Socio-demographic profile and mode of attempt of suicide among suicide attempters in Kashmir: a hospital-based study

Background: Suicide is an important and serious public health problem. It is one of the major emergencies in psychiatry. This study was carried out to assess the socio-demographic profile and mode of attempt of suicide among suicidal attempters attending emergency.Methods: This study was a cross sectional, observational study conducted at Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences-Kashmir, an associated hospital of Government Medical College Srinagar, among the suicide patients attending the outpatient service and inpatient services fulfilling inclusion and exclusion criteria over a period of one and a half year. Each patient was informed about the purpose of interview; his/her consent was obtained in a simple and easily understandable unambiguous language.Results: A total of 221 cases who had been admitted following unsuccessful suicide attempts to the emergency and psychiatry department were taken up for the study. Out of which 161 (72.9%) were females and 60 (27.1%) were males, the mean age was 24.61±8.9 years. Lower middle and upper lower classes occupied an equal percentage of 34.4% of the suicide attempters, while 24% belonged to upper middle class and only 5.9% belonged to lower class .The least no. of cases (1.4%) were from the upper classes. The most common mode adopted was poisoning whereas the least common mode was self- immolation. Poisoning and self-mutilation were proportionally high in females as compared to males with a significant p value.Conclusions: There should be a robust system in place which takes care of future management and follow up of this group of population.

Feasibility of a Solar Thermal Power Plant in Pakistan

Pakistan has been facing an unprecedented energy crisis since the last few years. The problem becomes more severe throughout the year. The current energy shortage crisis has badly hit Pakistan’s economy where hundreds of industries have closed due to lack of electricity to fulfil their requirements. The energy supply and demand gap has risen to 5000 MW [1] and is expected to rise considerably in the coming years as shown in Figure 1. Table 1 shows the existing installed power generation in Pakistan. Pakistan has a huge potential in renewable energy especially solar energy to fill this gap if utilized properly. Pakistan, being in the Sun Belt, is ideally located to take advantage of solar energy technologies. This energy source is widely distributed and abundantly available in the country. Pakistan receives 4.45- 5.83 kWh/m2/day of global horizontal insolation as an annual mean value, with 5.30 kWh/m2/day over most areas of the country [2, 3]. This minimum level of solar radiation (4.45 kWh/m2/day) is higher than the world average of 3.61 kWh/m2/day [4] which shows that Pakistan lies in an excellent solar belt range. Pakistan has six main insolation measuring stations, namely Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Quetta, Peshawar and Multan and 37 observatories distributed fairly well over the entire country, recording sunshine hours as shown in Table A in Appendix. From the sunshine hours data it can be seen that most of the cities mentioned receive more than 250 sunshine hours a month. 2006 energy policy has resulted in few practical steps taken for utilizing the abundantly available solar resource in Pakistan. A Solar Water Heating System has installed in a Leather Industry for first time in Pakistan. The system, using 400 m2 Evacuated Collector tubes, provides heated water at 70 to 80 oC (at least 10 degree rise to the incoming water) to the already used boiler system, thus saving 33% of the cost. The Project was funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC) under University-Industry Technological Support Program (UITSP). Solar water heating technology is relatively mature technology in Pakistan but its higher capital cost compared to conventional gas heaters has limited its use so far. This technology is widely recommended by a number of public sector organizations in northern mountains where natural gas is limited and difficult. The solar water heaters are now being commercially produced in the private sector. More than 2000 low cost solar cookers are used in Pakistan for cooking purposes. Similarly, solar dryers are used in Gilgit and Skardu (Northern part of Pakistan) to dry large quantities of fruits such as apricot and transport and sell them later in the urban areas, thus bringing economic prosperity to the area. Fresh water unavailability in large parts of Baluchistan, Sind and southern Punjab is a critical issue. Two solar desalination plants consisting of 240 sills each with a capacity of 6000 gallons of seawater/day have been operational at Gawadar in Baluchistan province. A number of such schemes are under active consideration by local governments in Baluchistan and Thar [5]. The need for constructing solar power plants has been realized both at federal and provincial governments. The government of Sindh recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with German company Azur Solar for building a 50 MW solar power plant at Dhabeji in District Thatta. The firm Azur Solar will initially set up a 60 kW solar power station to provide free electricity to backward 'goths' (Villages), schools and basic health centres of Badin. Both, technical and economical feasibility of a 50 MW solar thermal power plant using Stirling-Dish (SD) technology in Jacaobabad in Sindh Province of Pakistan is analysed in this chapter. The performance and environmental aspects of Stirling dish for power generation with and without solar energy is examined, discussed and compared. The solar data was collected from Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) of Pakistan and Life cycle cost analysis is performed to determine the economic feasibility of the solar thermal power plant. This study reveals that Jacobabad falls within the high solar energy belt and has minimum radiation energy of 4.45 kWh/m2/day (which is higher than the world average of 3.61 kWh/m2/day) to produce electricity, even during the low sunshine and cloudy days. The study concluded that solar thermal power plant in Pakistan is feasible using solar Stirling dish technology

Data Collection in Smart Communities Using Sensor Cloud: Recent Advances, Taxonomy, and Future Research Directions

The remarkable miniaturization of sensors has led to the production of massive amounts of data in smart communities. These data cannot be efficiently collected and processed in WSNs due to the weak communication capability of these networks. This drawback can be compensated for by amalgamating WSNs and cloud computing to obtain sensor clouds. In this article, we investigate, highlight, and report recent premier advances in sensor clouds with respect to data collection. We categorize and classify the literature by devising a taxonomy based on important parameters, such as objectives, applications, communication technology, collection types, discovery, data types, and classification. Moreover, a few prominent use cases are presented to highlight the role of sensor clouds in providing high computation capabilities. Furthermore, several open research challenges and issues, such as big data issues, deployment issues, data security, data aggregation, dissemination of control message, and on time delivery are discussed. Future research directions are also provided

Metasurface-based wideband MIMO antenna for 5G millimeter-wave systems

This paper presents a metasurface based multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna with a wideband operation for millimeter-wave 5G communication systems. The antenna system consists of four elements placed with a 90 degree shift in order to achieve a compact MIMO system while a 2× 2 non-uniform metasurface (total four elements) is placed at the back of the MIMO configuration to improve the radiation characteristics of it. The overall size of the MIMO antenna is 24× 24 mm2 while the operational bandwidth of the proposed antenna system ranges from 23.5-29.4 GHz. The peak gain achieved by the proposed MIMO antenna is almost 7dB which is further improved up to 10.44 dB by employing a 2× 2 metasurface. The total efficiency is also observed more than 80% across the operating band. Apart from this, the MIMO performance metrics such as envelope correlation coefficient (ECC), diversity gain (DG), and channel capacity loss (CCL) are analyzed which demonstrate good characteristics. All the simulations of the proposed design are carried out in computer simulation technology (CST) software, and measured results reveal good agreement with the simulated one which make it a potential contender for the upcoming 5G communication systems.This work was supported in part by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant Agreement No 801538, and in part by the the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Gobierno de España (MCIU/AEI/FEDER,UE) under Grant RTI2018-095499-B-C31

Plastid genomics of Nicotiana (Solanaceae) : insights into molecular evolution, positive selection and the origin of the maternal genome of Aztec tobacco (Nicotiana rustica)

The genus Nicotiana of the family Solanaceae, commonly referred to as tobacco plants, are a group cultivated as garden ornamentals. Besides their use in the worldwide production of tobacco leaves, they are also used as evolutionary model systems due to their complex development history, which is tangled by polyploidy and hybridization. Here, we assembled the plastid genomes of five tobacco species, namely N. knightiana, N. rustica, N. paniculata, N. obtusifolia and N. glauca. De novo assembled tobacco plastid genomes showed typical quadripartite structure, consisting of a pair of inverted repeats (IR) regions (25,323–25,369 bp each) separated by a large single copy (LSC) region (86,510 –86,716 bp) and a small single copy (SSC) region (18,441–18,555 bp). Comparative analyses of Nicotiana plastid genomes showed similar GC content, gene content, codon usage, simple sequence repeats, oligonucleotide repeats, RNA editing sites and substitutions with currently available Solanaceae genomes sequences. We identified twenty highly polymorphic regions mostly belonging to intergenic spacer regions (IGS), which could be appropriate for the development of robust and cost-effective markers to infer the phylogeny of genus Nicotiana and family Solanaceae. Our comparative plastid genome analysis revealed that the maternal parent of the tetraploid N. rustica was the common ancestor of N. paniculata and N. knightiana, and the later species is more closely related to N. rustica. The relaxed molecular clock analyses estimated that the speciation event between N. rustica and N. knightiana appeared 0.56 Ma (HPD 0.65–0.46). The biogeographical analysis showed a south-to-north range expansion and diversification for N. rustica and related species, where N. undulata and N. paniculata evolved in North/Central Peru, while N. rustica developed in Southern Peru and separated from N. knightiana, which adapted to the Southern coastal climatic regimes. We further inspected selective pressure on protein-coding genes among tobacco species to determine if this adaptation process affected the evolution of plastid genes. These analyses indicated that four genes involved in different plastid functions, such as DNA replication (rpoA) and photosynthesis (atpB, ndhD and ndhF), came under positive selective pressure as a result of specific environmental conditions. Genetic mutations of the following genes might have contributed to the survival and better adaptation during the evolutionary history of tobacco species.Peer reviewe

Growth Parameters for Films of Hydrothermally Synthesized One-Dimensional Nanocrystals of Zinc Oxide

Zinc oxide has been the focus of material research due to its potential applications in a variety of novel fields. The material exhibits anisotropic growth in the form of single crystal rods/wires of length in microns and thickness in several tens of nanometers through a facile and low temperature hydrothermal route wherein size, morphology, orientation, and growth rate are strongly dependent on a number of synthesis parameters. In this review article we intend to present/discuss the effects of important growth parameters of zinc oxide that have been reported in the literature. These parameters include concentration of the precursor solution, growth time, role of hexamine, synthesis temperature, pH of the precursor, and seeding layer deposited on a substrate

Radiation pattern synthesis in conformal antenna arrays using modified convex optimization technique

In this paper, a modified convex optimization technique is used for radiationpattern correction in a cylindrical-shaped conformal microstrip array antenna.The technique uses numerical simulations to optimize the amplitude andphase excitations, with the goal to decrease the Euclidean distance betweenthe desired field pattern and the obtained (simulated/measured) field patternwhile maintaining the main beam direction, null's location, and side lobelevels under control. Two prototypes of 1 4 and 2 4 conformal microstripantenna array deformed from linear/planar structure to the prescribed cylin-drical shape, with different radii of curvature, are studied to demonstrate theperformance of the proposed technique. The proposed convex optimizationmodel when applied to conformal antenna array possesses fast computingspeed and high convergence accuracy for radiation pattern synthesis, whichcan be a valuable tool for engineering applications.Dr. Mohammad Alibakhshikenari acknowledges supportfrom the CONEX-Plus programme funded by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under theMarie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 801538

Comparison of Chloroplast Genomes among Species of Unisexual and Bisexual Clades of the Monocot Family Araceae

The chloroplast genome provides insight into the evolution of plant species. We de novo assembled and annotated chloroplast genomes of four genera representing three subfamilies of Araceae: Lasia spinosa (Lasioideae), Stylochaeton bogneri, Zamioculcas zamiifolia (Zamioculcadoideae), and Orontium aquaticum (Orontioideae), and performed comparative genomics using these chloroplast genomes. The sizes of the chloroplast genomes ranged from 163,770 bp to 169,982 bp. These genomes comprise 113 unique genes, including 79 protein-coding, 4 rRNA, and 30 tRNA genes. Among these genes, 17–18 genes are duplicated in the inverted repeat (IR) regions, comprising 6–7 protein-coding (including trans-splicing gene rps12), 4 rRNA, and 7 tRNA genes. The total number of genes ranged between 130 and 131. The infA gene was found to be a pseudogene in all four genomes reported here. These genomes exhibited high similarities in codon usage, amino acid frequency, RNA editing sites, and microsatellites. The oligonucleotide repeats and junctions JSB (IRb/SSC) and JSA (SSC/IRa) were highly variable among the genomes. The patterns of IR contraction and expansion were shown to be homoplasious, and therefore unsuitable for phylogenetic analyses. Signatures of positive selection were seen in three genes in S. bogneri, including ycf2, clpP, and rpl36. This study is a valuable addition to the evolutionary history of chloroplast genome structure in Araceae

Complete Chloroplast Genomes of Anthurium huixtlense and Pothos scandens (Pothoideae, Araceae) : Unique Inverted Repeat Expansion and Contraction Affect Rate of Evolution

The subfamily Pothoideae belongs to the ecologically important plant family Araceae. Here, we report the chloroplast genomes of two species of the subfamily Pothoideae:Anthurium huixtlense(size: 163,116 bp) andPothos scandens(size: 164,719 bp). The chloroplast genome ofP. scandensshowed unique contraction and expansion of inverted repeats (IRs), thereby increasing the size of the large single-copy region (LSC: 102,956 bp) and decreasing the size of the small single-copy region (SSC: 6779 bp). This led to duplication of many single-copy genes due to transfer to IR regions from the small single-copy (SSC) region, whereas some duplicate genes became single copy due to transfer to large single-copy regions. The rate of evolution of protein-coding genes was affected by the contraction and expansion of IRs; we found higher mutation rates for genes that exist in single-copy regions as compared to those in IRs. We found a 2.3-fold increase of oligonucleotide repeats inP. scandenswhen compared withA. huixtlense, whereas amino acid frequency and codon usage revealed similarities. The ratio of transition to transversion mutations was 2.26 inP. scandensand 2.12 inA. huixtlense. Transversion mutations mostly translated in non-synonymous substitutions. The phylogenetic inference of the limited species showed the monophyly of the Araceae subfamilies. Our study provides insight into the molecular evolution of chloroplast genomes in the subfamily Pothoideae and family Araceae.Peer reviewe

appXchain: Application-Level Interoperability for Blockchain Networks

Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize industries by offering decentralized, transparent, data provenance, auditable, reliable, and trustworthy features. However, cross-chain interoperability is one of the crucial challenges preventing widespread adoption of blockchain applications. Cross-chain interoperability represents the ability for one blockchain network to interact and share data with another blockchain network. Contemporary cross-chain interoperability solutions are centralized and require re-engineering of the core blockchain stack to enable inter-communication and data sharing among heterogeneous blockchain networks. In this paper, we propose an application-based cross-chain interoperability solution named appXchain which allows blockchain networks of any architecture type and industrial focus to inter-communicate, share data, and make requests. Our solution utilizes the decentralized applications as a distributed translation layer that is capable of communicating and understanding multiple blockchain networks, thereby delegating requests and parameters among them. The architecture uses incentivized verifier nodes that maintain the integrity of shared data facilitating them to be readable by the entities of their network. We define and describe the roles and requirements of major entities of inter-operating blockchain networks in the context of healthcare. We present a detailed explanation of the sequence of interactions needed to share an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) document from one blockchain network to another along with the required algorithms. We implement the appXchain solution with Ethereum-based smart contracts for two hospitals and also present its cost and security analysis. We have made our smart contracts code and testing scripts publicly available