The Effects of Maternal Supplementation of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on Visual, Neurobehavioural, and Developmental Outcomes of the Child: A Systematic Review of the Randomized Trials

Polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) use in pregnancy has been promoted as beneficial for visual and neurobehavioural development in the fetus. However, no systematic review of the randomized trials has been conducted. The objective of this review was to evaluate potential advantages of this regiment by reviewing all randomized trials in pregnancy. Methods. Systematic review of randomized controlled studies comparing cognitive and visual achievements among infants whose mothers were treated and untreated with PUFA during gestation. Results. Nine studies met the inclusion criteria, three focusing on visual and six on neurobehavioural development. Due to differing outcome measurements in the infants, the studies could not be combined into a formal meta-analysis. Synthesizing the existing data, for both visual and neurobehavioural development, most studies could not show sustained benefits to infant cognition or visual development. Conclusion. At the present time a recommendation to change practice and supplement all expecting mothers with PUFA to improve offspring vision or neurobehavioural function is not supported by existing evidence

Distributed Access by Multiple Sources for Age of Information Minimization Over a Finite Horizon

Age of information (AoI) quantifies the freshness of updates in real time applications, such as vehicular networking or road traffic monitoring and control. This study explores the optimization of AoI over a finite horizon for multiple IoT devices independently tracking the same process of interest and reporting status updates. In this setting, the efficiency of distributed policies where sources probabilistically report their measurements is not adequate. Even assuming pre-defined rendez-vous transmission instants, if the choice about which one to utilize is left to the individual source, lack of coordination may arise, causing simultaneous transmissions (redundant and therefore inefficient) at times, and, consequently, other intervals where no node transmits. We investigate practical solutions to this problem inspired by random medium access techniques. Firstly, we introduce a protocol where no transmission instant is deserted thanks to carrier sensing. If no nodes choose to transmit, they all sense the channel as idle, and randomly revise their decision until at least one transmits. Subsequently, we explore an uneven spread of the transmission instants to balance the resulting scheduling. We measure the effectiveness of these improvements compared to full coordination. These techniques are shown to improve distributed policies by more than 20%, and in general offer valuable insights for future research on sensing in multi-source autonomic environments

Novel charger topologies for plug-in hybrid electric vehicle

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are based on a drive system that combines an internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric motor (EM) with a chemical energy storage...A plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) has a battery/ultracapacitor that is able to be recharged from an electrical outlet. The vehicle is used for short trips of moderate speed when it operates as a purely electric vehicle (EV). The long-range and additional power of the ICEE is available when needed. In the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept, the rechargeable energy storage system (RESS) has three important purposes. First, it accumulates energy delivered by a dynamo, regenerative breaking, or power grid. Second, it provides energy to the electric propulsion system during the drive. Third, a number of PHEVs could deliver electrical energy tot he power grid and improve power conditioning on the national level, acting as a distributed power generation system...In this paper, modular and cascaded charger topologies are presented and their operation is analyzed in detail --Abstract, page iv