Electronic Structure Based Classification of Neurotransmitters and Related Drugs

A fundamental understanding of the relationship between structure and activity of neurotransmitters in the human brain is of vital importance for the design targeted drugs. Using density functional theory and hybrid exchange correlation energy functionals we have studied the structure-activity-relationships of some important neurotransmitters and selected drugs by calculating their absolute hardness (η) and absolute electronegativity (χ). A plot of the η- χ diagram allowed us to assign them into three distinct groups, namely, (i) Acetylcholine analogs (positively charged structure), (ii) GABA analogs (zwitterionic structures) and (iii) monoamines. The results suggest that brain stem is chemically soft because of distribution of monoaminergic nerve pathways. Prefrontal cortex is also chemically soft due to secretion of dopamine from mesocortical dopaminergic nerve A10, whereas neocortex is chemically hard due to presence of zwitterionic neurotransmitters. Target drugs (agonists/antagonists) can also be predicted by comparing the η- χ diagram of neurotransmitters with those of the drugs

LANAP, Periodontics and Beyond: A Review

ABSTRACTLaser has emerged as an adjunct in several treatment modalities in dentistry in the past few decades. This less invasive bladeless technique is bringing revolutionary outcomes in a plethora of periodontal treatment procedures as well. A unique ameliorative approach termed LANAP, described as laser-assisted new attachment procedure was developed by Gregg and McCarthy. In 1990 they introduced an innovative treatment for diseases of gums incorporating pulsed neodymium yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd: YAG) 1064 nm wavelength laser (PerioLase MVP-7). The LANAP concept was endorsed by Yukna et al who conducted a study according to the protocol reinforced at the1996 world workshop in periodontics, which established specific histologic criteria to prove regeneration. Yukna’s histological study found that regeneration of the periodontally compromised root could be achieved by Nd: YAG laser. LANAP facilitates refurbishing of new tissues from supporting structures of the periodontium wherein the unhealthy surface of the roots exhibit pristine attachments in human beings. This paper is a review providing a detailed report of LANAP from its inception to recent advances

Review on e-waste recycling scenario and development of eco-friendly processes at CSIR-NML

Electrical and electronic devices applications in consumer products are growing enormously, resulting in increasing resources demand due to the replacement of old/ obsolete by advanced and new products. It is estimated that the total amount of e-wastes generation in European Union (EU) ranges from 5 to 7 million tons per annum or about 14 to 15 kg per capita with the growth rate 3% to 5% yearly. CSIR-NML (India) is pioneer in the field of development of e-waste recycling processes and also recognized by several national and international recognitions. Present paper focused on a detailed analysis of global e-waste recycling scenario and contribution of CSIR-NML for developing the e-waste recycling processes with several national and international collaborations. Recently, CSIR-NML has developed a process for the removal of hazardous metal elements from leach liquor of electronic scraps following solvent extraction and recovery of valuables. A novel process has been developed for the recovery of lead and tin from liberated resin of printed circuit boards (PCBs) swelled by organic. The processes meet the strict environmental regulations. In the area of rare earth processing, a process for the recovery of neodymium has been developed on laboratory scale by hydrometallurgical route from discarded hard-disk of personal computer. The laboratory scale processes are also developed for the recovery of indium, lithium, cobalt, zinc, chromium, lead, tin etc from secondary resources. Developments of several eco – friendly and energy-saving processes for e-waste recycling are underway to meet the stringent environmental regulations

Intertwining Order Preserving Encryption and Differential Privacy

Ciphertexts of an order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme preserve the order of their corresponding plaintexts. However, OPEs are vulnerable to inference attacks that exploit this preserved order. At another end, differential privacy has become the de-facto standard for achieving data privacy. One of the most attractive properties of DP is that any post-processing (inferential) computation performed on the noisy output of a DP algorithm does not degrade its privacy guarantee. In this paper, we intertwine the two approaches and propose a novel differentially private order preserving encryption scheme, OP$\epsilon$. Under OP$\epsilon$, the leakage of order from the ciphertexts is differentially private. As a result, in the least, OP$\epsilon$ ensures a formal guarantee (specifically, a relaxed DP guarantee) even in the face of inference attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to intertwine DP with a property-preserving encryption scheme. We demonstrate OP$\epsilon$'s practical utility in answering range queries via extensive empirical evaluation on four real-world datasets. For instance, OP$\epsilon$ misses only around $4$ in every $10K$ correct records on average for a dataset of size $\sim732K$ with an attribute of domain size $\sim18K$ and $\epsilon= 1$

ShadowNet: A Secure and Efficient System for On-device Model Inference

With the increased usage of AI accelerators on mobile and edge devices, on-device machine learning (ML) is gaining popularity. Consequently, thousands of proprietary ML models are being deployed on billions of untrusted devices. This raises serious security concerns about model privacy. However, protecting the model privacy without losing access to the AI accelerators is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel on-device model inference system, ShadowNet. ShadowNet protects the model privacy with Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) while securely outsourcing the heavy linear layers of the model to the untrusted hardware accelerators. ShadowNet achieves this by transforming the weights of the linear layers before outsourcing them and restoring the results inside the TEE. The nonlinear layers are also kept secure inside the TEE. The transformation of the weights and the restoration of the results are designed in a way that can be implemented efficiently. We have built a ShadowNet prototype based on TensorFlow Lite and applied it on four popular CNNs, namely, MobileNets, ResNet-44, AlexNet and MiniVGG. Our evaluation shows that ShadowNet achieves strong security guarantees with reasonable performance, offering a practical solution for secure on-device model inference.Comment: single column, 21 pages (29 pages include appendix), 12 figure

Chemistry of enediynyl azides: activation through a novel pathway

The spontaneous activation of a nonaromatic enediynyl azide under ambient conditions has been demonstrated. The aromatic enediyne followed the expected cycloaddition with the alkene in the neighbouring arm to form a stable bridged bicyclic enediyne

STANDARDIZATION OF A TRADITIONAL POLYHERBO-MINERAL FORMULATION- BRAHMI VATI

The present study deals with standardization of an in-house standard preparation and three marketed samples of Brahmi vati, which is a traditional medicine known to be effective in mental disorders, convulsions, weak memory, high fever and hysteria. Preparation and standardization have been done by following modern scientific quality control procedures for raw material and the finished products. The scanning electron microscopic (SEM) analysis showed the reduction of metals and minerals (particle size range 2-5 μm) which indicates the proper preparation of bhasmas, the important ingredient of Brahmi vati. Findings of EDX analysis of all samples of Brahmi vati suggested the absence of Gold, an important constituent of Brahmi vati in two marketed samples. All the samples of Brahmi vati were subjected to quantitative estimation of Bacoside A (marker compound) by HPTLC technique. Extraction of the samples was done in methanol and the chromatograms were developed in Butanol: Glacial acetic acid: water (4.5:0.5:5 v/v) and detected at 225nm. The regression analysis of calibration plots of Bacoside A exhibited linear relationship in the concentration range of 50-300 ng, while the % recovery was found to be 96.06% w/w, thus proving the accuracy and precision of the analysis. The Bacoside A content in the in-house preparation was found to be higher than that of the commercial samples. The proposed HPTLC method was found to be rapid, simple and accurate for quantitative estimation of Bacoside A in different formulations. The results of this study could be used as a model data in the standardization of Brahmi vati