Decline in human sperm counts during the past 50 years?

There is widespread concern that environmental pollutants acting as xenoestrogens may affect human fertility adversely. Whether this has already made an impact on human fertility worldwide remains debatable at the present stage. Ever since Carlsen's analysis reported that sperm concentrations have decreased over the last 50 years there has been renewed attention and curiosity amongst peer groups in different parts of the world. Though Carlsen's mode of data analysis was criticized on many fronts, a number of similar studies that appeared subsequently have contradicted each other. The article has reviewed the literature to determine whether semen counts have indeed changed in the past 50 years. We conclude that sperm counts vary enormously between different countries or regions of the world and also between individual men. There is even marked variation between counts on the same men. It is therefore not surprising that not all analyses of sperm counts find the same patterns. We suggest that a well ­designed prospective study should be performed in several different regions of the world in order to extrapolate the results on sperm counts and to evaluate the potential effect of external factors on male reproductive health. It is hoped that the conclusions from these new studies might put an end to the controversy that surrounds this issue.peer-reviewe

Presowing hardening of the host with phenolic acids reduces induction of seed germination in the root parasite Striga asiatica

S. asiatica, A root parasite, causes severe loss of yield in sorghum and several other crops. The seeds of the parasite are induced to germinate by a stimulant in the host root exudate. Presowing hardening of the host with vanillic acid [121-​34-​6]​, caffeic acid [331-​39-​5]​, and ferulic acid [1135-​24-​6] (25 ppm) reduced the induction of seed germination in the parasite by the host root exudate. The treatment caused a slight improvement in the dry matter prodn. in the host and in addn., increased the phenolics level in the host root exudate. The latter effect might be responsible for reducing germination in Striga

Airline Search Engine Project

The Airline Search Engine Project is a tool that helps anyone to find the facts/data related to Airlines/Airports. For this project, the raw data set is available in the .dat format. We are going to use this data, which can be downloaded from [1]. The tool may also do some first cleaning of the data if needed for forming dimensional data, the cleaning process such as data value unification, data type and size unification, deduplication, dropping columns, and correcting some known errors. The data will be processed with the help of languages like Python and Spark. By storing the data, we can distribute storage systems such as Hadoop and Amazon S3. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) used in this project would be editors such as Google Colab and PyCharm. This tool can be run as a job in different clusters such as EMR (Elastic MapReduce), HDInsight, Cloudera, and Databricks. It can solve/derive data by analyzing terra bytes of raw data into useful information. We can create reports out of it, which Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and businesspeople can use

A computational model of visual attention.

Visual attention is a process by which the Human Visual System (HVS) selects most important information from a scene. Visual attention models are computational or mathematical models developed to predict this information. The performance of the state-of-the-art visual attention models is limited in terms of prediction accuracy and computational complexity. In spite of significant amount of active research in this area, modelling visual attention is still an open research challenge. This thesis proposes a novel computational model of visual attention that achieves higher prediction accuracy with low computational complexity. A new bottom-up visual attention model based on in-focus regions is proposed. To develop the model, an image dataset is created by capturing images with in-focus and out-of-focus regions. The Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) spectrum of these images is investigated qualitatively and quantitatively to discover the key frequency coefficients that correspond to the in-focus regions. The model detects these key coefficients by formulating a novel relation between the in-focus and out-of-focus regions in the frequency domain. These frequency coefficients are used to detect the salient in-focus regions. The simulation results show that this attention model achieves good prediction accuracy with low complexity. The prediction accuracy of the proposed in-focus visual attention model is further improved by incorporating sensitivity of the HVS towards the image centre and the human faces. Moreover, the computational complexity is further reduced by using Integer Cosine Transform (ICT). The model is parameter tuned using the hill climbing approach to optimise the accuracy. The performance has been analysed qualitatively and quantitatively using two large image datasets with eye tracking fixation ground truth. The results show that the model achieves higher prediction accuracy with a lower computational complexity compared to the state-of-the-art visual attention models. The proposed model is useful in predicting human fixations in computationally constrained environments. Mainly it is useful in applications such as perceptual video coding, image quality assessment, object recognition and image segmentation

Allelopathic effects of Parthenium hysterophorus L. - I. Exudation of inhibitors through roots

Association with Parthenium hysterophorus L. caused retarded growth and nodulation in bean (Phaseolus vulgaris var. 'Burpees Stringless') the inhibition decreasing with increasing distance from the weed. Leachate collected from Parthenium grown pots also caused similar inhibition in bean growth. The inhibitory nature of the root exudate was confirmed under sterile cultural conditions by its effect on wheat (Triticum aestivum var. 'UP301') seedling growth. At the rosette and flowering stage of the weed there was maximum exudation of inhibitors which remained active for about thirty days. © 1979 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Allelopathic effects of Parthenium hysterophorus L - Part IV. Identification of inhibitors

Analysis of the inhibitors from allelopathic species of Parthenium hysterophorus L. revealed that sesquiterpene lactones and phenolics formed an important group of water soluble compounds involved in allelopathy. Parthenin was the major sesquiterpene lactone involved though dampsin was also found in traces. Caffeic acid, vanillic acid, ferulic acid, chlorogenic acid, and anisic acid among the phenolics and fumaric acid among the organic acids were the important constituents of the air dried parts of the plant, many of them being traced in the root exudates, leaf washings, pollen and trichome leachates. © 1980 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Allelopathic effects of Parthenium hysterophorus L - III. Inhibitory effects of the weed residue

Growth toxins are released to the soil through leaching and during decay from the air-dried parts of Parthenium hysterophorus L. The dry leaves mixed to the soil inhibit nodulation and growth in legumes, branching in tomato (Lycopersicum esculentum L. cv. 'Pusa Ruby'), plant height and tillering in ragi (Eleusine coracana Gaertn. cv. 'Poorna'), and yield in bean (Phaseolus vulgaris. L. cv. 'Burpees Stringless'), cowpea (Vigna sinensis L.), tomato and ragi, but have stimulatory effect on bajra (Pennisetum typhoideum Rich cv. 'H.B.1'). The inhibitors released to the substratum remain active for about thirty days. © 1979 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Possible toxic effect of antihypertensive drug olmesartan on male reproductive system of rat

Background: To evaluate the possible toxic effect of a new angiotensin II receptor antagonist or blocker, olmesartan medoxomil, on the male reproductive system of rat.Methods: Twelve Sprague Dawley rats, randomly divided into two groups: treated group (n=6) and control group (n=6). Olmesartan medoxomil (5mg/kg/dose) was fed to the treated group once daily for 28 days. Sperm motility, count and morphology and pituitary gonadal hormonal levels were assessed.Results: Despite some fluctuations in sperm count, sperm motility, and concentration of testosterone, FSH and LH levels of treated group when compared to controls, the results were statistically insignificant.Conclusions: It is therefore concluded that olmesartan medoxomil did not adversely affect the male reproductive health of treated rats

Allelopathic effects ofParthenium hysterophorus L.

Association withParthenium hysterophorus L. caused retarded growth and nodulation in bean (Phaseolus vulgaris var. ‘Burpees Stringless’) the inhibition decreasing with increasing distance from the weed. Leachate collected from Parthenium grown pots also caused similar inhibition in bean growth. The inhibitory nature of the root exudate was confirmed under sterile cultural conditions by its effect on wheat (Triticum aestivum var. ‘UP301’) seedling growth. At the rosette and flowering stage of the weed there was maximum exudation of inhibitors which remained active for about thirty days