Congenital Lymphoedema, Bronchiectasis And Seizure: Case Report

A l0-year-old girl with facial anomalies, mental retardation, peripheral lymphoedema, convulsions, cerebral cortical dysgenetic changes, bronchiectasis and chronic sinusitis is presented. She had features of both yellow nail syndrome and Hennekam syndrome. We think that our case might be a new congenital lymphoedema syndrome or an intermediate form between these syndromes. East African Medical Journal Vol. 85 (3) 2008: pp. 145-14

Management of spontaneous pneumothorax in patients with COVID-19.

ObjectivesThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pneumonia may cause cystic features of lung parenchyma which can resolve or progress to larger blebs. Pneumothorax was more likely in patients with neutrophilia, severe lung injury and a prolonged clinical course. The timely diagnosis and management will reduce COVID-19-associated morbidity and mortality.MethodsWe present 11 cases of spontaneous pneumothorax managed with chest tube thoracostomy or high-dose oxygen therapy. Isolated spontaneous pneumothorax was detected in all cases.ResultsEight cases were male and 3 cases were female. There were bilateral ground-glass opacities or pulmonary infiltrates in the parenchyma of the 10 cases. We detected neutrophilia, lymphopaenia and increased C-reactive protein, Ferritin, lactate dehydrogenase, D-Dimer, interleukin-6 levels in almost all cases. Chest tube thoracostomy was sufficient to treat pneumothorax in our 9 of case. In 2 cases, pneumothorax healed with high-dose oxygen therapy. Favipiravir and antibiotic treatment were given to different 10 patients. In our institution, all patients with COVID-19 infection were placed on prophylactic or therapeutic anticoagulation, unless contraindicated. The treatments of patients diagnosed with secondary spontaneous pneumothorax during the pandemic period and those diagnosed with secondary spontaneous pneumothorax in the previous 3 years were compared with the durations of tube thoracostomy performed in both groups.ConclusionsThe increased number of cases of pneumothorax suggests that pneumothorax may be a complication of COVID-19 infection. During medical treatment of COVID-19, pneumothorax may be the only reason for hospitalization. Although tube thoracostomy is a sufficient treatment option in most cases, clinicians should be aware of the difficulties that may arise in diagnosis and treatment

Radius constraints from high-speed photometry of 20 low-mass white dwarf binaries

We carry out high-speed photometry on 20 of the shortest-period, detached white dwarf binaries known and discover systems with eclipses, ellipsoidal variations (due to tidal deformations of the visible white dwarf), and Doppler beaming. All of the binaries contain low-mass white dwarfs with orbital periods less than 4 hr. Our observations identify the first eight tidally distorted white dwarfs, four of which are reported for the first time here, which we use to put empirical constraints on the mass-radius relationship for extremely low-mass (<0.30 Msun) white dwarfs. We also detect Doppler beaming in several of these binaries, which confirms the high-amplitude radial-velocity variability. All of these systems are strong sources of gravitational radiation, and long-term monitoring of those that display ellipsoidal variations can be used to detect spin-up of the tidal bulge due to orbital decay.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Secondary metabolites of Phlomis viscosa and their biological activities

Further phytochemical studies on the aerial parts of Phlomis viscosa (Lamiaceae) led to the isolation of 24 compounds: 3 iridoid glycosides, 10 phenylethanoid glycosides, a megastigmane glycoside and a hydroquinone glycoside, as well as 2 lignan glucosides and 7 neolignan glucosides, 1 of which is new (17b). Compound 17b was obtained as a minor component of an inseparable mixture (2:1) of 2 neolignan glucosides (17a/b), and characterized as 3',4-O-dimethylcedrusin 9-O-b -glucopyranoside. Full NMR data of the known 8-O-4' neolignan glucoside, erythro-1-(4-O-b-glucopyranosyl-3-methoxyphenyl)- 2-{2-methoxyl-4-[1-(E)-propene-3-ol]-phenoxyl}-propane-1,3-diol (18) are also reported. All isolated compounds were screened for cell growth inhibition versus 3 tumor cell lines (MCF7, NCI-H460, and SF-268) and several phenylethanoid glycosides were found to possess weak antitumoral activity. The phenylethanoid glycosides were also evaluated for their free radical (DPPH) scavenging, antibacterial and antifungal activities. The free radical (DPPH) scavenging activities of verbascoside (4), isoacteoside (5), forsythoside B (10), myricoside (13) and samioside (14) were found to be comparable to that of dl-a -tocopherol. Compounds 4, 5, 10 and 14 (MIC: 500 m g/mL) as well as Leucosceptoside A (8) and 13 (MIC:1000 m g/mL) showed very weak activity against Gram (+) bacteria

Models of Little Higgs and Electroweak Precision Tests

The little Higgs idea is an alternative to supersymmetry as a solution to the gauge hierarchy problem. In this note, I review various little Higgs models and their phenomenology with emphases on the precision electroweak constraints in these models.Comment: 16 pages; 4 figures; review submitted to Modern Physics Letter

The Littlest Higgs in Anti-de Sitter Space

We implement the SU(5)/SO(5) littlest Higgs theory in a slice of 5D Anti-de Sitter space bounded by a UV brane and an IR brane. In this model, there is a bulk SU(5) gauge symmetry that is broken to SO(5) on the IR brane, and the Higgs boson is contained in the Goldstones from this breaking. All of the interactions on the IR brane preserve the global symmetries that protect the Higgs mass, but a radiative potential is generated through loops that stretch to the UV brane where there are explicit SU(5) violating boundary conditions. Like the original littlest Higgs, this model exhibits collective breaking in that two interactions must be turned on in order to generate a Higgs potential. In AdS space, however, collective breaking does not appear in coupling constants directly but rather in the choice of UV brane boundary conditions. We match this AdS construction to the known low energy structure of the littlest Higgs and comment on some of the tensions inherent in the AdS construction. We calculate the 5D Coleman-Weinberg effective potential for the Higgs and find that collective breaking is manifest. In a simplified model with only the SU(2) gauge structure and the top quark, the physical Higgs mass can be of order 200 GeV with no considerable fine tuning (25%). We sketch a more realistic model involving the entire gauge and fermion structure that also implements T-parity, and we comment on the tension between T-parity and flavor structure.Comment: 42 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables; v2: minor rewording, JHEP format; v3: to match JHEP versio

Spectral modeling of gaseous metal disks around DAZ white dwarfs

We report on our attempt for the first non-LTE modeling of gaseous metal disks around single DAZ white dwarfs recently discovered by Gaensicke et al. and thought to originate from a disrupted asteroid. We assume a Keplerian rotating viscous disk ring composed of calcium and hydrogen and compute the detailed vertical structure and emergent spectrum. We find that the observed infrared CaII emission triplet can be modeled with a hydrogen-deficient gas ring located at R=1.2 R_sun, inside of the tidal disruption radius, with Teff about 6000 K and a low surface mass density of about 0.3 g/cm**2. A disk having this density and reaching from the central white dwarf out to R=1.2 R_sun would have a total mass of 7 10**21 g, corresponding to an asteroid with about 160 km diameter.Comment: Proceedings, 16th European White Dwarf Workshop, Barcelona, 200

Adaptive hierarchical space partitioning for online classification

We propose an online algorithm for supervised learning with strong performance guarantees under the empirical zero-one loss. The proposed method adaptively partitions the feature space in a hierarchical manner and generates a powerful finite combination of basic models. This provides algorithm to obtain a strong classification method which enables it to create a linear piecewise classifier model that can work well under highly non-linear complex data. The introduced algorithm also have scalable computational complexity that scales linearly with dimension of the feature space, depth of the partitioning and number of processed data. Through experiments we show that the introduced algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art ensemble techniques over various well-known machine learning data sets. © 2016 IEEE