Value of proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy of brain to study the cerebral metabolic abnormalities in COPD: Initial experience

AbstractBackgroundChronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients were found to have cerebral metabolic abnormalities. Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H MRS) is a sensitive technique that detects metabolic changes of the brain.ObjectiveTo study the cerebral metabolic changes in COPD patients using 1H MRS.MethodsThis study was carried-out on twenty symptomatic COPD patients (16 male and 4 female) and age matched group of 20 healthy controls (11 male and 19 female). Pulmonary function tests, respiratory muscle strength, resting arterial blood gases, and 1H MRS of the brain were carried out on all subjects. The parieto-temporal and occipital regions were localized for 1H MRS. The metabolic ratios of N-acetyl aspartate to creatine (NAA/Cr) and choline to creatine (Cho/Cr) were calculated by the single voxel technique.ResultsIn comparison with healthy control subjects, the mean values of Cho/Cr in COPD patients were lower in parieto-temporal and occipital areas (0.99±0.21 vs. 1.10±0.31; P=0.22) (0.81±0.26 vs. 0.88±0.21; P=0.37), respectively while, the mean values of NAA/Cr in COPD patients were higher in both parieto-temporal and occipital areas of the brain (1.82±0.35 vs. 1.68±0.22; P=0.14) (1.59±0.31 vs. 1.39±0.39; P=0.08), respectively. In COPD patients, significant positive correlations were observed between maximal expiratory pressure (MEP) and NAA/Cr in parieto-temporal area of the brain.ConclusionsThe cerebral metabolites, arterial blood gases, respiratory muscle strength, and pulmonary function tests are altered in symptomatic COPD patients. 1H MRS is a non invasive technique that detects cerebral metabolic changes in COPD patients

Günümüzde insanların Kur’an okumadaki durumları

MakaleGünümüzde Kur’an-ı Kerim okuyanların on gruba ayrıldığını görüyoruz..

Improvement of drought tolerance in five different cultivars of Vicia faba with foliar application of ascorbic acid or silicon

Aim of study: To explore the role of ascorbic acid (AsA) or silicon (Si) in improving drought tolerance in five faba bean cultivars under irrigation water deficit (IWD).Area of study: The experimental farm; 30° 36′ N, 32° 16′ E, Egypt.Material and methods: Three drip irrigation regimes (WW, well-watered, 4000 m3 water ha-1; MD, moderate drought, 3000 m3 water ha-1; and SD, severe drought, 2000 m3 water ha-1) were applied to plants, which were sprayed 25, 40, and 55 days after sowing with 1.5 mM AsA or 2.0 mM Si vs distilled water as a control.Main results: Drought negatively affected physiological attributes (photosynthetic pigments, gas exchange parameters, relative water content, membrane stability index, electrolyte leakage (EL), and lipid peroxidation), which restricted plant growth and yields, and stimulated alterations in both enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant activities. However, AsA or Si application mitigated drought effects on physiological attributes, improving growth, yields and water use efficiency by raising antioxidant activities and suppressing lipid peroxidation and EL in stressful cultivars. The mitigating effects of AsA and Si were more pronounced under MD.Research highlights: ‘Nubaria-2’, ‘Giza-843’, and ‘Sakha-3’ were more tolerant than ‘Giza-716’ and ‘Sakha-4’, suggesting the use of AsA or Si to ameliorate the IWD effects on stressful cultivars. Certain physiological traits exhibited positive association with growth and seed yield, demonstrating their importance in enhancing seed yield under irrigation treatments

Identifikasi Gulma pada Usia Tanaman Kelapa Sawit (Elaeis guineensis Jacq) yang Berbeda pada Tanah Ultisol Di Kebun Jaya Seujahtera PT. ASN

Kelapa Sawit merupakan komoditas tanaman perkebunan dengan penghasil minyak nabati tertinggi. Seiring dengan tumbuh dan berkembangnya tanaman Kelapa Sawit memerlukan perhatian dan perawatan secara intensif, salah satunya dengan pengendalian gulma. Gulma ialah tanaman yang hidup disekitar tanaman budidaya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui jenis-jenis pertumbuhan Gulma di areal perkebunan PT. Agro Sinergi Nusantara. Penelitian ini dilaksanakan dari bulan Mei 2022 hingga Juni 2022 dengan menggunakan Metode Penelitian Kuadrat dengan pengambilan Sample secara langsung. Pengumpulan data dilakukan dengan mengambil sample pada bingkai yang sudah dibentuk dengan ukuran 1x1 meter sebanyak 5 titik didalam 1 blok dengan penempatan secara acak dan beratur. Hasil penelitian ini ditemukan 10 famili dan 18 Jenis Gulma. Frekuensi pertumbuhan Gulma pada umur 10 Tahun di dominansi oleh jenis Gulma Ludwigia palustris dan pada umur tanaman 9 Tahun di dominansi oleh Ehrharta erecta. Persentase penutupan Gulma pada umur 10 Tahun 60% dan pada umur 9 tahun 63%.Kata kunci: Elaeis guinensis Jacq, Tanah PMK, Identifikasi gulma, Frekuensi gulma, PT. AS

Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Analyse the Temporal Behavior of Extremists on Social Media

Aiming at achieving sustainability and quality of life for citizens, future smart cities adopt a data-centric approach to decision making in which assets, people, and events are constantly monitored to inform decisions. Public opinion monitoring is of particular importance to governments and intelligence agencies, who seek to monitor extreme views and attempts of radicalizing individuals in society. While social media platforms provide increased visibility and a platform to express public views freely, such platforms can also be used to manipulate public opinion, spread hate speech, and radicalize others. Natural language processing and data mining techniques have gained popularity for the analysis of social media content and the detection of extremists and radical views expressed online. However, existing approaches simplify the concept of radicalization to a binary problem in which individuals are classified as extremists or non-extremists. Such binary approaches do not capture the radicalization process\u27s complexity that is influenced by many aspects such as social interactions, the impact of opinion leaders, and peer pressure. Moreover, the longitudinal analysis of users\u27 interactions and profile evolution over time is lacking in the literature. Aiming at addressing those limitations, this work proposes a sophisticated framework for the analysis of the temporal behavior of extremists on social media platforms. Far-right extremism during the Trump presidency was used as a case study, and a large dataset of over 259,000 tweets was collected to train and test our models. The results obtained are very promising and encourage the use of advanced social media analytics in the support of effective and timely decision-making

Comparative Study of Sensorless Control Methods of PMSM Drives

Recently, permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) are increasingly used in high performance variable speed drives of many industrial applications. This is because the PMSM has many features, like high efficiency, compactness, high torque to inertia ratio, rapid dynamic response, simple modeling and control, and maintenance-free operation. In most applications, the presence of such a position sensor presents several disadvantages, such as reduced reliability, susceptibility to noise, additional cost and weight and increased complexity of the drive system. For these reasons, the development of alternative indirect methods for speed and position control becomes an important research topic. Many advantages of sensorless control such as reduced hardware complexity, low cost, reduced size, cable elimination, increased noise immunity, increased reliability and decreased maintenance. The key problem in sensorless vector control of ac drives is the accurate dynamic estimation of the stator flux vector over a wide speed range using only terminal variables (currents and voltages). The difficulty comprises state estimation at very low speeds where the fundamental excitation is low and the observer performance tends to be poor. The reasons are the observer sensitivity to model parameter variations, unmodeled nonlinearities and disturbances, limited accuracy of acquisition signals, drifts, and dc offsets. Poor speed estimation at low speed is attributed to data acquisition errors, voltage distortion due the PWM inverter and stator resistance drop which degrading the performance of sensorless drive. Moreover, the noises of system and measurements are considered other main problems. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the different methods of speed and position estimations for sensorless PMSM drives. A deep insight of the advantages and disadvantages of each method is investigated. Furthermore, the difficulties faced sensorless PMSM drives at low speeds as well as the reasons are highly demonstrated. Keywords: permanent magnet, synchronous motor, sensorless control, speed estimation, position estimation, parameter adaptation

An efficient technique for out-of-band power reduction for the eliminated CP-STC-shaped system for 5G requirements

The most dominant needs for the recent wireless mobile applications are higher bandwidth (BW) efficiency, higher energy efficiency higher quality of services (QOS). The main technique in 4G systems is OFDM but it suffers from some limitations such as large peak to average power ratio (PAPR), higher Out-of-Band (OOB) power radiation, and wasting bandwidth efficiency due to cyclic prefix (CP) extension. In his paper, these OFDM limitations will be reduced with low computational complexity compared to filter bank multicarriers (FBMC). The proposed scheme is based on symbol time compression (STC) for OFDM system. The proposed STC-Shaped system is achieved via interleaver-spreader and symbol shaper in the transmitter side in addition to equalization and combining processes in the receiver side. Comparative study between the proposed system and the conventional OFDM in case of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and COST 207 typical multipath fading channel will be presented. The numerical results show that the proposed STC-Shaped scheme reduces OOB significantly. The proposed scheme improves BER in multipath Rayleigh fading although it is without CP. Thus, the proposed system is more robust against inter symbol interference (ISI) compared to conventional OFDM system. Also, the numerical results show that the PAPR of the proposed system is decreased significantly and also, it is derived theoretically. Also, the proposed scheme overcomes CP extension, and hence increases the bandwidth (BW) efficiency. Finally, the computational complexity for the proposed scheme is derived and it has very low complexity compared to FBMC. The system performance measurments has been fulfilled using cumulative distribution function (CDF), power spectral density (PSD) and bit error rate (BER)

Physio-Biochemical and agronomic responses of Faba Beans to exogenously applied Nano-Silicon under drought stress conditions

Nano-silicon application is an efficient novel approach to mitigate the deleterious impacts of drought stress on field crops, which is expected to increase owing to climate change, especially in arid regions. Two-season field studies investigated the influence of foliar-applied nano-silicon (0.5, 1, and 1.5 mM) on physiological and biochemical attributes and their impacts on crop water productivity (CWP) and the agronomic traits of faba beans (Vicia faba). The plants were evaluated under two irrigation regimes: well-watered (100% ETc giving 406 mm ha−1) and drought stress (65% ETc giving 264 mm ha−1). It was found that drought stress significantly decreased gas exchange (leaf net photosynthetic rate, stomatal conductance, and rate of transpiration), water relations (relative water content and membrane stability index), nutrient uptake (N, P, K+, and Ca+2), flavonoids, and phenolic content. In contrast, drought stress significantly increased oxidative stress (H2O2 and O⋅−2) and enzymatic and non-enzymatic antioxidant activities compared with the well-watered treatment. These influences of drought stress were negatively reflected in seed yield-related traits and CWP. However, foliar treatment with nano-silicon, particularly with 1.5 mM, limited the devastating impact of drought stress and markedly enhanced all the aforementioned parameters. Therefore, exogenously applied nano-silicon could be used to improve the CWP and seed and biological yields of faba bean plants under conditions with low water availability in arid environments

Protective activity of sweet sorghum and sugarcane syrups against oxidative stress induced by cadmium in albino rats

The present study was designed to investigate the effect of sweet sorghum and sugarcane syrups as antioxidants on oxidative stress biomarkers and the lipid profile i.e. serum total triglyceride (TG), total cholesterol (TC), high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) and low density lipoproteins cholesterol (LDL-C)) in male rats. Cadmium was received orally to rats daily at a dose of 10mg/L in drinking water. Rats were divided into four groups,-eight rats for each- as follow: (I) control group, (II) cadmium treated group, (III) sweet sorghum syrup solution (500 ppm) once daily at a dose of 1 ml/kg body weight of cadmium acetate solution, (IV) sugarcane syrup solution (500 ppm) and cadmium acetate solution. Bioactive compounds of syrups under investigation were identified, total phenolic and flavonoid contents were determined as well. Results cleared that the effect of variation in varieties on total phenol (mg GAE/ml sample) and antioxidant activity determined by 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl radical (DPPH) assay of syrup was significant (P≤0.05) while it was not significant (P˃0.05) on total flavonoid (mg CE/ml sample).The highest total phenolic content was recorded by sweet sorghum syrup (1.87 mg GAE/ml sample) meanwhile, total flavonoid content varied between (1.09 and 1.36 mg CE/ml sample). Results also cleared that G.T.54-9 sugarcane and Rex sweet sorghum syrup samples exhibited significant (P≤0.05) scavenging activity compared to commercial sugarcane sample that gave lower scavenging activity (97.16, 96.07 and 74.22, respectively).Sweet sorghum and sugarcane syrups significantly affected (P≤0.05) absolute weight of organs and relative weight of both heart and kidney, while the effect on relative weight of liver was not significant (P>0.05). The treatment of sweet sorghum and sugarcane syrups during cadmium acetate administration in rats led to reduction in alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), antioxidant enzymes, urea, creatinine and biomarkers in rat livers, like reduced glutathione , catalase ,malondialdehyde ,serum total triglyceride, total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol and low density lipoproteins cholesterol back near to normal when compared to control rats. In general, the treatment with sugarcane syrup reduced the cadmium acetate induced hepatotoxicity in rats