The role of local orography on the development of a severe rainfall event over western Peninsular Malaysia: a case study

Severe rainfall events are common in western Peninsular Malaysia. They are usually short and intense, and occasionally cause flash floods and landslides. Forecasting these local events is difficult and understanding the mechanisms of the rainfall events is vital for the advancement of tropical weather forecasting. This study investigates the mechanisms responsible for a local heavy rainfall event on 2 May 2012 that caused flash floods and landslides using both observations and simulations with the limited-area high-resolution UK Met Office Unified Model (MetUM). Results suggest that previous day rainfalls over Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra Island influenced the development of overnight rainfall over the Strait of Malacca by low-level flow convergence. Afternoon convection over the Titiwangsa mountains over Peninsular Malaysia then induced rainfall development and the combination of these two events influenced the development of severe convective storm over western Peninsular Malaysia. Additionally, anomalously strong low-level north-westerlies also contributed to this event. Sensitivity studies were carried out to investigate the influence of the local orography on this event. Flattened Peninsular Malaysia orography causes a lack of rainfall over the central part of Peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra Island and produces a weaker overnight rainfall over the Strait of Malacca. By removing Sumatra Island in the final experiment, the western and inland parts of Peninsular Malaysia would receive more rainfall, as this region is more influenced by the westerly wind from the Indian Ocean. These results suggest the importance of the interation between land masses, orography, low-level flow and the diurnal cycle on the development of heavy rainfall events

Defoliation of in vitro shootlets of Azadirachta excelsa (Jack) M. Jacobs: a possible solution

Defoliation is a common phenomenon which usually hinders the productivity of plantlets of Azadirachta excelsa through micropropagation. Thus, a study to develop a procedure to overcome defoliation of in vitro shootlets of A. excelsa after undergoing rooting stage was conducted. Shoots exhibiting defoliation were transferred on to MS medium supplemented either with only 0.24% gelrite, mixture of 0.1 mgl-1 BAP, 1.0 mgl-1 NAA and 0.75% difco-bacto agar, mixture of 0.24% gelrite and 0.2% activated charcoal and mixture of 0.24% gelrite, 2.0 mgl-1 BAP and 10.0 mgl-1 AgNO3. The results indicated that the different treatment produced significant effects at P<0.05 on the number of leaves, shoot length, root length and number of axillary shoots after 30 days of culture incubation. The MS medium supplemented only with 0.24% gelrite was the most effective treatment producing the highest number of leaves (9.8) and the longest shoot and root lengths of 17.2 mm and 43.5 mm respectively. The addition of NAA, BAP and AgNO3 stimulated callus formation and growth of axillary shoot

Role of Interferons in the Development of Diagnostics, Vaccines, and Therapy for Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). About one-third of the world’s population is latently infected with TB and 5–15% of them will develop active TB in their lifetime. It is estimated that each case of active TB may cause 10–20 new infections. Host immune response to Mtb is influenced by interferon- (IFN-) signaling pathways, particularly by type I and type II interferons (IFNs). The latter that consists of IFN-γ has been associated with the promotion of Th1 immune response which is associated with protection against TB. Although this aspect remains controversial at present due to the lack of established correlates of protection, currently, there are different prophylactic, diagnostic, and immunotherapeutic approaches in which IFNs play an important role. This review summarizes the main aspects related with the biology of IFNs, mainly associated with TB, as well as presents the main applications of these cytokines related to prophylaxis, diagnosis, and immunotherapy of TB

Pulmonary non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections: current state and future management

Currently, there is a trend of increasing incidence in pulmonary non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections (PNTM) together with a decrease in tuberculosis (TB) incidence, particularly in developed countries. The prevalence of PNTM in underdeveloped and developing countries remains unclear as there is still a lack of detection methods that could clearly diagnose PNTM applicable in these low-resource settings. Since non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are environmental pathogens, the vicinity favouring host-pathogen interactions is known as important predisposing factor for PNTM. The ongoing changes in world population, as well as socio-political and economic factors, are linked to the rise in the incidence of PNTM. Development is an important factor for the improvement of population well-being, but it has also been linked, in general, to detrimental environmental consequences, including the rise of emergent (usually neglected) infectious diseases, such as PNTM. The rise of neglected PNTM infections requires the expansion of the current efforts on the development of diagnostics, therapies and vaccines for mycobacterial diseases, which at present, are mainly focused on TB. This review discuss the current situation of PNTM and its predisposing factors, as well as the efforts and challenges for their control

Immunogenicity of recombinant Mycobacterium bovis bacille Calmette-Guèrin clones expressing T and B cell epitopes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis antigens

Recombinant Mycobacterium bovis bacille Calmette-Guèrin (rBCG) expressing three T cell epitopes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) Ag85B antigen (P1, P2, P3) fused to the Mtb8.4 protein (rBCG018) or a combination of these antigens fused to B cell epitopes from ESAT-6, CFP-10 and MTP40 proteins (rBCG032) were used to immunize Balb/c mice. Total IgG responses were determined against Mtb8.4 antigen and ESAT-6 and CFP-10 B cell epitopes after immunization with rBCG032. Mice immunized with rBCG032 showed a significant increase in IgG1 and IgG2a antibodies against ESAT-6 and MTP40 (P1) B cell epitopes and IgG3 against both P1 and P2 B cell epitopes of MPT40. Splenocytes from mice immunized with rBCG018 proliferated against Ag85B P2 and P3 T cell epitopes and Mtb8.4 protein whereas those from mice-immunized with rBCG032 responded against all Ag85B epitopes and the ESAT-6 B cell epitope. CD4+ and CD8+ lymphocytes from mice immunized with rBCG018 produced primarily Th1 type cytokines in response to the T cell epitopes. Similar pattern of recognition against the T cell epitopes were obtained with rBCG032 with the additional recognition of ESAT-6, CFP-10 and one of the MTP40 B cell epitopes with the same pattern of cytokines. This study demonstrates that rBCG constructs expressing either T or T and B cell epitopes of MTB induced appropriate immunogenicity against MTB

A New Threshold Estimation Method of SEMG Wavelet De-noising for Prolonged Fatigue Identification

In sports training, fatigue management is very important to avoid muscle injury and chronic fatigue syndrome. It occurs due to untreated normal fatigue (NF) which leads to a higher level of fatigue. This paper refers to the higher level of fatigue condition as prolonged fatigue (PF). Fatigue can be identified based on musculoskeletal, physiological, psychological, immunological and endocrinal system condition. Presently, musculoskeletal or muscle condition can be accessed quantitatively based on an invasive technique known as biopsies. It is accurate to evaluate muscle condition, but not suitable for frequent measurements. The non-invasive method used through self-evaluation tools such as questionnaire is not a quantitative measurement and sometimes is difficult to quantify. There are other non-invasive methods to evaluate muscle condition known as surface electromyography (SEMG). Before this, SEMG were only widely used to classify between non-fatigue and NF conditions. However, NF prediction might not be accurate and suitable to be used on athletes since they are required to undergo high-intensive training every day and this involves PF condition. Recently, SEMG signals characteristics found out to be able to evaluate ionic concentration changes in the muscle due to intensive training. The signals characteristics are different compared to NF identification. Therefore, high quality SEMG plays an important role in PF detection to avoid misinterpretation. In this study, twenty healthy participants were recruited and performed five consecutive days of intensive training to induce PF symptoms. The training was based on Bruce Protocol treadmill test and SEMG data were collected from the participants’ rectus femoris muscle. This paper pre-processed SEMG signals using Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) ‘db’ 45 with different threshold estimation techniques of de-noising such as RigRSURE, HeurSURE, minimax, universal threshold and a new estimation of threshold method. The new method able to overcome the limitation of conventional methods which estimate threshold based on statistical principles. Most importantly, the new method can preserve significant SEMG information, remove corner frequency and mitigate baseline noises. The performance of conventional and propose methods can then be evaluated based on PF classification performance. The de-noised signals extracted based on time, frequency and time-frequency features. Naïve Bayes classification results using time and frequency features indicate that the new estimation of threshold method with time and frequency features have the highest accuracy (98%), compared to RigRSURE (85%), HuerSURE (68%), Universal Threshold (74%) and minimax (76%) in PF identification

The Impact of Parameter Identification Methods on Drug Therapy Control in an Intensive Care Unit

This paper investigates the impact of fast parameter identification methods, which do not require any forward simulations, on model-based glucose control, using retrospective data in the Christchurch Hospital Intensive Care Unit. The integral-based identification method has been previously clinically validated and extensively applied in a number of biomedical applications; and is a crucial element in the presented model-based therapeutics approach. Common non-linear regression and gradient descent approaches are too computationally intense and not suitable for the glucose control applications presented. The main focus in this paper is on better characterizing and understanding the importance of the integral in the formulation and the effect it has on model-based drug therapy control. As a comparison, a potentially more natural derivative formulation which has the same computation speed advantages is investigated, and is shown to go unstable with respect to modelling error which is always present clinically. The integral method remains robust

Synthesis of poly(hydroxamic acid) ligand from polymer grafted corn-cob cellulose for transition metals extraction

Poly(hydroxamic acid) ligand was synthesized using ester functionalities of cellulose-graft-poly(methyl acrylate) copolymer, and products are characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, field emission scanning electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy analysis. The poly(hydroxamic acid) ligand was utilized for the sensing and removal of transition metal ions form aqueous solutions. The solution pH is found a key factor for the optical detection of metal ions, and the reflectance spectra of the [Cu-ligand]n+ complex were observed to be the highest absorbance 99.5% at pH?6. With the increase of Cu2+ ion concentration, the reflectance spectra were increased, and a broad peak at 705?nm indicated that the charge transfer (p-p transition) complex was formed. The adsorption capacity with copper was found to be superior, 320?mg?g-1, and adsorption capacities for other transition metal ions were also found to be good such as Fe3+, Mn2+, Co3+, Cr3+, Ni2+, and Zn2+ were 255, 260, 300, 280, 233, and 223?mg?g-1, respectively, at pH?6. The experimental data show that all metal ions fitted well with the pseudo-second-order rate equation. The sorption results of the transition metal ions onto ligand were well fitted with Langmuir isotherm model (R2?>?0.98), which implies the homogenous and monolayer character of poly(hydroxamic acid) ligand surface. Eleven cycles sorption/desorption process were applied to verify the reusability of this adsorbent. The investigation of sorption and extraction efficiency in each cycle indicated that this new type of adsorbent can be recycled in many cycles with no significant loss in its original detection and removal capability

Translation and Validation of a Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) Version of the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA)

Objectives: The 32-item Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) is a widely-used measure of multidimensional interoception. In the present study, we examined the psychometric properties of a Bahasa Malaysia (Malay) translation of the MAIA. Methods: An online sample of 815 Malaysian Malays (women n = 403) completed a novel translation of the MAIA. Validated measures of trait mindfulness and self-esteem were also completed to facilitate a preliminary assessment of convergent validity. Results: Exploratory factor analysis indicated that the MAIA items reduced to a 19-item, 3-factor model. The 3-factor model was further tested using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) alongside the parent 8-factor model. Both models had good fit on some indices, but less-than-ideal fit on other indices. The 3-factor model evidenced comparatively better fit, with fit indices being adequate following modification. Multi-group CFA indicated both the 3-factor model and the 8-factor model had full strict invariance across sex. However, evidence for construct and convergent validity was mixed. Conclusions: Overall the 3-dimensional Malay MAIA was demonstrated to be both internally consistent and invariant across sex, but further evidence of construct and convergent validity is required. Issues that affect the dimensionality of MAIA scores in the present and extant work are discussed in conclusion