The protective effect of garlic extract on diabetic nephropathy

Diabetes causes significant changes in urine and serum constituents such as albumin, creatinine, urea nitrogen, and glycated hemoglobin. Garlic extract, however, has been shown to restore all of these biochemicals, and cause histopathological changes. Administration of garlic extract or metformin, or their combinations has also been demonstrated to have both curative and protective effects against gentamicin nephrotoxicity. These findings can potentiate the clinical use of combinations of metformin and garlic extract in the prevention of diabetic nephropathy

Hyperuricemia aggravates IgA nephropathy

It is well documented that hyperuricemia is an independent risk factor for IgA nephropathy, and appropriate treatment by allopurinol is a reasonable modality in the patients. We believe that, this drug should routinely be included to the treatment of patients with IgA nephropathy. In this regard, to better understand the allopurinol kidney protective properties in IgA nephropathy, clinical studies are suggested

Fairness in Influence Maximization through Randomization

The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have been taken into account in this scope. In the present paper, we propose to use randomization as a mean for achieving fairness. While this general idea is not new, it has not been applied in the area of information spread in networks. Similar to previous works like Fish et al. (WWW '19) and Tsang et al. (IJCAI '19), we study the maximin criterion for (group) fairness. By allowing randomized solutions, we introduce two different variants of this problem. While the original deterministic maximin problem has been shown to be inapproximable, interestingly, we show that both probabilistic variants permit approximation algorithms with a constant multiplicative factor of 1 - 1/e plus an additive arbitrarily small error due to the simulation of the information spread. For an experimental study, we provide implementations of our methods and compare the achieved fairness values to existing methods. Non-surprisingly, the ex-ante values, i.e., minimum expected value of an individual (or group) to obtain the information, of the computed probabilistic strategies are significantly larger than the (ex-post) fairness values of previous methods. This confirms that studying fairness via randomization is a worthwhile direction. More surprisingly, we observe that even the ex-post fairness values, i.e., fairness values of sets sampled according to the probabilistic strategies, computed by our routines dominate over the fairness achieved by previous methods on most of the instances tested

An enterprise architecture driven approach to virtualisation

Organisations have shown a significant interest in the adoption of virtualisation technology for improving the efficiency of their Data Centres (DC) from both the resource performance and cost efficiency viewpoints. By improving the efficiency of data centres we can sustainably manage their impact on the environment by controlling their energy consumption. The intentions are clear but how best to approach to Data Centre virtualisation is not. This paper proposes an integrated Enterprise Architecture and Information Infrastructure (EAII) driven approach to guide the Data Centre virtualisation. The EAII approach has been developed based on the review and analysis of wellknown The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and Information Infrastructure (II) model. The proposed integrated EAII approach seems appropriate to guide and align business strategy and virtualisation implementation for data centres of any size in any industry vertical

Nanosecond pulsed laser ablated sub-10 nm silicon nanoparticles for improving photovoltaic conversion efficiency of commercial solar cells

In this paper, we demonstrate the enhancement of photovoltaic (PV) solar cell efficiency using luminescent silicon nanoparticles (Si-NPs). Sub-10 nm Si-NPs are synthesized via pulsed laser ablation technique. These ultra-small Si nanoparticles exhibit photoluminescence (PL) character tics at 425 and 517 nm upon excitation by ultra-violet (UV) light. Therefore, they can act as secondary light sources that convert high energetic photons to ones at visible range. This down-shifting property can be a promising approach to enhance PV performance of the solar cell, regardless of its type. As proof-of-concept, polycrystalline commercial solar cells with an efficiency of ca 10% are coated with these luminescent Si-NPs. The nanoparticle-decorated solar cells exhibit up to 1.64% increase in the external quantum efficiency with respect to the uncoated reference cells. According to spectral photo-responsivity characterizations, the efficiency enhancement is stronger in wavelengths below 550 nm. As expected, this is attributed to down-shifting via Si-NPs, which is verified by their PL characteristics. The results presented here can serve as a beacon for future performance enhanced devices in a wide range of applications based on Si-NPs including PVs and LED applications. © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd

Study Clinical Symptoms and Para-Clinical Findings in Poisoning Patient with Aluminum Phosphide in Patients Referred to Imam Khomeini Hospital in Ardabil (Northwest of Iran)

Background: Aluminum phosphide is used in different area in Iran. According to that the herbal form of these pills are used increasingly, comparison and evaluation of these patients in terms of clinical and laboratory symptoms are important. We studied on clinical and Para-clinical findings in patients who had taken aluminum phosphide and its herbal form in this study.Methods: This is a descriptive and analytic study which carried out during 2006-2012. In this study, laboratory variables, white blood cell count, hematocrit, blood glucose, sodium, potassium and bicarbonate, arterial blood gas also clinical finding after taking aluminum phosphide pills, and vital signs of poisoned patients were extracted.Results: In this study 386 poisoned patients were evaluated. We divided poisoned patients in two groups, case and herbal. 35% had been taking original Aluminum phosphide (case group) and 65% herbal form (herbal group). In totally 18.7% of poisoned patients were male. The average age of patients in herbal group was 23.22 ±8.20 years and in case group was 24.78±7.04 years. In both groups, nausea and vomiting were the most prevalent clinical signs. Experiments in a separate group showed significant different in blood pressure upper (P<0.001), Po2 level lower (P<0.001), pH lower (P<0.001) and bicarbonate lower (P<0.001) but there was no significant difference in respiratory rate, temperature, hemoglobin level and hematocrit. Also was observed that 70.4% of patients in case group died but all patients in herbal group survived (P<0.001).Conclusion: The results of this study indicated that arterial blood gas of patients is a useful tool for differentiating oral poisoning with original and herbal rice pill. Hence, in patients with clinical toxicity of rice tablet can be used to differentiate these two tablets

A Comparative Study of Different Phase Detrending Algorithms for Scintillation Monitoring

Rapid and sudden fluctuations of phase and amplitude in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals due to diffraction of the ionosphere phase components when signals passing through small-scale irregularities (less than hundreds meters) are commonly so-called ionospheric scintillation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the implementation and compare the performance of different phase detrending algorithms to improve scintillation monitoring. Three different phase detrending methods, namely, three cascaded second-order high pass filters, six order Butterworth filter conducted by cascading six first-order high pass Butterworth filters, and Fast Iterative Filter (FIF) are considered in this paper. The study exploits real GNSS signals (GPS L1, Galileo E1b) affected by significant phase scintillation effects, collected in early September 2017 at Brazilian Centro de Radioastronomia e Astrofisica Mackenzie (CRAAM) monitoring station and at Adventdalen (Svalbard, Norway) research station. In this study, a software defined radio (SDR) based GNSS receiver is used to process GNSS signals and to implement the aforementioned detrending algorithms

Optomechanical Entanglement in the Presence of Laser Phase Noise

We study the simplest optomechanical system in the presence of laser phase noise using the covariance matrix formalism. We show that the destructive effect of the phase noise is especially strong in the bistable regime. This explains why ground state cooling is still possible in the presence of phase noise, as it happens far away from the bistable regime. On the other hand, the optomechanical entanglement is strongly affected by phase noise.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure