Ghrelin; The Renown Hormone

Ghrelin , a 28 amino acid gastric peptide, was found to be a potent releaser of GH and in addition, actively participate in controlling energy balance and the regulation of food intake. Specifically, plasma ghrelin originates in the oxyntic gland where A-like cells exist and is secreted into the bloodstream. Lower concentrations have also been reported at various regions in the body. It is well known that ghrelin participates in the regulation of many functions in the body

Seismic capacity evaluation of unreinforced masonry residential buildings in Albania

This study evaluates seismic capacity of the unreinforced masonry buildings with the selected template designs constructed per pre-modern code in Albania considering nonlinear behaviour of masonry. Three residential buildings with template designs were selected to represent an important percentage of residential buildings in medium-size cities located in seismic regions of Albania. Selection of template designed buildings and material properties were based on archive and site survey in several cities of Albania. Capacity curves of investigated buildings were determined by pushover analyses conducted in two principal directions. The seismic performances of these buildings have been determined for various earthquake levels. Seismic capacity evaluation was carried out in accordance with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) 440 guidelines. Reasons for building damages in past earthquakes are examined using the results of capacity assessment of investigated buildings. It is concluded that of the residential buildings with the template design, with the exception of one, are far from satisfying required performance criteria. Furthermore, deficiencies and possible solutions to improve the capacity of investigated buildings are discussed

Infrapatellar Fat Pad Para-Articular Osteochondroma: A Ten-Year Follow-up and Review

Introduction: Para-articular masses are not clear enough in terms of their etiology and nomenclature. Although surgical removal of the mass is the preferred treatment, long term follow-up after surgical treatment has not been reported yet. The current study presents a patient with the osteo-cartilaginous mass of infrapatellar region, diagnosed after a trauma. This case has the longest follow-up period in the literature. Case Presentation: A 52-year-old female patient referred after falling down on her right knee. Lateral radiographs of the knee revealed a mass in the infrapatellar area. The case was treated surgically by total excision of the mass. The mass was extra-capsular with lobular and irregular shape. After mass removal the clinical course was uneventful and at the 10-year follow-up, no signs of recurrence were evident clinically or radiologically. Conclusions: Tumor-like lesions within the infrapatellar fat pad should remind the para-articular osteochondroma. Although its etiology has not yet been elicited, operative removal of the mass is the preferred treatment of choice and also curative in long-term follow-up

Testing robustness of relative complexity measure method constructing robust phylogenetic trees for Galanthus L. Using the relative complexity measure

Background: Most phylogeny analysis methods based on molecular sequences use multiple alignment where the quality of the alignment, which is dependent on the alignment parameters, determines the accuracy of the resulting trees. Different parameter combinations chosen for the multiple alignment may result in different phylogenies. A new non-alignment based approach, Relative Complexity Measure (RCM), has been introduced to tackle this problem and proven to work in fungi and mitochondrial DNA. Result: In this work, we present an application of the RCM method to reconstruct robust phylogenetic trees using sequence data for genus Galanthus obtained from different regions in Turkey. Phylogenies have been analyzed using nuclear and chloroplast DNA sequences. Results showed that, the tree obtained from nuclear ribosomal RNA gene sequences was more robust, while the tree obtained from the chloroplast DNA showed a higher degree of variation. Conclusions: Phylogenies generated by Relative Complexity Measure were found to be robust and results of RCM were more reliable than the compared techniques. Particularly, to overcome MSA-based problems, RCM seems to be a reasonable way and a good alternative to MSA-based phylogenetic analysis. We believe our method will become a mainstream phylogeny construction method especially for the highly variable sequence families where the accuracy of the MSA heavily depends on the alignment parameters

Structural damages of L'Aquila (Italy) earthquake

On 6 April 2009 an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 occurred in L'Aquila city, Italy. In the city center and surrounding villages many masonry and reinforced concrete (RC) buildings were heavily damaged or collapsed. After the earthquake, the inspection carried out in the region provided relevant results concerning the quality of the materials, method of construction and the performance of the structures. The region was initially inhabited in the 13th century and has many historic structures. The main structural materials are unreinforced masonry (URM) composed of rubble stone, brick, and hollow clay tile. Masonry units suffered the worst damage. Wood flooring systems and corrugated steel roofs are common in URM buildings. Moreover, unconfined gable walls, excessive wall thicknesses without connection with each other are among the most common deficiencies of poorly constructed masonry structures. These walls caused an increase in earthquake loads. The quality of the materials and the construction were not in accordance with the standards. On the other hand, several modern, non-ductile concrete frame buildings have collapsed. Poor concrete quality and poor reinforcement detailing caused damage in reinforced concrete structures. Furthermore, many structural deficiencies such as non-ductile detailing, strong beams-weak columns and were commonly observed. In this paper, reasons why the buildings were damaged in the 6 April 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy are given. Some suggestions are made to prevent such disasters in the future

A Suspended Array of Square Patch Metamaterial Absorbers for Terahertz Applications

A suspended array of square metallic patches on a thin dielectric layer is introduced as a terahertz absorber. The absorber is fabricated on a metalized substrate and the device exhibits metamaterial behavior at specific frequencies determined by the size of the patches. It is feasible to place patches with different sizes in an array formation for a broadband absorber. Design of the absorber is described using electromagnetic simulations. The absorber structure was fabricated on a silicon wafer and its characteristics were measured using a terahertz time domain spectroscope. The measured data match well the simulations indicating strong absorption peaks in a band of 0.5-2 THz

A Linear General Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Based Computing With Words Approach for Realising an Ambient Intelligent Platform for Cooking Recipes Recommendation

This paper addresses the need to enhance transparency in ambient intelligent environments by developing more natural ways of interaction, which allow the users to communicate easily with the hidden networked devices rather than embedding obtrusive tablets and computing equipment throughout their surroundings. Ambient intelligence vision aims to realize digital environments that adapt to users in a responsive, transparent, and context-aware manner in order to enhance users' comfort. It is, therefore, appropriate to employ the paradigm of “computing with words” (CWWs), which aims to mimic the ability of humans to communicate transparently and manipulate perceptions via words. One of the daily activities that would increase the comfort levels of the users (especially people with disabilities) is cooking and performing tasks in the kitchen. Existing approaches on food preparation, cooking, and recipe recommendation stress on healthy eating and balanced meal choices while providing limited personalization features through the use of intrusive user interfaces. Herein, we present an application, which transparently interacts with users based on a novel CWWs approach in order to predict the recipe's difficulty level and to recommend an appropriate recipe depending on the user's mood, appetite, and spare time. The proposed CWWs framework is based on linear general type-2 (LGT2) fuzzy sets, which linearly quantify the linguistic modifiers in the third dimension in order to better represent the user perceptions while avoiding the drawbacks of type-1 and interval type-2 fuzzy sets. The LGT2-based CWWs framework can learn from user experiences and adapt to them in order to establish more natural human-machine interaction. We have carried numerous real-world experiments with various users in the University of Essex intelligent flat. The comparison analysis between interval type-2 fuzzy sets and LGT2 fuzzy sets demonstrates up to 55.43% improvement when general type-2 fuzzy sets are used than when interval type-2 fuzzy sets are used instead. The quantitative and qualitative analysis both show the success of the system in providing a natural interaction with the users for recommending food recipes where the quantitative analysis shows the high statistical correlation between the system output and the users' feedback; the qualitative analysis presents social scienc

Transmitter and Receiver Architectures for Molecular Communications: A Survey on Physical Design with Modulation, Coding, and Detection Techniques

Inspired by nature, molecular communications (MC), i.e., the use of molecules to encode, transmit, and receive information, stands as the most promising communication paradigm to realize the nanonetworks. Even though there has been extensive theoretical research toward nanoscale MC, there are no examples of implemented nanoscale MC networks. The main reason for this lies in the peculiarities of nanoscale physics, challenges in nanoscale fabrication, and highly stochastic nature of the biochemical domain of envisioned nanonetwork applications. This mandates developing novel device architectures and communication methods compatible with MC constraints. To that end, various transmitter and receiver designs for MC have been proposed in the literature together with numerable modulation, coding, and detection techniques. However, these works fall into domains of a very wide spectrum of disciplines, including, but not limited to, information and communication theory, quantum physics, materials science, nanofabrication, physiology, and synthetic biology. Therefore, we believe it is imperative for the progress of the field that an organized exposition of cumulative knowledge on the subject matter can be compiled. Thus, to fill this gap, in this comprehensive survey, we review the existing literature on transmitter and receiver architectures toward realizing MC among nanomaterial-based nanomachines and/or biological entities and provide a complete overview of modulation, coding, and detection techniques employed for MC. Moreover, we identify the most significant shortcomings and challenges in all these research areas and propose potential solutions to overcome some of them.This work was supported in part by the European Research Council (ERC) Projects MINERVA under Grant ERC-2013-CoG #616922 and MINERGRACE under Grant ERC-2017-PoC #780645

A Quantum-Quantum Metropolis Algorithm

Recently, the idea of classical Metropolis sampling through Markov chains has been generalized for quantum Hamiltonians. However, the underlying Markov chain of this algorithm is still classical in nature. Due to Szegedy's method, the Markov chains of classical Hamiltonians can achieve a quadratic quantum speedup in the eigenvalue gap of the corresponding transition matrix. A natural question to ask is whether Szegedy's quantum speedup is merely a consequence of employing classical Hamiltonians, where the eigenstates simply coincide with the computational basis, making cloning of the classical information possible. We solve this problem by introducing a quantum version of the method of Markov-chain quantization combined with the quantum simulated annealing (QSA) procedure, and describe explicitly a novel quantum Metropolis algorithm, which exhibits a quadratic quantum speedup in the eigenvalue gap of the corresponding Metropolis Markov chain for any quantum Hamiltonian. This result provides a complete generalization of the classical Metropolis method to the quantum domain.Comment: 7 page

Molecular surveillance of Theileria parasites of livestock in Oman

Background: Theileriosis is one of the most prevalent infectious diseases of livestock in the Arabian Peninsula, and causes high rates of mortality and morbidity in sheep and cattle. However, there is a paucity of information on the distribution of Theileria spp. over the whole region and their impact on different hosts. The present study carried out a country-wide molecular survey for Theileria spp. of livestock in Oman across four governorates. The aim of the survey was to define the prevalence of Theileria spp. in cattle, sheep and goats, highlight risk factors for infection and identify the main tick species involved in parasite transmission. Material and methods: A total of 2020 animals were examined in the survey consisting of sheep [n = 592], goats [n = 981] and cattle [n = 447]. All three species were raised and co-grazed on the same farms. Theileria parasites were detected using PCR-RFLP and RLB of the 18S rRNA gene. Cloning and sequencing of the 18S rRNA was carried out on 11 T. lestoquardi isolates from Ash-Sharqiyah, and Ad-Dhahira governorates, and phylogenetic relationships were inferred using additional sequences of T. lestoquardi, T. annulata and T. ovis available in GenBank. Results: Theileria spp. prevalence was 72.3%, 36.7% and 2.7% among cattle, sheep and goats, respectively. Strong similarity in results was obtained using RLB and PCR-RFLP for detection of Theileria spp. however, RLB detected a higher rate of mixed infection than PCR-RFPL (P < 0.001). Theileria annulata was the only parasite detected in cattle, while sheep and goats carried T. ovis, T. lestoquardi and T. annulata as well as Theileria spp. OT1. Of the four Theileria spp. detected in small ruminants, overall T. ovis was most prevalent (sheep [33.4%], goats [2.0%]), whereas T. lestoquardi was less prevalent (sheep [22.0%], goats [0.5%]). A large proportion of infected sheep (19%) carried mixed infection of T. ovis and T. lestoquardi. However, single T. lestoquardi infections (3.0%) were less prevalent than T. ovis infections (14.5%). Risk of Theileria spp. infection was significantly higher for exotic breeds, relative to native breeds, of cattle (p = 0.00002) and sheep (p = 0.005). Phylogenetic analysis placed T. lestoquardi in Oman in the same clade as other T. lestoquardi strains isolated from the same regional area (Iraq and Iran). The main tick species, identified on the examined animals, Hyalomma anatolicum, was widely distributed and was found in all of the surveyed governorates. Conclusion: Theileria spp. are widespread in Oman with variable prevalence detected in different regions. Two economically important hosts, cattle and sheep are at high risk from virulent T. annulata and T. lestoquardi, respectively. The survey indicates extensive exposure to ticks and transmission of infection that has a significant economic impact. The higher prevalence of T. lestoquardi as mixed rather than single infection requires further investigation