Protective effect of Urtica dioica L. (Urticaceae) on morphometric and morphologic alterations of seminiferous tubules in STZ diabetic rats

Objective(s): Urtica dioica L. has been known as a medicinal plant in the world. This study was conducted to determine the effects of the hydroalcoholic extract of Urtica dioica leaves on seminiferous tubules of diabetic rats. Materials and Methods: Animals were allocated to control, diabetic and protective groups. Treated animals received extract of U. dioica (100 mg/ kg/ day) IP for the first 5 days and STZ injection on the 6th day. After 5 weeks, testes removed and stained with H&E technique. Results: Tubular cell disintegration, sertoli and spermatogonia cell vacuolization, and decrease in sperm concentration observed in diabetic in comparison with control and protective groups. External seminiferous tubular diameter and seminiferous epithelial height significantly reduced (P< 0.05) in diabetic compared with controls, and these parameters increased (P< 0.05) in the treated compared with diabetics. Conclusion: Hydroalcoholic extract of U. dioica, before induction of diabetes; has protective role on seminiferous tubules alterations

Impacts of technological interventions on fish production and biodiversity of seasonal floodplains in Bangladesh

The Community-based Fish Culture in Seasonal Floodplains and Irrigation Systems (CBFC) project is a five year research project supported by the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF), with the aim of increasing productivity of seasonally occurring water bodies through aquaculture. The project has been implemented in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Mali and Vietnam, where technical and institutional options for community based aquaculture have been tested. The project began in 2005 and was completed in March 2010. The objective of the study was to determine the impacts of technological interventions in the floodplains on fish yield and biodiversity benefiting the poor fisher folk and other community people. Technological interventions for fish culture in the floodplains included (a) the installation of low-cost large meshed bamboo fencing at water inlet and outlet points, and setting of ring culverts for maintaining suitable levels of water for fish culture without hampering the production of rice in the upland areas of the floodplains (b) stocking of larger fingerlings at suitable stocking densities of endemic (rohu, catla, mrigal) and exotic (silver carp, bighead carp, common carp/mirror carp) species at 31-48 kg/ha (c) post stocking management; use of extra fencing during over flooding and mobile guarding using boats (d) harvesting management; regulations in harvest for certain period, use of multiple harvesting techniques. These interventions were carried out through CB participation with initial technological and financial support from the Challenge Program Project (CP35).Flood plains, Freshwater aquaculture

On the taxonomic status of some cladoceran taxa (Crustacea : Cladocera) from Central India

La taxinomie et la validité de douze nouvelles espèces et d'une sous-espèce de Cladocères d'eau douce, décrites par RANE (1983-87) de l'état de Madhya Pradesh en Inde centrale, sont examinées et discutées. Leur distribution géographique est présentée. (Résumé d'auteur

Comparison of Krylov subspace methods with preconditioning techniques for solving boundary value problems

AbstractIn this paper, we made an attempt to establish the usefulness of Lanczos solver with preconditioning technique over the preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (CG) solvers. We have presented here a detail comparative study with respect to convergence, speed as well as CPU-time, by considering appropriate boundary value problems

Kolkata Restaurant Problem as a generalised El Farol Bar Problem

Generalisation of the El Farol bar problem to that of many bars here leads to the Kolkata restaurant problem, where the decision to go to any restaurant or not is much simpler (depending on the previous experience of course, as in the El Farol bar problem). This generalised problem can be exactly analysed in some limiting cases discussed here. The fluctuation in the restaurant service can be shown to have precisely an inverse cubic behavior, as widely seen in the stock market fluctuations.Comment: 2 column RevTeX4, 4 pages, 3 eps figs; to be published in 'Econophysics of Markets and Business Networks', [Proc. Econophys-Kolkata III], Eds. A. Chatterjee, B. K. Chakrabarti, New Economic Windows Series, Springer, Milan, 2007, pp. 220-22

A novel application of deep learning with image cropping: a smart city use case for flood monitoring

© 2020, The Author(s). Event monitoring is an essential application of Smart City platforms. Real-time monitoring of gully and drainage blockage is an important part of flood monitoring applications. Building viable IoT sensors for detecting blockage is a complex task due to the limitations of deploying such sensors in situ. Image classification with deep learning is a potential alternative solution. However, there are no image datasets of gullies and drainages. We were faced with such challenges as part of developing a flood monitoring application in a European Union-funded project. To address these issues, we propose a novel image classification approach based on deep learning with an IoT-enabled camera to monitor gullies and drainages. This approach utilises deep learning to develop an effective image classification model to classify blockage images into different class labels based on the severity. In order to handle the complexity of video-based images, and subsequent poor classification accuracy of the model, we have carried out experiments with the removal of image edges by applying image cropping. The process of cropping in our proposed experimentation is aimed to concentrate only on the regions of interest within images, hence leaving out some proportion of image edges. An image dataset from crowd-sourced publicly accessible images has been curated to train and test the proposed model. For validation, model accuracies were compared considering model with and without image cropping. The cropping-based image classification showed improvement in the classification accuracy. This paper outlines the lessons from our experimentation that have a wider impact on many similar use cases involving IoT-based cameras as part of smart city event monitoring platforms

Fish seed production in ricefields: participatory training and extension manual

Seed (aquaculture), Rice field aquaculture, Rice fields, Manuals Oreochromis niloticus

Computational codon optimization of synthetic gene for protein expression

10.1186/1752-0509-6-134BMC Systems Biology6

Estimation of Measures in M/m/1 Queue

Maximum likelihood and uniform minimum variance unbiased estimators of steady-state probability distribution of system size, probability of at least ℓ customers in the system in steady state, and certain steady-state measures of effectiveness in the M/M/1 queue are obtained/derived based on observations on X, the number of customer arrivals during a service time. The estimators are compared using Asympotic Expected Deficiency (AED) criterion leading to recommendation of uniform minimum variance unbiased estimators over maximum likelihood estimators for some measures

3-D Perturbations in Conformal Turbulence

The effects of three-dimensional perturbations in two-dimensional turbulence are investigated, through a conformal field theory approach. We compute scaling exponents for the energy spectra of enstrophy and energy cascades, in a strong coupling limit, and compare them to the values found in recent experiments. The extension of unperturbed conformal turbulence to the present situation is performed by means of a simple physical picture in which the existence of small scale random forces is closely related to deviations of the exact two-dimensional fluid motion.Comment: Discussion of intermittency improved. Figure include