3,225 research outputs found
Phase Stability and Thermoelectric Properties of the Mineral FeS2: An Ab Initio Study
First principles calculations were carried out to study the phase stability
and thermoelectric properties of the naturally occurring marcasite phase of
FeS at ambient condition as well as under pressure. Two distinct density
functional approaches has been used to investigate the above mentioned
properties. The plane wave pseudopotential approach was used to study the phase
stability and structural, elastic, and vibrational properties. The full
potential linear augment plane wave method has been used to study the
electronic structure and thermoelectric properties. From the total energy
calculations, it is clearly seen that marcasite FeS is stable at ambient
conditions, and it undergoes a first order phase transition to pyrite FeS
at around 3.7 GPa with a volume collapse of about 3. The calculated ground
state properties such as lattice parameters, bond lengths and bulk modulus of
marcasite FeS agree quite well with the experiment. Apart from the above
studies, phonon dispersion curves unambiguously indicate that marcasite phase
is stable under ambient conditions. Further, we do not observe any phonon
softening across the marcasite to pyrite transition and the possible reason
driving the transition is also analyzed in the present study, which has not
been attempted earlier. In addition, we have also calculated the electronic
structure and thermoelectric properties of the both marcasite and pyrite
FeS. We find a high thermopower for both the phases, especially with p-type
doping, which enables us to predict that FeS might find promising
applications as good thermoelectric materials.Comment: 10 Figure
Attention-based Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection in Conversation using RNN
The availability of an enormous quantity of multimodal data and its widespread applications, automatic sentiment analysis and emotion classification in the conversation has become an interesting research topic among the research community. The interlocutor state, context state between the neighboring utterances and multimodal fusion play an important role in multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion detection in conversation. In this article, the recurrent neural network (RNN) based method is developed to capture the interlocutor state and contextual state between the utterances. The pair-wise attention mechanism is used to understand the relationship between the modalities and their importance before fusion. First, two-two combinations of modalities are fused at a time and finally, all the modalities are fused to form the trimodal representation feature vector. The experiments are conducted on three standard datasets such as IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSEI, and CMU-MOSI. The proposed model is evaluated using two metrics such as accuracy and F1-Score and the results demonstrate that the proposed model performs better than the standard baselines
Friend Turns Foe: Transformation of Anti-Inflammatory HDL to Proinflammatory HDL during Acute-Phase Response
High-density lipoprotein (HDL) is a major carrier of cholesterol in the blood. Unlike other lipoproteins, physiological functions of HDL influence the cardiovascular system in favorable ways except when HDL is modified pathologically. The cardioprotective mechanism of HDL is mainly based on reverse cholesterol transport, but there has been an emerging interest in the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant roles of HDL. These latter activities of HDL are compromised in many pathological states associated with inflammation. Further, abnormal HDL can become proinflammatory contributing to oxidative damage. In this paper, we discuss the functional heterogeneity of HDL, how alterations in these particles in inflammatory states result in loss of both antioxidant activity and reverse cholesterol transport in relation to atherosclerosis, and the need for assays to predict its functionality
Winning quick and dirty: the greedy random walk
As a strategy to complete games quickly, we investigate one-dimensional
random walks where the step length increases deterministically upon each return
to the origin. When the step length after the kth return equals k, the
displacement of the walk x grows linearly in time. Asymptotically, the
probability distribution of displacements is a purely exponentially decaying
function of |x|/t. The probability E(t,L) for the walk to escape a bounded
domain of size L at time t decays algebraically in the long time limit, E(t,L)
~ L/t^2. Consequently, the mean escape time ~ L ln L, while ~
L^{2n-1} for n>1. Corresponding results are derived when the step length after
the kth return scales as k^alpha$ for alpha>0.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 2-column revtext4 forma
Recent advances in starch–clay nanocomposites
Biological nanocomposites are a valuable addition to the existing nanocomposite materials and eventually can substitute petroleum-based composite materials in numerous applications due to their inherent advantages such as biodegradability, eco-friendliness, low cost, and easy availability to name a few. Recently, polymer–clay nanocomposites have achieved much more attention due to their enhanced properties such as size dispersion and significant enhancement in physicochemical and mechanical properties in comparison to the pure polymer systems. Among various biopolymers, starch is one of the most abundant natural polymers on the earth and is highly valuable due to its chemical and physical properties. Starch polymer has highly increased potential as an alternative to petroleum-based materials. However, starch cannot be used alone and starch–clay nanocomposite has emerged as a new potential green sustainable material. This article focuses on recent progress in starch-based nanocomposites with particular emphasis on starch–clay nanocomposite preparation, properties, and applications
Effect of Nucart VG (Boswellia serrata in combination with veg glucosamine sulphate) in comparison with glucosamine sulphate to improve quality of life of knee osteoarthritis patients: a randomized controlled trial
Background: Boswellia serrata has been proved to be an effective and safe herb for the treatment of osteoarthritis (OA). This study aims at assessing the synergistic effect of this herb with vegetarian glucosamine sulphate, a nutritional supplement, on knee osteoarthritis using quality of life indicators.Methods: This was an open label, parallel group randomized trial of 12-week duration. Sixty-six subjects were equally randomized to two treatment arms: Boswellia serrata extract (600 mg) and glucosamine (750 mg) [Nucart VG]; and glucosamine sulphate (market comparator) 750 mg. Patients were administered 1 tablet twice-a-day post-meal for three months. Efficacy of treatment was measured on primary end-points like EuroQol-5D (EQ-5D) (health status indicator), visual analogue scale (VAS) and Western Ontario and McMaster Universities osteoarthritis index (WOMAC) scale (pain indicators), while safety was measured in terms of vital parameters. Both intention-to-treat (ITT) and per-protocol (PP) analyses were performed for comparing scores between the two groups.Results: The baseline characteristics of patients between two groups were insignificantly different (p>0.05). In ITT analysis, the health status (EQ-5D score) of patients in Nucart VG group improved significantly than the comparator group at follow up 2 (p=0.037) and showed further improvement at follow up 3 (p=0.012). The pain indicators i.e. VAS and WOMAC scores were significantly lower in Nucart VG group right from follow up 1 till follow up 3 (p<0.05). Similar were the observations during PP analysis.Conclusions: Nucart VG is beneficial for the treatment of mild to moderate knee OA, as inferred from the functional and health status assessment
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