The Effect of Oxidation on the Tribological Performance of Few Vegetable Oils

BackgroundThe use of vegetable oils and their derivatives as lubricant base oils are ever increasing because of sustainability issues and in the context of conservation of nature as they are biodegradable and environmentally friendly. The one disadvantage which is of concern with vegetable oils is their limited oxidative stability.ObjectivesTo study the effect of oxidation on the tribological performance of few vegetable oils by subjecting the oil samples to accelerated ageing in a dark oven at different temperatures, inducing the oxidation under controlled conditions.MethodOils were stored at an elevated temperature in an oven under dark condition and the oxidized oil samples were analyzed in terms of various properties.Results and conclusionsThe samples were analyzed for the changes in viscosity, percentage of free fatty acid, peroxide number and were compared with fresh oils samples. Further tribological property was also evaluated and the observed differences were linked to formation of oxidation products like peroxides, kinetics of the oxidation with reference to ageing temperature

Intracuff buffered lidocaine versus saline or air – A comparative study for smooth extubation in patients with hyperactive airways undergoing eye surgery

Background: Increased cough and restlessness during emergence from general anaesthesia in patients undergoing ophthalmologic surgical procedures might result in increased intraocular pressure, ruptured sutures and suprachoroidal haemorrhage, which can be detrimental to the outcome of surgery. In hyperactive airway patients, as the cough receptors are in the hypersensitised stage, the patients tend to cough more frequently and violently during extubation. Hence, in such patients, we sought to determine the benefits of filling the endotracheal tube cuff with either buffered lidocaine, saline or air, so as to prevent endotracheal tube-induced coughing during emergence from general anaesthesia. Methods: Seventy five patients either with a history of chronic smoking or recently treated upper respiratory tract infections were randomly assigned into three groups (n = 25), based on the type of endotracheal tube cuff inflation, as follows: Group A (air), Group B (6 ml normal saline) and Group C (6 ml 2% lidocaine + 0.5 ml 7.5% sodium bicarbonate). A second, blinded anaesthetist, graded the extubation as: Grade 0 (no cough), Grade 1 (cough 15s). Results: Extubation was smooth in Group C compared with Groups B and A (p < 0.0001). Further, the incidence of sore throat was found to be lower in both liquid groups, B and C, compared with Group A at 1 h (p < 0.0001) and 24 h(p < 0.01) postoperatively. Conclusions: Injecting buffered lidocaine into the endotracheal tube cuff, produces smooth extubation even in patients with hyperactive airways as the cough receptors in the tracheal mucosa gets blocked by the increased diffusion of uncharged base form of the drug across the hydrophobic polyvinyl chloride wall of the cuff

Kinetics and mechanism of oxidation of chloramphenicol by 1-chlorobenzotriazole in acidic medium

Chloramphenicol (CAP) is an antibiotic drug having a wide spectrum of activity. The kinetics of oxidation of chloramphenicol by 1-chlorobenzotriazole (CBT) in HClO4 medium over the temperature range 293–323 K has been investigated. The reaction exhibits first-order kinetics with respect to [CBT]o and zero-order with respect to [CAP]o. The fractional-order dependence of rate on [H+] suggests complex formation between CBT and H+. It fails to induce polymerization of acrylonitrile under the experimental conditions employed. Activation parameters are evaluated. The observed solvent isotope effect indicates the absence of hydride transfer during oxidation. Effects of dielectric constant and ionic strength of the medium on the reaction rate have been studied. Oxidation products are identified. A suitable reaction scheme is proposed and an appropriate rate law is deduced to account for the observed kinetic data

Synaptic partner prediction from point annotations in insect brains

High-throughput electron microscopy allows recording of lar- ge stacks of neural tissue with sufficient resolution to extract the wiring diagram of the underlying neural network. Current efforts to automate this process focus mainly on the segmentation of neurons. However, in order to recover a wiring diagram, synaptic partners need to be identi- fied as well. This is especially challenging in insect brains like Drosophila melanogaster, where one presynaptic site is associated with multiple post- synaptic elements. Here we propose a 3D U-Net architecture to directly identify pairs of voxels that are pre- and postsynaptic to each other. To that end, we formulate the problem of synaptic partner identification as a classification problem on long-range edges between voxels to encode both the presence of a synaptic pair and its direction. This formulation allows us to directly learn from synaptic point annotations instead of more ex- pensive voxel-based synaptic cleft or vesicle annotations. We evaluate our method on the MICCAI 2016 CREMI challenge and improve over the current state of the art, producing 3% fewer errors than the next best method

Text Extraction and Localization From Captured Images

Extraction of text contents from image is tedious task because of variance in the font size, style, Orientation, Alignment and heterogeneous nature of text. The contents of text information in the scene images hold valuable data. The framework uses 2-d Wavelet transform using HAAR is applied to the grayscale image followed by edge detection for each sub-band filtering. Then region clustering technique is applied using centroids to each region. Further bounding box is fit to each region thus identifying the text components. Proposed framework is removing non-text content and separated text-content, then each text contents are converted into editable text using OCR engine. Here, we use Teserract recognition engine

6-(4-Chloro­phen­yl)-2-isobutyl­imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole

In the title compound, C14H14ClN3S, the imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole system is essentially planar, with a maximum deviation of 0.006 (2) Å. The dihedral angle between the imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole and chloro­phenyl rings is 5.07 (8)°. In the crystal, there are no classical hydrogen bonds but stabilization is provided by weak π–π [centroid–centroid distance = 3.5697 (11) Å] and C—H⋯π inter­actions

2-Isobutyl-6-phenyl­imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole

In the title compound, C14H15N3S, the imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thia­diazole fused-ring system is close to planar, with a maximum deviation of 0.042 (1) Å, and the dihedral angle between it and the phenyl ring is 24.21 (6)°. The isobutyl group is disordered over two sets of sites in a 0.899 (9):0.101 (9) ratio. In the crystal, weak aromatic π–π stacking inter­actions involving the imidazole and thia­diazole rings with a centroid–centroid distance of 3.8067 (7) Å occur