Nanoparticle delivery systems in the treatment of diabetes complications

Diabetes mellitus, an incurable metabolic disease, is characterized by changes in the homeostasis of blood sugar levels, being the subcutaneous injection of insulin the first line treatment. This administration route is however associated with limited patients compliance, due to the risk of pain, discomfort and local infection. Nanoparticles have been proposed as insulin carriers to make possible the administration of the peptide via friendlier pathways without the need of injection, i.e., via oral or nasal routes. Nanoparticles stand for particles in the nanometer range that can be obtained from different materials (e.g., polysaccharides, synthetic polymers, lipid) and are commonly used with the aim to improve the physicochemical stability of the loaded drug and thereby its bioavailability. This review discusses the use of different types of nanoparticles (e.g., polymeric and lipid nanoparticles, liposomes, dendrimers, niosomes, micelles, nanoemulsions and also drug nanosuspensions) for improved delivery of different oral hypoglycemic agents in comparison to conventional therapies.The authors acknowledge the financial support received from Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT/MCT) and from European Funds (PRODER/COMPETE) under the project reference M-ERA-NET/0004/2015-PAIRED, co-financed by FEDER, under the Partnership Agreement PT2020. The authors also acknowledge the support of the research project: “Nutraceutica come supporto nutrizionale nel paziente oncologico”, CUP: B83D18000140007.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Hybrid multicriteria fuzzy classification of network traffic patterns, anomalies, and protocols

© 2017, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature. Traffic classification in computer networks has very significant roles in network operation, management, and security. Examples include controlling the flow of information, allocating resources effectively, provisioning quality of service, detecting intrusions, and blocking malicious and unauthorized access. This problem has attracted a growing attention over years and a number of techniques have been proposed ranging from traditional port-based and payload inspection of TCP/IP packets to supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised machine learning paradigms. With the increasing complexity of network environments and support for emerging mobility services and applications, more robust and accurate techniques need to be investigated. In this paper, we propose a new supervised hybrid machine-learning approach for ubiquitous traffic classification based on multicriteria fuzzy decision trees with attribute selection. Moreover, our approach can handle well the imbalanced datasets and zero-day applications (i.e., those without previously known traffic patterns). Evaluating the proposed methodology on several benchmark real-world traffic datasets of different nature demonstrated its capability to effectively discriminate a variety of traffic patterns, anomalies, and protocols for unencrypted and encrypted traffic flows. Comparing with other methods, the performance of the proposed methodology showed remarkably better classification accuracy

Cohort Profile: Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study

The Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study was established to assess the prevalence of chronic airflow obstruction, a key characteristic of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and its risk factors in adults (≥40 years) from general populations across the world. The baseline study was conducted between 2003 and 2016, in 41 sites across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, the Caribbean and Oceania, and collected high-quality pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry from 28 828 participants. The follow-up study was conducted between 2019 and 2021, in 18 sites across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean. At baseline, there were in these sites 12 502 participants with high-quality spirometry. A total of 6452 were followed up, with 5936 completing the study core questionnaire. Of these, 4044 also provided high-quality pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry. On both occasions, the core questionnaire covered information on respiratory symptoms, doctor diagnoses, health care use, medication use and ealth status, as well as potential risk factors. Information on occupation, environmental exposures and diet was also collected

A Review on Aluminium Hybrid Surface Composite Fabrication Using Friction Stir Processing

Nowadays, Aluminium (Al) based hybrid surface composites are amongst the fastest developing advanced materials used for structural applications. Friction Stir Processing (FSP) has emerged as a clean and flexible solid-state surface composites fabrication technique. Intensive research in this field resulted in numerous research output; which hinders in finding relevant meta-data for further research with objectivity. In order to facilitate this research need, present article summarizes current state of the art and advances in aluminium based hybrid surface composites fabrication by FSP with in-situ and ex-situ approach. Reported literature were read and systematically categorized to show impacts of different types of reinforcements, deposition techniques, hybrid reinforcement ratio and FSP machine parameters on microstructures, mechanical and tribological characteristics of different Al alloys. Challenges and opportunities in this field have been summarized at the end, which will be beneficial to researchers working onsolid state FSP technique

Microstructural analysis of Al6063/sic with calcium additives for hardness enhancement

Microstructural Analysis plays an important role in enhancing the mechanical properties of metals and composites. Usually Aluminium Silicon Carbide (Al6063/SiC) alloys are mixed with strontium, sodium and antimony for high durability even though they are toxic and costly. As an alternative calcium is used as an alloying element to improve the mechanical property of Al6063/Sic alloy. In this paper Al6063 is chosen as the matrix material while Sic is used as a reinforcement where calcium powder is added to modify the silicon phase of the composite. Finally, concentration of Silicon carbide is varied from 0 to 150 mg to produce four specimens of Al6063 alloy and it is subjected to microstructure analysis which showed the reduction of grain size and therefore improvement in the hardness from 52.9 HV to 58.4 HV and decrease in the wear loss from 3.97 to 3.27 percentage

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Not AvailableA self-propelled intra-canopy boom spraying system was designed for spraying chemicals in small height row crops. The performance of the spraying system was evaluated both under laboratory and field conditions to assess the efficacy and minimize the loss of spray liquid. Flat fan and hollow cone nozzles were tested to determine the boom volumetric distribution, swath and spray angle at different combinations of pressure and height. The flat fan nozzle gave better volumetric distribution at 2.5 kgf.cm-2, while the hollow cone nozzle gave at 2.0 kgf.cm-2 pressure corresponding to 300 mm nozzle height. The spraying system was tested on soybean crop at forwarding speeds of 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 km.h-1. With an increase in forwarding speed, the mean percentage of coverage decreased significantly (30.30 - 15.37 % for top and 20.01- 4.12 % for bottom part of the leaves), and the mean droplet density varied significantly (277.35 - 243.40 no.cm-2 for top and 262.87 - 78.44 no.cm-2 for the bottom part of the leaves) at 5 % level of significance. A good percentage of leaf area coverage (30.30 % and 20.01 % for top and bottom of the plant) was obtained at low forward speed (1.5 km.h-1) while compromising more spray volume and less field capacity as compared to higher forward travel speeds. The effect of forwarding travel speed, position of tags and nozzle types were significant (p<0.05) for mean droplet size, number median diameter, percentage coverage of leaf area and droplet density. The field capacity of the spraying system ranged between 0.22 and 0.36 ha.h-1 with an increase in forward travel speed from 1.50 km.h-1 to 2.50 km.h-1 at an average swath of 1.8 m.Not Availabl

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Not AvailableThe threshing on Indian farms is required to make and collect both grain and chaff for human and cattle consumption, respectively. This criteria of wheat bhusa making led to unacceptability of combines and the simultaneous development of threshers which not only separate grain but also deliver wheat straw in size of 10-20 mm length. The wheat straw size for maximum output capacity and maximum threshing efficiency were 22.43 mm and 22.67 mm at tip diameter of 600 mm and spike thickness of 6 mm corresponding to maximum feed rate (780 kg/h) in case of rectangular spiked and round spiked threshing cylinders. For higher threshing efficiency, fine straw quality and minimum specific power consumption, rectangular spiked threshing cylinder of 600 mm tip diameter and spike thickness of 6 mm have given best performance results with total grain loss within permissible limit. The spike thickness of 6 mm gave minimum broken grain loss with fine straw quality. The round spiked (plain spike) threshing cylinder with same configuration of threshing cylinder showed best results. But from mass manufacturing point of view, tip diameter of 600 mm and 8 mm round spike thickness will be appropriate for manufacturers. It also delivered good output capacity and threshing efficiency and fine straw quality.Not Availabl

Optimization of dry sliding wear behavior of epoxy nanocomposites under different conditions

This paper evaluates the wear properties of epoxy nanocomposites containing GNP (Graphene Nanoplatelets). In this research, variation of GNP (0,0.1, 0.25, and 0.5 wt%) were used to make nanocomposites. The hand layup technique was used for the fabrication of different composites. The Taguchi method is used to optimize the wear test and its related characteristics. Analysis of variance is used to understand the correlation between input variables and response measurements. Load (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 kg) and time (4, 6, 8, and 10 min) are the main variables for exploring wear characteristics for this study. It has been discovered that minimum wear in terms of mass loss and friction coefficient are minimum at 0.5 wt% GNP. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive x-ray analysis (EDX), and RAMAN spectroscopy were used to characterize the wear mechanism. The result shows that the optimized value is closer to the experimental value