487 research outputs found
Effect of mulching and organic manure on growth and yield performance of wheat
An experiment was conducted at the Agronomy Field Laboratory, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh in Rabi season (dry season) of 2014 to study the effect of mulching and organic manure on growth and yield performance of wheat. Five mulching practices viz. M1=1 irrigation at 17-21 days after sowing (DAS), M2=2 irrigations at 17-21 and 55-60 DAS, M3=3 irrigations at 17-21, 55-60 and 75-80 DAS, M4=control, M5=straw mulch (6 t ha-1) and five organic manure managements viz. O1=recommended chemical fertilizer (NPKS @ 100-23-20-16 kg ha-1), O2=poultry manure @ 6 t ha-1 (100% PM), O3=vermicompost @ 8 t ha-1 (100% VC), O4=50% chemical fertilizer+50% VC and O5=50% chemical fertilizer+50% PM were used as experimental variables. The experiment was conducted in split-plot design with three replications. The results showed that mulching had significant influence on all attributes. The highest values of all attributes were found in straw mulch treatment. It was observed that organic manure had significant influences on all characters. The highest values of yield and yield attributes were found in O5 (50% chemical fertilizer+50% PM) treatment. It was observed that effective tillers hill-1, grain yield and straw yield were significantly affected by combined effect of mulching and organic manure. The highest values obtained from mulching and O5 (50% chemical fertilizer+50% PM) treatment. Therefore, it can be inferred from the results of the study that highest production could be obtained from mulching and O5 (50% chemical fertilizer+50% PM) treatment
High body fat percentage among adult women in Malaysia: the role of lifestyle
Body fat percentage is regarded as an important measurement for diagnosis of obesity. Theaim of this study is to determine the association of high body fat percentage (BF%) andlifestyle among adult women. The study was conducted on 327 women, aged 40-59 years,recruited during a health screening program. Data on socio-demography, dietary intake andphysical activity were collected through validated questionnaires. BF% was measured usingInBody 270 Body Impedance analyzer machine. Association between lifestyle factors andbody fat percentage were investigated using multiple linear regression, adjusted for age andbody mass index (BMI). Intake of protein, calcium and physical activity on householdintensity were the predictors of high BF%.Keywords: body fat; obesity; women; Malaysia; lifestyle
EEG-based multi-modal emotion recognition using bag of deep features: An optimal feature selection approach
Much attention has been paid to the recognition of human emotions with the help of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals based on machine learning technology. Recognizing emotions is a challenging task due to the non-linear property of the EEG signal. This paper presents an advanced signal processing method using the deep neural network (DNN) for emotion recognition based on EEG signals. The spectral and temporal components of the raw EEG signal are first retained in the 2D Spectrogram before the extraction of features. The pre-trained AlexNet model is used to extract the raw features from the 2D Spectrogram for each channel. To reduce the feature dimensionality, spatial, and temporal based, bag of deep features (BoDF) model is proposed. A series of vocabularies consisting of 10 cluster centers of each class is calculated using the k-means cluster algorithm. Lastly, the emotion of each subject is represented using the histogram of the vocabulary set collected from the raw-feature of a single channel. Features extracted from the proposed BoDF model have considerably smaller dimensions. The proposed model achieves better classification accuracy compared to the recently reported work when validated on SJTU SEED and DEAP data sets. For optimal classification performance, we use a support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) to classify the extracted features for the different emotional states of the two data sets. The BoDF model achieves 93.8% accuracy in the SEED data set and 77.4% accuracy in the DEAP data set, which is more accurate compared to other state-of-the-art methods of human emotion recognition. - 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Funding: This research was funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC): Tdf/67/2017.Scopu
Superconducting Vortices and Elliptical Ferromagnetic Textures
In this article an analytical and numerical study of superconducting thin
film with ferromagnetic textures of elliptical geometries in close proximity is
presented. The screening currents induced in the superconductor due to the
magnetic texture are calculated. Close to the superconducting transition
temperature the spontaneous creation of superconducting vortices becomes
energy favorable depending on the value of the magnetization and the
geometrical quantities of the magnetic texture. The creation of vortices by
elliptic dots is more energy favorable than those created by circular ones. The
superconductor covered by elliptic dots array exhibits anisotropic transport
properties.Comment: 4 pages, 5figure
PyCOOL - a Cosmological Object-Oriented Lattice code written in Python
There are a number of different phenomena in the early universe that have to
be studied numerically with lattice simulations. This paper presents a graphics
processing unit (GPU) accelerated Python program called PyCOOL that solves the
evolution of scalar fields in a lattice with very precise symplectic
integrators. The program has been written with the intention to hit a sweet
spot of speed, accuracy and user friendliness. This has been achieved by using
the Python language with the PyCUDA interface to make a program that is easy to
adapt to different scalar field models. In this paper we derive the symplectic
dynamics that govern the evolution of the system and then present the
implementation of the program in Python and PyCUDA. The functionality of the
program is tested in a chaotic inflation preheating model, a single field
oscillon case and in a supersymmetric curvaton model which leads to Q-ball
production. We have also compared the performance of a consumer graphics card
to a professional Tesla compute card in these simulations. We find that the
program is not only accurate but also very fast. To further increase the
usefulness of the program we have equipped it with numerous post-processing
functions that provide useful information about the cosmological model. These
include various spectra and statistics of the fields. The program can be
additionally used to calculate the generated curvature perturbation. The
program is publicly available under GNU General Public License at
https://github.com/jtksai/PyCOOL . Some additional information can be found
from http://www.physics.utu.fi/tiedostot/theory/particlecosmology/pycool/ .Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures; some typos correcte
Mixed-location cerebral microbleeds as a biomarker of neurodegeneration in a memory clinic population
Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) in the lobar and deep locations are associated with two distinct pathologies: cerebral amyloid angiopathy and hypertensive arteriopathy. However, the role of mixed-location CMBs in neurodegeneration remains unexplored. We investigated the associations between strictly lobar, strictly deep and mixed-location CMBs with markers of neurodegeneration. This study recruited 477 patients from a memory clinic who underwent 3T MRI scans. CMBs were categorized into strictly lobar, strictly deep and mixed-location. Cortical thickness, white matter volume and subcortical structural volumes were quantified using Free-Surfer. Linear regression models were performed to assess the association between CMBs and cerebral atrophy, and the mean difference (β) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were reported. In the regression analyses, mixed-location CMBs were associated with smaller cortical thickness of limbic region [β=-0.01; 95% CI=-0.02,-0.00, p=0.007) as well as with smaller accumbens volume [β=-0.01; 95% CI=-0.02,-0.00, p=0.004) and presubiculum region of hippocampus [β=-0.01; 95% CI=-0.02,-0.00, p=0.002). Strictly lobar CMBs were associated with smaller total white matter volume [β=-0.03; 95% CI=-0.04,-0.01, p<0.001] and with region specific white mat
Dynamics of oscillating scalar field in thermal environment
There often appear coherently oscillating scalar fields in particle physics
motivated cosmological scenarios, which may have rich phenomenological
consequences. Scalar fields should somehow interact with background thermal
bath in order to decay into radiation at an appropriate epoch, but introducing
some couplings to the scalar field makes the dynamics complicated. We
investigate in detail the dynamics of a coherently oscillating scalar field,
which has renormalizable couplings to another field interacting with thermal
background. The scalar field dynamics and its resultant abundance are
significantly modified by taking account of following effects : (1) thermal
correction to the effective potential, (2) dissipation effect on the scalar
field in thermal bath, (3) non-perturbative particle production events and (4)
formation of non-topological solitons. There appear many time scales depending
on the scalar mass, amplitude, couplings and the background temperature, which
make the efficiencies of these effects non-trivial.Comment: 45 pages, 6 figures; v2: several typos corrected; v3: minor
corrections and references added; v4: minor corrections to reflect the
published version; v5: minor correction
Mg-modified Zn-Co-Fe-La nano ferrites: a study of structural, morphological, vibrational, electro-optical, dielectric and magnetic evolution
The series of Zn0.4Co0.6−xMgxFe1.9La0.1O4 (x = 0.0, 0.15, 0.30, 0.45, 0.6) nanoferrites prepared via co-precipitation technique. Scherrer and Williamson-Hall (W-H) methods were used to find the crystallite size (29.6–39.2 nm and 31.6–36.3 nm, respectively) and lattice constant was calculated (8.406–8.395 Å). Moreover, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy revealed the existence of absorption bands along with functional groups. The vibrations of O2- ions at the tetrahedral and octahedral sites were shown by the Raman five active modes. DC resistivity reduced in the range of 5.2961 × 108 Ω cm to 9.6453 × 107 Ω cm for x = 0.0 to x = 0.6, respectively. The maximum DC resistivity and activation energy (0.1035 eV) were obtained at the parent sample (Zn0.4Co0.6Fe1.9La0.1O4). The optical bandgaps reduced from 2.61 to 1.47 eV, as the Mg2+ contents increased. With increasing frequency the dielectric loss and the dielectric constant decrease. The magnetic parameters such as saturation magnetization (Ms = 60.82–25.94 emu/g), remnant magnetization (Mr = 47.82–18.64 emu/g), and coercivity (Hc = 1334–511 Oe) demonstrated reducing trends with the increase of Mg2+ doping. The best magnetic behavior of the as-prepared samples suitable in microwave devices was observed for Zn0.4Co0.6Fe1.9La0.1O4 sample
Evaluation of anti-nociceptive and anti-inflammatory activities of Piper sylvaticum (Roxb.) stem by experimental and computational approaches
Piper sylvaticum Roxb., (Family: Piperaceae), commonly known as pahaari peepal, is used in traditional medicine for the treatment of rheumatic pain, headache, asthma, chronic cough, diarrhea, and wounds. To provide scientific proof for its traditional use, the present study was designed to investigate the antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory properties of methanol extract of P. sylvaticum stem (MEPSS) in pain models. Additionally, computational studies viz. molecular docking, ADME and toxicological property predictions were performed to identify the potent phytochemicals of this plant for antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory activities with good oral bioavailability and safety features. Quantitative phytochemical analysis of MEPSS was performed using established protocols. The antinociceptive activity was determined using acetic acid and formalin test in mice at the doses of 200 and 400 mg/kg while paw edema induced by carrageenan used for anti-inflammatory activity. Molecular docking study was performed by Schrödinger Maestro 10.1 whereas the SwissADME and admetSAR were used for ADME and toxicity prediction respectively. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents of MEPSS were 93.39 and 53.74 mg gallic acid and quercetin equivalent/g of extract respectively. The methanol extract exhibited significant and dose-dependent antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory effects in experimental pain models. Also, our docking study showed that piperine, piperlonguminine, and sylvamide have the best binding affinities to cyclooxygenase enzymes with good ADME/T properties. This study confirmed that MEPSS possess significant antinociceptive and anti-inflammatory activities which could be due to the presence of phytochemicals and three bioactive compounds (piperine, piperlonguminine, and sylvamide) were found to be most effective in computational studies.</p
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