Mechanical design and fluid analysis of a vertical-axis wind turbine "TRIBINE"

Purpose of the final project is to design a wind turbine with an artistic view, choose proper wind turbine axis and comparison of them. The chosen wind turbine should be manufacturable, eco friendly and innovative. After the wind turbine blade selection, flow simulations were done by Solidworks

Combination of seed priming and nutrient foliar application improved physiological attributes, grain yield, and biofortification of rainfed wheat

Seed priming and foliar application are two crop management practices that can increase grain yield and quality. The research aimed to assess the influence of seed priming and foliar application on rainfed wheat. Two field experiments with two seed priming rates (control and priming) and five foliar applications [control, urea (4%), silicon (4 mM), FeSO4.7H2O (0.6%), and ZnSO4.7H2O (0.4%)] at the anthesis/Z61 stage were conducted. Seeds were primed for 12 h at 25 ± 2°C, by soaking in an aerating solution [urea (20 g L−1) + FeSO4.7H2O (50 ppm) + ZnSO4.7H2O (50 ppm) + silicon (20 mg L−1)]. Seed weight-to-solution volume ratio was 1:5 (kg L−1). A pot experiment was also conducted to examine the effect of priming on root growth. Overall, combined seed priming and foliar application induced a positive impact on physiological traits and attributes. Maximum chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, total chlorophyll, and carotenoid concentrations (1.58, 0.669, 2.24, and 0.61 mg g−1 FW), membrane stability index (77.31%), superoxide dismutase and peroxidase activity (0.174 and 0.375 Unit mg−1 protein), 1,000-grain weight (35.30 g), biological yield, grain yield (8,061 and 2,456 kg ha−1), and minimum malondialdehyde concentration (3.91 µg g−1 FW) were observed in seed priming combination with ZnSO4 foliar application. The highest glycine betaine concentration (6.90 mg g−1 DW) and proline (972.8 µg g−1 FW) were recorded with the co-application of seed priming and foliar urea spraying. Foliar application of ZnSO4, FeSO4, and urea drastically enhanced grain Zn (29.17%), Fe (19.51%), and protein content (increased from 11.14% in control to 12.46% in urea foliar application), respectively. Compared to control, seed priming increased root length, root volume, and dry mass root by 8.95%, 4.31%, and 9.64%, respectively. It is concluded that adequate Zn, Fe, silicon, and N supply through seed priming and foliar applications of these compounds at the terminal stage of rainfed wheat alleviates drought stress and improves GY and biofortification

ContrastNER: Contrastive-based Prompt Tuning for Few-shot NER

Prompt-based language models have produced encouraging results in numerous applications, including Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. NER aims to identify entities in a sentence and provide their types. However, the strong performance of most available NER approaches is heavily dependent on the design of discrete prompts and a verbalizer to map the model-predicted outputs to entity categories, which are complicated undertakings. To address these challenges, we present ContrastNER, a prompt-based NER framework that employs both discrete and continuous tokens in prompts and uses a contrastive learning approach to learn the continuous prompts and forecast entity types. The experimental results demonstrate that ContrastNER obtains competitive performance to the state-of-the-art NER methods in high-resource settings and outperforms the state-of-the-art models in low-resource circumstances without requiring extensive manual prompt engineering and verbalizer design.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, COMPSAC202

Evaluation of desmoglein 1 and 3 autoantibodies in pemphigus vulgaris : correlation with disease severity

Pemphigus is an autoimmune blistering disease of the skin and mucous membranes caused by autoantibodies against desmoglein 1 (Dsg1) and desmoglein 3 (Dsg3). Pemphigus vulgaris (PV) is the most common form of pemphigus. The aim of this study was to assess the correlation between the levels of anti-desmoglein 1 and 3 autoantibodies and the severity of PV disease. Nineteen newly diagnosed patients with pemphigus vulgaris were enrolled in this study. The titers of Dsg in subjects by using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were done at diagnosis time-point, 4th and 8th weeks after the initiation of treatment, and the correlation of antibodies with the oral and skin disease severity was evaluated. The severity of cutaneous lesions was significantly correlated with anti-Dsg1 titer in all visits and the severity of mucosal lesions was correlated with the titer of Dsg3 in the third visit (<0.001, 0.001, 0.016 and 0.015 P value, respectively). Anti-Dsg-1 autoantibodies titers seem to be more useful in showing the extent of the disease and activity in pemphigus with mucocutaneous lesions

Analysis of Different Tool Path Strategies for Free Form Machining with Computer Aided Surface Milling Operations

[EN] Free form surfaces are commonly used to generate aesthetic parts. These parts can be manufactured directly by material removal techniques or indirectly with molding or forming techniques. In any case, these surfaces must be commonly machined with traditional processes, at least until certain degree of surface finishing, and the tool path must be generated with computer aided applications. In doing so, developers are implementing new theoretical strategy operations for controlling tool path and trajectories. These new options have so many combinations that it is difficult to know which is the best one to choose when defining the tool movements. Apart from the traditional strategies fixed angle method, principal axis method and multipoint machining, combined with tool orientation, there are many other strategies to explore due to machine tool and numerical control improvements. What is need now is a validation of these new strategies in computer aided applications regarding time minimizing and how the cutting parameters affects in the surface final result.The authors would like to thanks Universitat Politècnica de València, La Fondation Dassault Systèmes, Carolina Foundation and the National Polytechnic School for the support of this article through the 2017 call and project PIS 16-15 - PIS 16-22.Vila, C.; Ayabaca-Sarria, C.; Torres Carot, R.; Gutiérrez, SC.; Meseguer, M.; Yang, X. (2019). Analysis of Different Tool Path Strategies for Free Form Machining with Computer Aided Surface Milling Operations. Procedia Manufacturing. 41:843-850. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.promfg.2019.10.006S8438504

A Preliminary Study on the Therapeutic Effects of Hydroxychloroquine on Generalized Vitiligo

Vitiligo is a recalcitrant depigmentary autoimmune skin disorder. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is an effective immunomodulatory drug which is widely used in treatment of autoimmune disorders. HCQ-induced pigmenta- tion has been previously found in patients taking HCQ due to other auto- immune diseases. The present study aimed to determine whether HCQ im- proves re-pigmentation of generalized vitiligo. HCQ was orally administered 400 mg daily (6.5 mg/Kg of body weight) by 15 patients with generalized vitiligo (more than 10% involvement of body surface area) for three months. Patients were evaluated monthly and skin re-pigmentation was assessed us- ing the Vitiligo Area Scoring Index (VASI). Laboratory data were obtained and repeated monthly. Fifteen patients (12 women and 3 men) with a mean age of 30.13±12.75 years were studied. After 3 months, the extent of re-pigmen- tation on all the body regions, including the upper extremities, hands, trunk, lower extremities, feet, and head and neck was significantly higher than the baseline (P value <0.001, 0.016, 0.029, <0.001, 0.006, 0.006, respectively). Patients with concomitant autoimmune diseases had significantly more re- pigmentation compared with others (P=0.020). No irregular laboratory data were observed during the study. HCQ could be an effective treatment for generalized vitiligo. The benefits are likely to be more evident in case of con- comitant autoimmune disease. The authors recommend additional large- scale controlled studies to draw further conclusions

Efficacy of Topical Liposomal Amphotericin B versus Intralesional Meglumine Antimoniate (Glucantime) in the Treatment of Cutaneous Leishmaniasis

Background. Topical treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis is an attractive alternative avoiding toxicities of parenteral therapy while being administered through a simple painless route. Recently liposomal formulations of amphotericin B have been increasingly used in the treatment of several types of leishmaniasis. Aims. The efficacy of a topical liposomal amphotericin B formulation was compared with intralesional glucantime in the treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis. Methods. From 110 patients, the randomly selected 50 received a topical liposomal formulation of amphotericin B into each lesion, 3–7 drops twice daily, according to the lesion's size and for 8 weeks. The other group of 60 patients received intralesional glucantime injection of 1-2 mL once a week for the same period. The clinical responses and side effects of both groups were evaluated weekly during the treatment course. Results. Per-protocol analysis showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups (P = 0.317, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.610 (0.632–4.101)). Moreover, after intention-to-treat analysis, the same results were seen (P = 0.650, 95% CI = 0.1.91 (0.560–2.530)). Serious post treatment side effects were not observed in either group. Conclusions. Topical liposomal amphotericin B has the same efficacy as intralesional glucantime in the treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis