Giant urinary bladder calculus: Case report

A vertical calculus weighing more than 100 g is categorised as a giant urinary bladder stone. Giant urinary bladder stones are very rare and very few cases have been reported in English literature and only one case from Africa. This is a case report of a patient with a giant urinary bladder calculus presenting as a rectal tumour. The stone was removed by open cystolithotomy. Possible etiological factors and imaging modalities are discussed

Performability Analysis Methods for Clustered WSNs as Enabling Technology for IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) where sensors are used to couple the physical infrastructure with information and communication technologies is the main concept enabling applications such as smart homes, smart cities and intelligent transportation. The distributed sensor networks are used for interconnecting devices to transmit measured information, and control instructions. Therefore, energy efficiency and performability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are critical for IoT applications. It is possible to combine WSN nodes into smaller groups and set one of the nodes as cluster head (CH) in order to increase the energy efficiency and decrease transmission delay. This approach of combining sensor nodes is known as clustering. Clustering is a technique that has been widely applied for achieving goals such as prolonging the network lifetime, improving scalability and balancing the residual energy of all nodes. Development of algorithms using equal and unequal clustering techniques has been a popular topic in recent studies. Most of these techniques use residual energy of nodes and distance to base station as parameters for selecting cluster heads. This chapter considers analytical modelling approaches of homogeneous clustered WSNs with a centrally located CH responsible for coordinating cluster communication. Unlike most of the existing studies, the performance and energy efficiency of the cluster head are considered together. Furthermore, potential failure of WSN nodes is considered and performance and availability models are integrated as well as the potential repair or replacement of sensor nodes. Existing techniques used in performance evaluation of multiserver systems in general are investigated and analysed in detail. Similarly, pure availability modelling approaches are also analysed. Pure performance modelling techniques, pure availability models and performability models are considered critically for WSN configurations. Since the pure performance models tend to be too optimistic and pure availability models are too conservative, performability models are used in turn for the evaluation. The two-dimensional continuous-time Markov chains (CTMC) which are popularly used in performability analysis are considered together with queuing theory, in order to merge the performance and reliability processes which are relatively mutually independent. The possible use of open queuing networks to model the behaviour of the CH which is expecting intra-cluster as well as inter-cluster traffic while in various operative states is discussed. Among the possible operative conditions, we have states where the servers are broken, fully operational states, states with degraded service facilities and states where sleep scheduling mechanisms are also incorporated to extend the proposed energy models

Serological evidence of MERS-CoV and HKU8-related CoV co-infection in Kenyan camels

10.1080/22221751.2019.1679610Emerging Microbes & Infections8011528-153

Gene expression in coffee

Coffee is cultivated in more than 70 countries of the intertropical belt where it has important economic, social and environmental impacts. As for many other crops, the development of molecular biology technics allowed to launch research projects for coffee analyzing gene expression. In the 90s decade, the first expression studies were performed by Northern-blot or PCR, and focused on genes coding enzymes of the main compounds (e.g., storage proteins, sugars, complex polysaccharides, caffeine and chlorogenic acids) found in green beans. Few years after, the development of 454 pyrosequencing technics generated expressed sequence tags (ESTs) obviously from beans but also from other organs (e.g., leaves and roots) of the two main cultivated coffee species, Coffea arabica and C. canephora. Together with the use of real-time quantitative PCR, these ESTs significantly raised the number of coffee gene expression studies leading to the identification of (1) key genes of biochemical pathways, (2) candidate genes involved in biotic and abiotic stresses as well as (3) molecular markers essential to assess the genetic diversity of the Coffea genus, for example. The development of more recent Illumina sequencing technology now allows large-scale transcriptome analysis in coffee plants and opens the way to analyze the effects on gene expression of complex biological processes like genotype and environment interactions, heterosis and gene regulation in polypoid context like in C. arabica. The aim of the present review is to make an extensive list of coffee genes studied and also to perform an inventory of large-scale sequencing (RNAseq) projects already done or on-going