Degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in petroleum products-contaminated soil using pig dung

This study determined the effect of pig dung on the degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in petroleum products-contaminated soil. Topsoil (0-15 cm depth) was collected from Teaching and Research Farm, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria. One kilogram of the soil was measured into nine containers and contaminated with a 10 % mixture of gasoline and diesel. Pig Dung (PD) was mixed with the soil at the rate of 0, 50 and 100 g kg-1 soil in triplicate and the containers were arranged in a Completely Randomized Design. Soil samples were taken from each container at 21 and 42 days for Hydrocarbon Utilizing Bacteria (HUB) and Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH) determination using standard methods. Collected data were subjected to descriptive and inferential statistics. The HUB species identified were Bacillus, Staphylococcus, Escherichia, and Klebsiella. The TPH (mg kg-1) of the soil before the PD application was 83.55±0.22. After the amendments (at 0, 50 and 100 g kg-1), values were 63.24±0.25, 50.09±0.64, 39.56±0.15 and 49.72±1.30, 34.51±0.56, 16.89±0.36 for 21 and 42 days respectively. Pig dung enhanced degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in the petroleum products-contaminated soil

POTABILITY AND IRRIGATION POTENTIAL OF GROUNDWATER SOURCES AT THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE, ABEOKUTA, NIGERIA

Groundwater is an important source of freshwater and its quality determines it’s potential for domestic and agricultural use. Water samples from ten boreholes located within the Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria were collected and analysed for physico-chemical and bacteriological properties, cations and metals using standard procedures. Results were compared with the regulatory standards while water quality index (WQI) method was used to classify the water potability. Potential of groundwater for irrigation was investigated using appropriate indices. The range of values for the measured parameters include: pH: 6.9 – 7.82; electrical conductivity(EC): 127 – 650 μS/cm; total dissolved solids (TDS): 58 to 284 mg/L; magnesium (Mg2+): 10 - 61 mg/L; nitrates (NO3-): 0.01 – 1.38 mg/L; iron (Fe): 0.02 – 0.05 mg/L; biological oxygen demand (BOD): 0.1 – 2.83 mg/L and total coliform: ND - 28×10cfu/mL. Majority of the water quality parameters fell within regulatory limits with the exception of magnesium and total coliforms. Escherichia coli, an indicator of faecal contamination was also absent in the water samples. On the average, groundwater within the study area has a WQI = 46.3 and can be classified to be of good quality for domestic use.  Sodium absorption ratio (SAR) was less than 10% and Magnesium adsorption ratio (MAR) was less 50 %, and are therefore classified as of excellent quality for irrigation purpose. Soluble sodium percentage (SSP) values range between 11.1 and 51 %. All samples were found to be good or fair for irrigation purpose with no harmful effects to the soil.     &nbsp

Complete homochirality induced by the nonlinear autocatalysis and recycling

A nonlinear autocatalysis of a chiral substance is shown to achieve homochirality in a closed system, if the back-reaction is included. Asymmetry in the concentration of two enantiomers or the enantiometric excess increases due to the nonlinear autocatalysis. Furthermore, when the back-reaction is taken into account, the reactant supplied by the decomposition of the enantiomers is recycled to produce more and more the dominant one, and eventually the homochirality is established.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Annotating patient clinical records with syntactic chunks and named entities: the Harvey corpus

The free text notes typed by physicians during patient consultations contain valuable information for the study of disease and treatment. These notes are difficult to process by existing natural language analysis tools since they are highly telegraphic (omitting many words), and contain many spelling mistakes, inconsistencies in punctuation, and non-standard word order. To support information extraction and classification tasks over such text, we describe a de-identified corpus of free text notes, a shallow syntactic and named entity annotation scheme for this kind of text, and an approach to training domain specialists with no linguistic background to annotate the text. Finally, we present a statistical chunking system for such clinical text with a stable learning rate and good accuracy, indicating that the manual annotation is consistent and that the annotation scheme is tractable for machine learning

Нарушения в геноме хозяина при экспериментальном гименолепидозе в зависимости от дозы введенного инвазивного материала при заряжении

ГИМЕНОЛЕПИДО

A demonstration of an affinity between pyrite and organic matter in a hydrothermal setting

One of the key-principles of the iron-sulphur world theory is to bring organic molecules close enough to interact with each other, using the surface of pyrite as a substrate in a hydrothermal setting. The present paper explores the relationship of pyrite and organic matter in a hydrothermal setting from the geological record; in hydrothermal calcite veins from Carboniferous limestones in central Ireland. Here, the organic matter is accumulated as coatings around, and through, pyrite grains. Most of the pyrite grains are euhedral-subhedral crystals, ranging in size from ca 0.1-0.5 mm in diameter, and they are scattered throughout the matrix of the vein calcite. The organic matter was deposited from a hydrothermal fluid at a temperature of at least 200°C, and gives a Raman signature of disordered carbon. This study points to an example from a hydrothermal setting in the geological record, demonstrating that pyrite can have a high potential for the concentration and accumulation of organic materials

Sex difference in physical activity, energy expenditure and obesity driven by a subpopulation of hypothalamic POMC neurons.

OBJECTIVE: Obesity is one of the primary healthcare challenges of the 21st century. Signals relaying information regarding energy needs are integrated within the brain to influence body weight. Central among these integration nodes are the brain pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) peptides, perturbations of which disrupt energy balance and promote severe obesity. However, POMC neurons are neurochemically diverse and the crucial source of POMC peptides that regulate energy homeostasis and body weight remains to be fully clarified. METHODS: Given that a 5-hydroxytryptamine 2c receptor (5-HT2CR) agonist is a current obesity medication and 5-HT2CR agonist's effects on appetite are primarily mediated via POMC neurons, we hypothesized that a critical source of POMC regulating food intake and body weight is specifically synthesized in cells containing 5-HT2CRs. To exclusively manipulate Pomc synthesis only within 5-HT2CR containing cells, we generated a novel 5-HT 2C R (CRE) mouse line and intercrossed it with Cre recombinase-dependent and hypothalamic specific reactivatable Pomc (NEO) mice to restrict Pomc synthesis to the subset of hypothalamic cells containing 5-HT2CRs. This provided a means to clarify the specific contribution of a defined subgroup of POMC peptides in energy balance and body weight. RESULTS: Here we transform genetically programed obese and hyperinsulinemic male mice lacking hypothalamic Pomc with increased appetite, reduced physical activity and compromised brown adipose tissue (BAT) into lean, healthy mice via targeted restoration of Pomc function only within 5-HT2CR expressing cells. Remarkably, the same metabolic transformation does not occur in females, who despite corrected feeding behavior and normalized insulin levels remain physically inactive, have lower energy expenditure, compromised BAT and develop obesity. CONCLUSIONS: These data provide support for the functional heterogeneity of hypothalamic POMC neurons, revealing that Pomc expression within 5-HT2CR expressing neurons is sufficient to regulate energy intake and insulin sensitivity in male and female mice. However, an unexpected sex difference in the function of this subset of POMC neurons was identified with regard to energy expenditure. We reveal that a large sex difference in physical activity, energy expenditure and the development of obesity is driven by this subpopulation, which constitutes approximately 40% of all POMC neurons in the hypothalamic arcuate nucleus. This may have broad implications for strategies utilized to combat obesity, which at present largely ignore the sex of the obese individual