Polyherbal Formulation used in the Treatment of Jaundice

Plants have traditionally served as man\u27s most important weapon against pathogens. Herbal medicines are widely used by all sections of the community, either as folk remedies or as medicaments in the indigenous as well as modern system of medicine. The present work was performed to enumerate the medicinal herbs that tribes and rural people uses for the treatment of jaundice. Data were collected by interviewing local traditional therapists and tribes of the region. Details of 10 herbs and 03 formulations were gathered along with their doses, duration and formulations during the course of present investigation in the study area. Our study revealed that all above herbs and their formulations have been used since quite a long time by the tribes and rural people and no side/ adverse effects were reported

Blacklistable Anonymous Credentials: Blocking Misbehaving Users without TTPs (Extended Version)

Several credential systems have been proposed in which users can authenticate to services anonymously. Since anonymity can give users the license to misbehave, some variants allow the selective deanonymization (or linking) of misbehaving users upon a complaint to a trusted third party (TTP). The ability of the TTP to revoke a user\u27s privacy at any time, however, is too strong a punishment for misbehavior. To limit the scope of deanonymization, systems such as ``e-cash\u27\u27 have been proposed in which users are deanonymized under only certain types of well-defined misbehavior such as ``double spending.\u27\u27 While useful in some applications, it is not possible to generalize such techniques to more subjective definitions of misbehavior. We present the first anonymous credential system in which services can ``blacklist\u27\u27 misbehaving users without contacting a TTP. Since blacklisted users remain anonymous, misbehaviors can be judged subjectively without users fearing arbitrary deanonymization by a TTP

Constraints on compact dark matter from gravitational wave microlensing

If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the binary black hole events from the first two observing runs and the first half of the third observing run, we constrain the fraction of compact dark matter in the mass range $10^2-10^5~{M_\odot}$ to be less than $\simeq 50-80\%$ (details depend on the assumed source population properties and the Bayesian priors). These modest constraints will be significantly improved in the next few years with the expected detection of thousands of binary black hole events, providing a new avenue to probe the nature of dark matter

Understanding ethnic inequalities in hearing health in the UK: a cross-sectional study of the link between language proficiency and performance on the Digit Triplet Test

Introduction Research using the UK Biobank data has shown ethnic inequalities in hearing health; however, the hearing test used may exhibit a disadvantage for non-native language speakers. Objectives To validate the results of the UK Biobank hearing test (Digit Triplet Test, DTT) against self-reported measures of hearing in the dataset and create classifications of hearing health. To observe if language proficiency and migration age have the same effect on hearing health classification as on the DTT in isolation. Our hypothesis is that language proficiency acts differently on the DTT, demonstrating that the DTT is biased for non-native speakers of English. Design Latent classes representing profiles of hearing health were identified from the available hearing measures. Factors associated with class membership were tested using multinomial logistic regression models. Ethnicity was defined as (1) White, native English-speaking, (2) ethnic minority, arrived in the UK aged 12. Participants The UK Biobank participants with valid hearing test results and associated covariates (N=151 268). Outcome measures DTT score, self-reported hearing difficulty, self-reported hearing difficulty in noise and hearing aid use. Results Three classes of hearing health were found: ‘normal’, ‘generally poor’ and ‘only subjectively poor’. In a model adjusting for known confounders of hearing loss, a poor or insufficient hearing test result was less likely for those with better language (OR 0.69, 95% CI 0.65 to 0.74) or numerical ability (OR 0.71, 95% CI 0.67 to 0.75) but more likely for those having migrated aged >12 (OR 3.85, 95% CI 3.64 to 4.07). Conclusions The DTT showed evidence of bias, having greater dependence on language ability and migration age than other hearing indicators. Designers of future surveys and hearing screening applications may wish to consider the limitations of speech-in-noise tests in evaluating hearing acuity for populations that include non-native speakers

Environmental effect on egress simulation

Abstract. Evacuation and egress simulations can be a useful tool for studying the effect of design decisions on the flow of agent movement. This type of simulation can be used to determine before hand the effect of design decisions and enable exploration of potential improvements. In this work, we study at how agent egress is affected by the environment in real world and large scale virtual environments and investigate metrics to analyze the flow. Our work differs from many evacuation systems in that we support grouping restrictions between agents (e.g., families or other social groups traveling together), and model scenarios with multiple modes of transportation with physically realistic dynamics (e.g., individuals walk from a building to their own cars and leave only when all people in the group arrive).

Hybrid core-multishell nanowire forests for electrical connector applications

Electrical connectors based on hybrid core-multishell nanowire forests that require low engagement forces are demonstrated. The physical binding and electrical connectivity of the nanowire electrical connectors arise from the van der Waals interactions between the conductive metallic shells of the engaged nanowire forests. Specifically, the nanofibrillar structure of the connectors causes an amplification of the contact area between the interpenetrating nanowire arrays, resulting in strong adhesion with relatively low interfacial resistance. The nanowire electrical connectors may enable the exploration of a wide range of applications involving reversible assembly of micro- and macroscale components with built-in electrical interfacing.open151

Space Warps II. New Gravitational Lens Candidates from the CFHTLS Discovered through Citizen Science

We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search. The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales) which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about 65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set publicly available.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, MNRAS accepted, minor to moderate changes in this versio

Constraints on Compact Dark Matter from Gravitational Wave Microlensing

If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the nonobservation of microlensing signatures in the binary black hole events from the first two observing runs and the first half of the third observing run, we constrain the fraction of compact dark matter in the mass range 102-105 M to be less than ≃50%-80% (details depend on the assumed source population properties and the Bayesian priors). These modest constraints will be significantly improved in the next few years with the expected detection of thousands of binary black hole events, providing a new avenue to probe the nature of dark matter