Effect of organically bound iodine in cattle feed on health indicators

Currently, the problem of iodine deficiency is actual in the world, which may cause a large number of diseases and disorders. The problem of iodine deficiency for humans may be partly solved by enriching agricultural products with iodine, i.e. by providing animals with an increased intake of iodine during their growth. Theoretically, the most effective way to use iodine is the form bound to tyrosine, since diiodotyrosine has been proven to be a thyroxine precursor. Taking it into account, a supplement was developed containing iodine organically bound to tyrosine and histidine. In this work, we studied the effect of this supplement introduced into the diets of cattle on biochemical parameters of animal blood. In the test group, which received the supplement with organically bound iodine, an improvement in nitrogen metabolism was noted compared to the control group. This was most clearly demonstrated by the content of urea, since in the test group, its content decreased by ≈15 percentage points, and by the content of creatinine, since its increase in the test group was more than 20 percentage points. Differences in the parameters of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism between treatments were also noted, as in the blood of animals from the test group, the content of cholesterol, triglycerides, phospholipids, glucose and malondialdehyde was lower than in the control group. In mineral metabolism and morphological parameters, there was no significant difference between treatments. Among the indicators of pigment and hormone metabolism, it is important to note the reduced content of cortisol in the blood of animals from the test group. Its level was lower by ≈17.23 percentage points compared to the control group. A decrease in cortisol levels indicated a lower stress load in the test group. In general, studies have shown that the use of a feed supplement containing organically bound iodine has a positive effect on the metabolism of animals.Currently, the problem of iodine deficiency is actual in the world, which may cause a large number of diseases and disorders. The problem of iodine deficiency for humans may be partly solved by enriching agricultural products with iodine, i.e. by providing animals with an increased intake of iodine during their growth. Theoretically, the most effective way to use iodine is the form bound to tyrosine, since diiodotyrosine has been proven to be a thyroxine precursor. Taking it into account, a supplement was developed containing iodine organically bound to tyrosine and histidine. In this work, we studied the effect of this supplement introduced into the diets of cattle on biochemical parameters of animal blood. In the test group, which received the supplement with organically bound iodine, an improvement in nitrogen metabolism was noted compared to the control group. This was most clearly demonstrated by the content of urea, since in the test group, its content decreased by ≈15 percentage points, and by the content of creatinine, since its increase in the test group was more than 20 percentage points. Differences in the parameters of carbohydrate and lipid metabolism between treatments were also noted, as in the blood of animals from the test group, the content of cholesterol, triglycerides, phospholipids, glucose and malondialdehyde was lower than in the control group. In mineral metabolism and morphological parameters, there was no significant difference between treatments. Among the indicators of pigment and hormone metabolism, it is important to note the reduced content of cortisol in the blood of animals from the test group. Its level was lower by ≈17.23 percentage points compared to the control group. A decrease in cortisol levels indicated a lower stress load in the test group. In general, studies have shown that the use of a feed supplement containing organically bound iodine has a positive effect on the metabolism of animals

Many-to-Many Information Flow Policies

Information flow techniques typically classify information according to suitable security levels and enforce policies that are based on binary relations between individual levels, e.g., stating that information is allowed to flow from one level to another. We argue that some information flow properties of interest naturally require coordination patterns that involve sets of security levels rather than individual levels: some secret information could be safely disclosed to a set of confidential channels of incomparable security levels, with individual leaks considered instead illegal; a group of competing agencies might agree to disclose their secrets, with individual disclosures being undesired, etc. Motivated by this we propose a simple language for expressing information flow policies where the usual admitted flow relation between individual security levels is replaced by a relation between sets of security levels, thus allowing to capture coordinated flows of information. The flow of information is expressed in terms of causal dependencies and the satisfaction of a policy is defined with respect to an event structure that is assumed to capture the causal structure of system computations. We suggest applications to secret exchange protocols, program security and security architectures, and discuss the relation to classic notions of information flow control

Integration of Static and Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Checking Noninterference

In this article, we present an overview of recent combinations of deductive program verification and automatic test generation on the one hand and static analysis on the other hand, with the goal of checking noninterference. Noninterference is the non-functional property that certain confidential information cannot leak to certain public output, i.e., the confidentiality of that information is always preserved. We define the noninterference properties that are checked along with the individual approaches that we use in different combinations. In one use case, our framework for checking noninterference employs deductive verification to automatically generate tests for noninterference violations with an improved test coverage. In another use case, the framework provides two combinations of deductive verification with static analysis based on system dependence graphs to prove noninterference, thereby reducing the effort for deductive verification

Runtime enforcement of security policies on black box reactive programs

Security enforcement mechanisms like execution monitors are used to make sure that some untrusted program complies with a policy. Different enforcement mechanisms have different strengths and weaknesses and hence it is important to understand the qualities of various enforcement mechanisms. This paper studies runtime enforcement mechanisms for reactive programs. We study the impact of two important constraints that many practical enforcement mechanisms satisfy: (1) the enforcement mechanism must handle each input/output event in finite time and on occurrence of the event (as opposed to for instance Ligatti's edit automata that have the power to buffer events for an arbitrary amount of time), and (2) the enforcement mechanism treats the untrusted program as a black box: it can monitor and/or edit the input/output events that the program exhibits on execution and it can explore alternative executions of the program by running additional copies of the program and providing these different inputs. It can not inspect the source or machine code of the untrusted program. Such enforcement mechanisms are important in practice: They include for instance many execution monitors, virtual machine monitors, and secure multi-execution or shadow executions. We establish upper and lower bounds for the class of policies that are enforceable by such black box mechanisms, and we propose a generic enforcement mechanism that works for a wide range of policies.We also show how our generic enforcement mechanism can be instantiated to enforce specific classes of policies, at the same time showing that many existing enforcement mechanisms are optimized instances of our construction

A Heuristic method for the reduction of the outage rate of high-voltage substations due to atmospheric overvoltages

The adequate protection against lightning surges and the limitation of the expected annual failure rate of high-voltage substations are critical issues, in an effort to secure the safety of the equipment and the personnel. Various factors affect the lightning performance of the substations, determining the developed lightning surges and the expected outage rate, i.e., the grounding resistance, the length of the underground cable between the connected overhead transmission line and the power transformer, and the installation position of the arresters. In the current work, a heuristic method is developed to adjust different parameters of high-voltage substations that upgrade their lightning performance. The proposed methodology can be useful to the studies of substations' designers and engineers, contributing effectively in the reduction or/and elimination of lightning failures. © 2018 by the authors

A Methodical Elaboration of Mathematical Problems and the Intellectual Development of the Students

Представлена структура методичної розробки математичної задачі. Акцент поставлений на тезу: щоб навчання розв’язуванню завдань було успішним і щоб забезпечити умови для інтелектуального розвитку учнів, слід цілеспрямовано ознайомлювати їх з методами розв’язування завдань. Пропонований підхід є передумовою більш активного і самостійної участі учнів у вирішенні інших завдань системи, мета яких – удосконалення вмінь застосування засвоєних методів (синтезу, недосконалого і висхідного аналізу та їх комбінацій), а також більш ефективного інтелектуального розвитку учня.The authors present the structure of the methodical elaboration of mathematical problem and share their experience in the organization of this activity. The accent is put on the following thesis: in order the education of solving problems to be successful and to provide conditions for intellectual development of students, it is appropriate the students to be acquainted with methods for solving problems. The proposed approach is a prerequisite for a more active and independent participation of students in solving other problems of the system, whose purpose – to improve the application of skills learned techniques (synthesis, imperfect and bottom-up analysis, and combinations thereof), as well as better intellectual development of the student

A novel genotoxin-specific qPCR array based on the metabolically competent human HepaRG™ cell line as a rapid and reliable tool for improved in vitro hazard assessment

&lt;p&gt;Although the value of the regulatory accepted batteries for in vitro genotoxicity testing is recognized, they result in a high&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;number of false positives. This has a major impact on society and industries developing novel compounds for pharmaceutical,&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;chemical, and consumer products, as afflicted compounds have to be (prematurely) abandoned or further tested on&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;animals. Using the metabolically competent human HepaRG&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;™ cell line and toxicogenomics approaches, we have developed&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;an upgraded, innovative, and proprietary gene classifier. This gene classifier is based on transcriptomic changes induced by&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;12 genotoxic and 12 non-genotoxic reference compounds tested at sub-cytotoxic concentrations, i.e., IC10 concentrations&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;as determined by the 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. The resulting gene classifier&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;was translated into an easy-to-handle qPCR array that, as shown by pathway analysis, covers several different cellular&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;processes related to genotoxicity. To further assess the predictivity of the tool, a set of 5 known positive and 5 known negative&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;test compounds for genotoxicity was evaluated. In addition, 2 compounds with debatable genotoxicity data were tested&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;to explore how the qPCR array would classify these. With an accuracy of 100%, when equivocal results were considered&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;positive, the results showed that combining HepaRG&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;™ cells with a genotoxin-specific qPCR array can improve (geno)toxicological&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;hazard assessment. In addition, the developed qPCR array was able to provide additional information on compounds&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;for which so far debatable genotoxicity data are available. The results indicate that the new in vitro tool can improve human&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;safety assessment of chemicals in general by basing predictions on mechanistic toxicogenomics information.&lt;/p&gt;</p

In silico tools and transcriptomics analyses in the mutagenicity assessment of cosmetic ingredients: a proof-of-principle on how to add weight to the evidence.

&lt;p&gt;Prior to the downstream development of chemical substances, including pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, their influence on the genetic apparatus has to be tested. Several in vitro and in vivo assays have been developed to test for genotoxicity. In a first tier, a battery of two to three in vitro tests is recommended to cover mutagenicity, clastogenicity and aneugenicity as main endpoints. This regulatory in vitro test battery is known to have a high sensitivity, which is at the expense of the specificity. The high number of false positive in vitro results leads to excessive in vivo follow-up studies. In the case of cosmetics it may even induce the ban of the particular compound since in Europe the use of experimental animals is no longer allowed for cosmetics. In this article, an alternative approach to derisk a misleading positive Ames test is explored. Hereto we first tested the performance of five existing computational tools to predict the potential mutagenicity of a data set of 132 cosmetic compounds with a known genotoxicity profile. Furthermore, we present, as a proof-of-principle, a strategy in which a combination of computational tools and mechanistic information derived from in vitro transcriptomics analyses is used to derisk a misleading positive Ames test result. Our data shows that this strategy may represent a valuable tool in a weight-of-evidence approach to further evaluate a positive outcome in an Ames test.&lt;/p&gt;</p

Temporal Logics for Hyperproperties

Two new logics for verification of hyperproperties are proposed. Hyperproperties characterize security policies, such as noninterference, as a property of sets of computation paths. Standard temporal logics such as LTL, CTL, and CTL* can refer only to a single path at a time, hence cannot express many hyperproperties of interest. The logics proposed here, HyperLTL and HyperCTL*, add explicit and simultaneous quantification over multiple paths to LTL and to CTL*. This kind of quantification enables expression of hyperproperties. A model checking algorithm for the proposed logics is given. For a fragment of HyperLTL, a prototype model checker has been implemented