Evaluation of Varieties and Hybrids for Physico-Chemical Characters in Papaya (Carica papaya L.)

Papaya (Carica papaya L., Caricaceae) is a fruit crop of commercial significance in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The present investigation was carried out to assess physico-chemical characteristics of 10 genotypes of papaya under Bengaluru conditions. Results revealed that the varieties, Sunrise Solo, Waimanalo and the hybrids, H-39 and H-57 had medium-sized fruits. Fruit cavity index was low in the varieties Sunrise Solo, Pink Flesh Sweet and in hybrids H-39 and H-57. Further, Sunrise Solo recorded the highest plant height while the shortest plants were observed in Pusa Dwarf. Weight of the fruits was found to vary from 486.67g in Sunrise Solo, to 1380.33g in Pusa Dwarf. Pulp thickness, TSS and ascorbic acid were found to be maximum in hybrids H-39 and H-57. Lowest titratable acidity too was observed in the hybrids H-39 and H-57

Privacy Risks Analysis and Mitigation in Federated Learning for Medical Images

Federated learning (FL) is gaining increasing popularity in the medical domain for analyzing medical images, which is considered an effective technique to safeguard sensitive patient data and comply with privacy regulations. However, several recent studies have revealed that the default settings of FL may leak private training data under privacy attacks. Thus, it is still unclear whether and to what extent such privacy risks of FL exist in the medical domain, and if so, "how to mitigate such risks?". In this paper, first, we propose a holistic framework for Medical data Privacy risk analysis and mitigation in Federated Learning (MedPFL) to analyze privacy risks and develop effective mitigation strategies in FL for protecting private medical data. Second, we demonstrate the substantial privacy risks of using FL to process medical images, where adversaries can easily perform privacy attacks to reconstruct private medical images accurately. Third, we show that the defense approach of adding random noises may not always work effectively to protect medical images against privacy attacks in FL, which poses unique and pressing challenges associated with medical data for privacy protection.Comment: V

Evaluation of analgesic, antioxidant and cytotoxic activities of ethanol extract of Clerodendrum viscosum Vent

Clerodendrum viscosum Vent. is a very common plant in Bangladesh which is locally familiar as “Bhat” or “Ghetu”. Here, the ethanol extract of whole plant part of C. viscosum and its various solvent (petroleum-ether, chloroform and ethyl acetate) fractions were subjected for the appraisal of analgesic, antioxidant and cytotoxic activities. Analgesic activity was tested by acetic acid-induced writhing model in Swiss albino mice. All the plant samples at the oral doses of 100- and 200 mg/kg body weight were found to exhibit significant (p<0.05) pain reducing activity in test animals. Highest inhibition of writhing was 62.38% by the ethyl acetate soluble fraction at dose of 200 mg/kg body weight while the standard drug diclofenac sodium (50 mg/kg) produces 76.14% reduction of abdominal writhing. DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) free radical quenching assay was employed to determine the antioxidant potential of the plant samples while cytotoxic activity was checked by brine shrimp lethality bioassay. In DPPH radical scavenging assay, the plant samples showed prominent antioxidant activity. Among all, the ethyl acetate fraction showed maximum antioxidant potential with IC50 value of 28.02±0.53 μg/ml. In cytotoxic assay, the petroleum-ether fraction demonstrated strong cytotoxicity with LC50 value of 1.42±1.12 μg/ml. In summary, C. viscosum extracts possess significant analgesic, antioxidant and cytotoxic activities which rationalize its traditional use in folk medicine

Simulations of a weakly conducting droplet under the influence of an alternating electric field

We investigate the electrohydrodynamics of an initially spherical droplet under the influence of an external alternating electric field by conducting axisymmetric numerical simulations using a charge-conservative volume-of-fluid based finite volume flow solver. The mean amplitude of shape oscillations of a droplet subjected to an alternating electric field for leaky dielectric fluids is the same as the steady-state deformation under an equivalent root mean squared direct electric field for all possible electrical conductivity ratio $(K_r)$ and permittivity ratio $(S)$ of the droplet to the surrounding fluid. In contrast, our simulations for weakly conducting media show that this equivalence between alternating and direct electric fields does not hold for $K_r \ne S$. Moreover, for a range of parameters, the deformation obtained using the alternating and direct electric fields is qualitatively different, i.e. for low $K_r$ and high $S$, the droplet becomes prolate under alternating electric field but deforms to an oblate shape in the case of the equivalent direct electric field. A parametric study is conducted by varying the time period of the applied alternating electric field, the permittivity and the electrical conductivity ratios. It is observed that while increasing $K_r$ has a negligible effect on the deformation dynamics of the droplet for $K_r<S$, it enhances the deformation of the droplet when $K_r>S$ for both alternating and direct electric fields. We believe that our results may be of immense consequence in explaining the morphological evolution of droplets in a plethora of scenarios ranging from nature to biology.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

Bacteriological examination of drinking water in Burdwan, India with reference to coliforms

Most probable number (MPN) test was done to detect the coliform in water samples collected from mobile vendors, sweet shops and tap water supplied from Burdwan municipality. The study revealed that the number of coliforms was very high (1600) in water samples collected from mobile vendors. The bacteria were identified as Escherichia coli. Bacteriological examination of water samples collected from different sources showed that the water of mobile vendors and sweet shops of Burdwan marketarea was not potable while the municipal tap water was found to be safe for drinking

Spreading of Non-Newtonian and Newtonian Fluids on a Solid Substrate under Pressure

Strongly non-Newtonian fluids namely, aqueous gels of starch, are shown to exhibit visco-elastic behavior, when subjected to a load. We study arrowroot and potato starch gels. When a droplet of the fluid is sandwiched between two glass plates and compressed, the area of contact between the fluid and plates increases in an oscillatory manner. This is unlike Newtonian fluids, where the area increases monotonically in a similar situation. The periphery moreover, develops an instability, which looks similar to Saffman Taylor fingers. This is not normally seen under compression. The loading history is also found to affect the manner of spreading. We attempt to describe the non-Newtonian nature of the fluid through a visco-elastic model incorporating generalized calculus. This is shown to reproduce qualitatively the oscillatory variation in the surface strain.Comment: 11 page

Deconfinement Transition in Large N Lattice Gauge Theory

We study analytically the phase diagram of the pure $SU(N)$ lattice gauge theory at finite temperature, and we attempt to estimate the critical deconfinement temperature. We apply large $N$ techniques to the Wilson and to the Heat Kernel action, and we study the resulting models both in the strong coupling and in the weak coupling limits. Using the Heat Kernel action, we establish an interesting connection between the Douglas-Kazakov phase transition of two-dimensional QCD and the deconfining transition in $d$ dimensions. The analytic results obtained for the critical temperature compare well with Montecarlo simulations of the full theory in $(2+1)$ and in $(3+1)$ dimensions.Comment: 39 pages (Latex) + 4 ps-figures (using EPSF), DFTT 30/9