition results showed significant deposition in stage 2 using twin stage impinger (TSI) (∼70%). Compared to CFX, the formed hybrid nanoparticles were 3-4 folds more effective against inhibiting growth and biofilm formation by P. aeruginosa PAO1 and P. aeruginosa NCTC 10662

Fabrication of biopolymer based nanoparticles for the entrapment of chromium and iron supplements

The objective of this study was to encapsulate iron and chromium into novel nanoparticles formulated using chitosan (CS), dextran sulfate (DS) and whey protein isolate (WPI) for oral drug delivery. Empty and loaded CS-DS nanoparticles were prepared via complex coacervation whilst whey protein nanocarriers were produced by a modified thermal processing method using chitosan. The physiochemical properties of the particles were characterized to determine the effects of formulation variables, including biopolymer ratio on particle size and zeta potential. Permeability studies were also undertaken on the most stable whey protein–iron nanoparticles by measuring Caco-2 ferritin formation. A particle size analysis revealed that the majority of samples were sub-micron sized, ranging from 420–2400 nm for CS-DS particles and 220–1000 nm for WPI-CS samples. As expected, a higher chitosan concentration conferred a 17% more positive zeta potential on chromium-entrapped WPI nanoparticles, whilst a higher dextran volume decreased the size of CS-DS nanoparticles by 32%. The addition of iron also caused a significant increase in size for all samples, as seen where the loaded WPI samples were 296 nm larger than the empty particles. Caco-2 iron absorption revealed that one formulation, which had the lowest particle size (226 ± 10 nm), caused a 64% greater iron absorption compared to the ferrous sulfate standard. This study describes, for the first time, the novel design of chromium- and iron-entrapped nanoparticles, which could act as novel systems for oral drug delivery

Place Energy in Urban Drama Scene (River Transport in Shatt al-Arab)

The city of Basra is one of the most important cities in Iraq and most of the possessions of the potential, making it the most appropriate option for the subject of research, which depends on the energy of the place as a basis for him. The Shatt Al Arab was chosen for the river represents the spiritual and material value of the population of the city but for Iraq as a whole in terms of social, This river consists of the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates and is an important and vital gateway to the Arabian Gulf, so the discussion deal with the relationship between place energy and dramatic situation through the presentation of the research problem, namely: (There is no clear perception of the dramatic situation of the urban scene of Shatt al-Arab and resolve the research problem has been selected research hypothesis, which states: (The construction of the dramatic situation of the urban scene of Shatt al-Arab is based on activating the concept of place energy, the Research objective (constructing the dramatic situation of the urban scene of Shatt al-Arab by activating the concept of place energy using the possibility of river transport). As determined pursuant to the theoretical framework of the research problem and hypothesis, as theoretical part discusses the definition of place (place theory and place energy), river and river transport, urban scene drama(dramatic situation and perception). The research gives number of conclusions and final recommendations the most important conclusions(There is awareness of the energies of place and material potential, but there is a neglect of the spiritual side, which is an important andvital aspect in the process of building the dramatic situation), one of the main recommendations of the research(Adopting a mechanism to study and activate river transport in the Shatt al-Arab so that people can understand the urban scene of the Shatt al-Arab and thus create memories associated with the place for the purpose of building its own dramatic situation)

Effect of Aqueous Extract of Fig (Ficus carica) Fruit on Some Hematological Parameters in Female Rabbits

The effect of the aqueous extract of fig (Ficus carica) fruit was studied by using different concentrations of this fruit (15, 20 and 25 mg/kg of body weight) on some hematological parameters (hemoglobin concentration, packed cell volume, white blood cell count and platelets count) in female rabbits. Twenty female rabbits were randomly divided into four groups (five animals in each group). Three groups were dosed with the concentrations mentioned above, while the last was administered with distilled water and considered as control group. These animals were orally dosed by aqueous extract using a micropipette. The results showed that there was a significant (

On-spot quantification of modafinil in generic medicines purchased from the Internet using handheld Fourier transform-infrared, near-infrared and Raman spectroscopy

Poor quality medicines represent an expanding global public health threat facilitated by the Internet. A recent survey showed that one in five students have used modafinil to enhance learning ability mainly purchased from Internet sources. The aim of this work was to develop on-the-spot and simple methods for the quantification of modafinil in generic medicines using Fourier transform-infrared (FTIR), near-infrared (NIR) and Raman spectroscopy along with partial least square regression (PLSR). Modafinil tablets were measured in intact form using NIR and Raman and in powdered form using FTIR, NIR and Raman. Additionally, powder mixtures of crushed modafinil tablets and excipient(s) were prepared either by diluting the crushed tablets with excipient(s), or sequentially adding excipient(s) to the crushed tablets. Three PLSR models were constructed in MATLAB 2014a from powder mixtures and two from intact and powdered tablets. For FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, PLSR models based on tablets gave linear calibration curve with correlation coefficient (r2) values above 0.94 and a root mean square error of calibration (RMSEC) below 0.96% m/m. Conversely, the PLSR model based on powder sequential addition gave the highest accuracy using the NIR spectra (r2 = 0.99, RMSEC = 1.15% m/m). The latter model showed accuracy in predicting the concentration of the active pharmaceutical ingredient in modafinil generic medicines proving their authenticity. The overall results showed that the combination of the three spectroscopic methods with PLSR offered a rapid technique for authenticating generic modafinil medicines

Making sense of neuromorphic event data for human action recognition

Neuromorphic vision sensors provide low power sensing and capture salient spatial-temporal events. The majority of the existing neuromorphic sensing work focus on object detection. However, since they only record the events, they provide an efficient signal domain for privacy aware surveillance tasks. This paper explores how the neuromorphic vision sensor data streams can be analysed for human action recognition, which is a challenging application. The proposed method is based on handcrafted features. It consists of a pre-processing step for removing the noisy events followed by the extraction of handcrafted local and global feature vectors corresponding to the underlying human action. The local features are extracted considering a set of high-order descriptive statistics from the spatio-temporal events in a time window slice, while the global features are extracted by considering the frequencies of occurrences of the temporal event sequences. Then, low complexity classifiers, such as, support vector machines (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbours (KNNs), are trained using these feature vectors. The proposed method evaluation uses three groups of datasets: Emulator-based, re-recording-based and native NVS-based. The proposed method has outperformed the existing methods in terms of human action recognition accuracy rates by 0.54%, 19.3%, and 25.61% for E-KTH, E-UCF11 and E-HMDB51 datasets, respectively. This paper also reports results for three further datasets: E-UCF50, R-UCF50, and N-Actions, which are reported for the first time for human action recognition on neuromorphic vision sensor domain

Water And Alcohol Extraction Of Thyme Plant (Thymus Vulgaris) And Activity Study Against Bacteria, Tumors And Used As Anti-Oxidant In Margarine Manufacture

Isolation had been done for active substances from Thyme plant (Thymus Vulgaris) such as volatile oils, Saponins and Tannins. The percentage in form was (21.1%),(59.2%),( 9.7%) respectively. Also a study of anti-bacterial activity of extracts from Thyme using two types of pathogenic bacteria Escherichia Coli and aurous Staphylococcus showed the ability of inhibition for all different extracts by vary inhibition diameters for different active substances, concentrations and bacteria. One type of cancer cellular line used to study the effect of Thyme  extracts on the growth of cells in the laboratory and thus know the specifications of extracts as anti-tumor, (L20B) cell line have been used which  is mice Transformed cell Line. The possibility of using alcohol extract as anti-oxidant to be add to ghee or vegetable oil, the sensory evaluation and physical results were very good over full year. Keywords: Thymus Vulgaris, Antibacterial and  anticancer activity. Extraction, Anti-Oxidant

Modeling temporal visual salience for human action recognition enabled visual anonymity preservation

This paper proposes a novel approach for visually anonymizing video clips while retaining the ability to machine-based analysis of the video clip, such as, human action recognition. The visual anonymization is achieved by proposing a novel method for generating the anonymization silhouette by modeling the frame-wise temporal visual salience. This is followed by analysing these temporal salience-based silhouettes by extracting the proposed histograms of gradients in salience ( HOG-S ) for learning the action representation in the visually anonymized domain. Since the anonymization maps are based on the temporal salience maps represented in gray scale, only the moving body parts related to the motion of the action are represented in larger gray values forming highly anonymized silhouettes, resulting in the highest mean anonymity score (MAS), the least identifiable visual appearance attributes and a high utility of human-perceived utility in action recognition. In terms of machine-based human action recognition, using the proposed HOG-S features has resulted in the highest accuracy rate in the anonymized domain compared to those achieved from the existing anonymization methods. Overall, the proposed holistic human action recognition method, i.e. , the temporal salience modeling followed by the HOG-S feature extraction, has resulted in the best human action recognition accuracy rates for datasets DHA, KTH, UIUC1, UCF Sports and HMDB51 with improvements of 3%, 1.6%, 0.8%, 1.3% and 16.7%, respectively. The proposed method outperforms both feature-based and deep learning based existing approaches