Role of Phenolics in Anti-Atherosclerotic Property of Thuja occidentalis Linn.

The present study was carried out to evaluate the Lipid peroxidation activity and related hypolipidaemic activity of an (EFTO) ethanol fraction of extract of aerial part of Thuja occidentalis Linn. (Cupressaceae). Lipid peroxidation activity was carried out to evaluate the antioxidant potential, and hypolipidaemic activity on cholesterol fed rats. The antioxidant activity of ethanol fraction was increased in a concentration dependent manner. About 100, 150, 200, 250 & 300 μg EFTO (ethanol fraction of extract of aerial part of Thuja occidentalis) inhibited the FeSO4 induced lipid peroxidation in a dose dependent manner and showed IC50 value 195.60μg/ml. in hypolipidaemic activity EFTO at the dose of 200 mg and 400mg/kg body weight significantly reduced serum cholesterol (77 and 92%), LDL (53 and 84%), triglycerides (27 and 46%). The increase in HDL to total cholesterol ratio and reduction in atherogenic index in EFTO treated groups strongly supports anti-atherosclerotic property of Thuja occidentalis. The results obtained in this study indicate that EFTO can be a potential source of natural antioxidant and activities related to this

Growth and characterization of crystals for IR detectors and second harmonic gereration devices

Two types of materials, L-arginine phosphate (LAP) and doped triglycine sulfate (TGS), are examined for their growth characteristics and relevant properties for second harmonic generation and IR detector applications, respectively

Unusual Higgs or Supersymmetry from Natural Electroweak Symmetry Breaking

This review provides an elementary discussion of electroweak symmetry breaking in the minimal and the next-to-minimal supersymmetric models with the focus on the fine-tuning problem -- the tension between natural electroweak symmetry breaking and the direct search limit on the Higgs boson mass. Two generic solutions of the fine-tuning problem are discussed in detail: models with unusual Higgs decays; and models with unusual pattern of soft supersymmetry breaking parameters.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures; invited review by MPL

Generating Behaviorally Diverse Policies with Latent Diffusion Models

Recent progress in Quality Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) has enabled learning a collection of behaviorally diverse, high performing policies. However, these methods typically involve storing thousands of policies, which results in high space-complexity and poor scaling to additional behaviors. Condensing the archive into a single model while retaining the performance and coverage of the original collection of policies has proved challenging. In this work, we propose using diffusion models to distill the archive into a single generative model over policy parameters. We show that our method achieves a compression ratio of 13x while recovering 98% of the original rewards and 89% of the original coverage. Further, the conditioning mechanism of diffusion models allows for flexibly selecting and sequencing behaviors, including using language. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/policydiffusion/hom

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease may not be a severe disease at presentation among Asian Indians

Aim: To evaluate the clinical and biochemical profile of patients with non alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and to assess their histological severity at presentation. Methods: Consecutive patients presenting to the liver clinic of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) with raised transaminases to at least 1.5 times upper limit of normal, and histologically confi rmed non-alcoholic fatty liver disease were included. Patients who had significant alcohol intake or positive markers of other liver diseases or who were taking drugs known to produce fatty liver were excluded. The clinical, biochemical and histological profi le of this group was studied. Results: Fifty-one patients with NAFLD formed the study population. Their median age and BMI were 34(17-58) years and 26.7(21.3-32.5) kg/m2 respectively and 46 (90.1%) were males. The majority of the patients had mild inflammation, either grade 1 [32 (63%)] or grade 2 [16 (31%)] and only 3 (6%) patients had severe (grade 3) infl ammation. Twenty-three (45%), 19 (37%), 8(16%) and 1(2%) patient had stage 0, 1, 2 and 3 fi brosis respectively on index biopsy and none had cirrhosis. On univariate analysis, triglyceride levels more than 150 mg % (OR = 7.1; 95% CI: 1.6-31.5, P = 0.002) and AST/ALT ratio > 1 (OR = 14.3; 95% CI: 1.4-678.5, P = 0.008) were associated with high grades of inflammation and none was associated with advanced fibrosis. On multivariate logistic regression analysis, hypertriglyceridemia >150 mg% was the only factor independently associated with presence of high grade of infl ammation (OR = 1.6; 95% CI: 1.3-22.7, P = 0.02), while none was associated with advanced fi brosis. Triglyceride levels correlated positively with infl ammatory grade (r = 0.412; P = 0.003). Conclusion: NAFLD in North Indian patients is a disease of young over-weight males, most of whom are insulin resistant and they tend to have a mild histological disease at presentation

Cocaine-Induced Hepatonephrotoxicity: A Case Report

Hepatotoxicity due to cocaine has been well described in animal models. There are few reports on cocaine-induced hepatic injury in humans; however, its link to rhabdomyolysis and renal failure is better known. We report a case of reversible acute hepatonephrotoxicity associated with recreational cocaine use. The proposed mechanisms responsible for its hepatic and renal toxicity are reviewed

Te covered Si(001): a variable surface reconstruction

At a given temperature, clean and adatom covered silicon surfaces usually exhibit well-defined reconstruction patterns. Our finite temperature ab-initio molecular dynamics calculations show that the tellurium covered Si(001) surface is an exception. Soft longitudinal modes of surface phonons due to the strongly anharmonic potential of the bridged tellurium atoms prevent the reconstruction structure from attaining any permanent, two dimensional periodic geometry. This explains why experiments attempting to find a definite model for the reconstruction have reached conflicting conclusions.Comment: 4 pages, 3 gif figure