A giant post auricular cutaneous horn: A rare case report

A cutaneous (cornu cutaneum) horn is a rare lesion which usually appears in sun-exposed areas and is very uncommon. It is a conical projection of hyperkeratotic epidermis and can be from a few millimeters to several centimeters in length. Here, we present the case of a large “horn” of long duration, arising in the right postauricular region in a 32-years-old male. The lesion was carefully examined, evaluated, complete excision was done with adequate margins and the defect was closed with primary closure after mobilizing the skin flaps adequately. Histopathologic examination showed the skin with underlying epidermis and extensive hyperkeratosis with no malignant cells seen at the base of the horn. It is important to mention that horn itself, is not the most important issue, but rather the underlying condition, which may be malignant also, needs to be ruled out and addressed

Architectural support for persistent memory systems

The long stated vision of persistent memory is set to be realized with the release of 3D XPoint memory by Intel and Micron. Persistent memory, as the name suggests, amalgamates the persistence (non-volatility) property of storage devices (like disks) with byte-addressability and low latency of memory. These properties of persistent memory coupled with its accessibility through the processor load/store interface enable programmers to design in-memory persistent data structures. An important challenge in designing persistent memory systems is to provide support for maintaining crash consistency of these in-memory data structures. Crash consistency is necessary to ensure the correct recovery of program state after a crash. Ordering is a primitive that can be used to design crash consistent programs. It provides guarantees on the order of updates to persistent memory. Atomicity can also be used to design crash consistent programs via two primitives. First, as an atomic durability primitive which guarantees that in the presence of system crashes updates are made durable atomically, which means either all or none of the updates are made durable. Second, in the form of ACID transactions that guarantee atomic visibility and atomic durability. Existing systems do not support ordering, let alone atomic durability or ACID. In fact, these systems implement various performance enhancing optimizations that deliberately reorder updates to memory. Moreover, software in these systems cannot explicitly control the movement of data from volatile cache to persistent memory. Therefore, any ordering requirement has to be enforced synchronously which degrades performance because program execution is stalled waiting for updates to reach persistent memory. This thesis aims to provide the design principles and efficient implementations for three crash consistency primitives: ordering, atomic durability and ACID transactions. A set of persistency models have been proposed recently which provide support for the ordering primitive. This thesis extends the taxonomy of these models by adding buffering, which allows the hardware to enforce ordering in the background, as a new layer of classification. It then goes on show how the existing implementation of a buffered model degenerates to a performance inefficient non-buffered model because of the presence of conflicts and proposes efficient solutions to eliminate or limit the impact of these conflicts with minimal hardware modifications. This thesis also proposes the first implementation of a buffered model for a server class processor with multi-banked caches and multiple memory controllers. Write ahead logging (WAL) is a commonly used approach to provide atomic durability. This thesis argues that existing implementations ofWAL in software are not only inefficient, because of the fine grained ordering dependencies, but also waste precious execution cycles to implement a fundamentally data movement task. It then proposes ATOM, a hardware log manager based on undo logging that performs the logging operation out of the critical path. This thesis presents the design principles behind ATOM and two techniques that optimize its performance. These techniques enable the memory controller to enforce fine grained ordering required for logging and to even perform logging in some cases. In doing so, ATOM significantly reduces processor stall cycles and improves performance. The most commonly used abstraction employed to atomically update persistent data is that of durable transactions with ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability) semantics that make updates within a transaction both visible and durable atomically. As a final contribution, this thesis tackles the problem of providing efficient support for durable transactions in hardware by integrating hardware support for atomic durability with hardware transactional memory (HTM). It proposes DHTM (durable hardware transactional memory) in which durability is considered as a first class design constraint. DHTM guarantees atomic durability via hardware redo-logging, and integrates this logging support with a commercial HTM to provide atomic visibility. Furthermore, DHTM leverages the same logging infrastructure to extend the supported transaction size, from being L1-limited to the LLC, with minor changes to the coherence protocol

Production of Amylase by Bacillus polymyxa NCIM No. 2539 from Agroindustrial Wastes

Background and Objective: In the present study, Bacillus polymyxa NCIM No. 2539 was selected to utilize agro-industrial byproduct (orange peel) for amylase production under submergedfermentation conditions.Material and Methods: Different agro-industrial byproducts like cane molasses, wheat bran, rice bran and orange peel were screened for maximum amylase production. Amylase activitiy of Bacillus polymyxa was studied using starch-agar plate method. MINITAB software Version 17 and central composite design were applied to evaluate effect of supplementation of substrate with different sulphur containing amino acids (cysteine, methionine and cystine) and vitamin thiamine on enzyme activity. Further optimization of the parameters viz. amount of substrate, concentration of amino acid and vitamin for maximum amylase production was studied by central composite rotatable design.Results and Conclusion: Among 4 different agro-industrial substrates applied, orange peel showed maximum enzyme production (activity: 492.31 IU g-1 sample). Supplementation of the production media with cysteine showed maximum amylaseproduction (515.38 IU g-1 sample) among all three amino acids and control. Supplementation with thiamine also showed more amylase production (469.23 IU g-1 sample) as compared to control (415.38 IU g-1). Cysteine and thiamine proved to increaseamylase production significantly. Maximum amylase production was obtained at 7.7 g orange peel, 37.29 mg cysteine and 34.23 mg per 10 ml thiamine.Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest

Reference values for the six-minute walk test in obese Indian population

Background: The six-minute walk test is one of the most powerful test used to measure the functional capacity in various chronic conditions such as in Obesity. There are very few reported studies on SMWT on Obese population all over the world, and there is no reference equation for SMWD. The aim of present study is to propose a Reference equation which could predict the distance walked in SMWT by obese individuals.Methods: 150 obese individuals free from any cardiorespiratory disease were randomized into 2 groups. SMWT data from group A was used to propose the reference equation and SMWD for Group B was predicted. Significance of difference between predicted and original values for group B was found.Results: Mean SMWD for Group A was 304.56 (SD= 68.28) which significantly correlated to (by using linear regression method) age (r = -0.32, p <0.001), BMI (r = -0.43, p <0.001) SpO2* (r=-0.35, p<0.001). These could explain 56% of the total variance in 6MWT. Though the difference between predicted and original values for group B wasn’t found to be statistically significant. The proposed Reference equation is:6MWT distance = (6.8) O2 saturation-(4.3) BMI-(0.6) age-170.64.Conclusions: SMWT is a simple, safe and powerful test to assess the functional status. The standardized SMWD values for Indian obese population would serve as benchmark to assess baseline functional capacity, prescribe proper and safe exercise intensity and monitor changes after rehabilitation interventions

Generation of Electricity using Wind Energy Produced due to the Motion of Trains

The aim of this work is to generate free electricity for general use, through wind energy which is created due to the motion of trains. This is achieved by using a low friction ball bearing sensitive dynamo (22V, 100mA) with adjustments such that it can support a fan and using it practically as a small wind turbine. By creating a closely developed arrangements of many such dynamos around tracks, supported by feeding the outputs of all these dynamos systematically to a central electrical transmission line we can feed all the energy produced to a battery for further use. Keywords: Energy, Free, Electricity, Wind, Train