Aloe vera: A Multipurpose Healer and Bacterial Eradicator

The Aloe vera plant is a succulent known for its rich content in vitamins and minerals, thus gaining popularity over the years in healthcare products. With advancements in alternative medicine, it has been recently found useful in dentistry due to properties such as anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and antimicrobial actions that contribute to wound healing. The purpose of this study was to examine and discover how Aloe vera can be used as an alternative therapy in the dental field. The PubMed, Google Scholar and Dentistry & Oral Sciences (DOSS) databases were utilized to find current scientific evidence on the effects of Aloe vera. Relevant articles were summarized to write a review of findings. In this study, 21 articles published from 2015 to present were reviewed. From the studies, there is strong evidence to support that Aloe vera exhibits beneficial effects in prevention of carious lesions, non-surgical scaling and root planing in patients with chronic periodontitis, and oral wounds. Furthermore, it is cost effective and easily accessible. This review’s findings indicate that dental health care providers could recommend Aloe vera as a preventive and an alternative treatment option to improve patients’ oral health status.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/denh_student/1005/thumbnail.jp

Non-relativistic Extended Gravity and its applications across different astrophysical scales

Using dimensional analysis techniques we present an extension of Newton's gravitational theory built under the assumption that Milgrom's acceleration constant is a fundamental quantity of nature. The gravitational force converges to Newton's gravity and to a MOND-like description in two different mass and length regimes. It is shown that a modification on the force sector (and not in the dynamical one as MOND does) is more convenient and can reproduce and predict different phenomena usually ascribed to dark matter at the non-relativistic level.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 2011 Spanish Relativity Meeting (ERE2011) held in Madrid, Spai

All about the marine/sea ice diatom Nitzschia lecointei

Generally, in terms of growth N. lecointei seems quite tolerant to changes in pH and pCO2, probably due to the fact that this species grows in an environment with large seasonal variations in the carbonate system. However, increased pCO2 resulted in physiological changes that may have important ecological consequences, such as cellular stoichiometry. For instance, we observed changes in carbon metabolism, and fatty acid content and composition, that did not affect the growth rate. When the experimental period was increased (194 days, ca. 60 asexual generations), we observed a small reduction in growth at 960 µatm pCO2 after 147 days. Carbon metabolism was significantly affected, resulting in higher cellular release of dissolved organic carbon. When studying the synergism between temperature (−1.8 and 2.5°C) and pCO2 (390 and 960 μatm), synergism was detected in growth rate and acyl lipid fatty acid content. Carbon enrichment only promoted (3 %) growth rate closer to the optimal growth, but not at the control temperature (−1.8°C). Optimal growth rate was observed around 5°C in a separate experiment. The total content of fatty acids was reduced at elevated pCO2, but only at the control temperature. PUFAs were reduced at high pCO2. When combining increased temperature and different salinity conditions, the growth rate was higher at 3°C than at -1.8°C. Salinity 10 clearly limited growth rate and the highest growth rates were found at salinity 20 and 35. In another experiment, high and low temperature together with treatments simulating ice formation and melting conditions were studied. Here, the highest levels of oxidative stress were found in low temperature and ice melting treatments, respectively. With respect to 9 weeks in the dark, cell numbers were higher at -1.5°C compared to 3°C, but when retrieved to light conditions, after one week higher cell numbers were observed at 3°C versus -1.5°C. Furthermore, cell numbers were lower when acetateUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

An Adaptive Sampling Scheme to Efficiently Train Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown excellent performance in object recognition tasks and dense classification problems such as semantic segmentation. However, training deep neural networks on large and sparse datasets is still challenging and can require large amounts of computation and memory. In this work, we address the task of performing semantic segmentation on large data sets, such as three-dimensional medical images. We propose an adaptive sampling scheme that uses a-posterior error maps, generated throughout training, to focus sampling on difficult regions, resulting in improved learning. Our contribution is threefold: 1) We give a detailed description of the proposed sampling algorithm to speed up and improve learning performance on large images. We propose a deep dual path CNN that captures information at fine and coarse scales, resulting in a network with a large field of view and high resolution outputs. We show that our method is able to attain new state-of-the-art results on the VISCERAL Anatomy benchmark

Should Analogue Pre-Equalisers be Avoided in VLC Systems-

\ua9 2009-2012 IEEE.Visible light communication (VLC) systems are highly constrained by the limited 3-dB bandwidth of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Analogue pre-equalisers have been proposed to extend the LED\u27s bandwidth at the cost of reduced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Compared with the pre-equaliser, the multi-carrier modulation with bit-loading can efficiently use the spectrum beyond the LED\u27s raw 3-dB bandwidth without incuring SNR penalties by employing multiple narrow quasi-flat sub-bands to eliminate the need for equalisation. In this work we show by means of theoretical and experimental investigation that VLC with multi-band carrierless amplitude and phase modulation with bit-loading can outperform VLC with analogue pre-equalisers

A retrospective analysis of policy development on compliance with World Health Organization's physical activity recommendations between 2002 and 2005 in European Union adults: Closing the gap between research and policy

© 2018 The Author(s). Background: Physical inactivity (PIA) is a mortality risk factor defined as performing lower levels of physical activity than recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). After 2002, the WHO released the WHA55.23 Resolution and the Global Strategy which produced several changes in policymaking, but with no subsequent analyses of the impact of these changes in European Union (EU) policymaking while examining PIA prevalence. Methods: PIA of 31,946 adults as a whole sample and country-by-country were analyzed in the 2002 and 2005 EU Special Eurobarometers. PIA prevalence between countries was performed with the χ2 test and PIA between both years and between genders was analyzed with the Z-Score test for two population proportions. A retrospective analysis of national plans was performed to interpret the suitability of such policy documents, considering changes in PIA prevalence. Results: Differences in PIA prevalence were observed between countries (p 0.05). When considering gender, there were no gender reductions in subsamples for Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and United Kingdom, neither in Luxemburg for men, nor in France and Italy for women. When analyzing gender differences across the entire sample, PIA was higher in women than men for both years (p < 0.001). Greece and Luxemburg did not release national plans for promoting physical activity. Conclusions: While large differences in PIA prevalence between EU countries prevailed, the overall PIA descended between both years for the whole sample, men, and women. While this points out a general suitability of policymaking for reducing PIA, not all countries reported reductions in PIA for men, women, or both genders. Also, PIA levels were higher for women in both years, suggesting a less than optimal policy implementation, or lack of women-specific focus across the EU. This analysis helps to identify the strengths and weaknesses of PIA policymaking in the EU and provides researchers with targeted intervention areas for future development