Development of outdoor thermal comfort model for tourists in urban historical areas; A case study in Isfahan

The present study intended to evaluate thermal comfort conditions in microclimates of the urban historical areas of Isfahan, Iran during a heatwave. The thermal comfort conditions of different historical sites were compared during the daylight hours to determine the best time to visit each historical site. Using the results of this study, tourists can select the best timeframe with appropriate thermal conditions to visit the historical sites of Isfahan. Along with performing field measurements in the intended historical sites, a questionnaire was used to determine the thermal comfort range of tourists. ENVI-met is used in order to properly simulate the outdoor thermal environment of the historical touristic areas in Isfahan during the hottest as well as the most touristic month of the year. The results of questionnaire and simulations are compared with each other. It was shown that three historical sites with higher thermal stress experience an unpleasant thermal condition. The results of questionnaire show that the comfort range of tourists is within 23.06–29.73 °C PET. The thermal conditions of Si-o-Se Pol, Hasht Behesht and Naqsh-e-Jahan are within the thermal comfort range at 19,20 and 21 p.m. respectively. During the daytime, thermal comfort conditions varied from 4.9 °C PET at 8 a.m. to 8.1 °C PET at 3 p.m. Early morning hours were the most comfortable time to visit the historical sites of Menar-e-Jonban, Masjed-e-Jame and Vank Cathedral in Isfahan. During the peak hours of heat, the priority of thermal comfort goes to Masjed-e-Jame, Menar-e-Jonban and Si-o-Se Pol, respectively

Fluconazole resistance Candida albicans in females with recurrent vaginitis and Pir1 overexpression

Background: Some genes may be associated with Candida albicans resistance to azoles. Pir1 gene is described as responsible to induce resistance in C. albicans. Objectives: The current study aimed to find the relationship between fluconazole resistance and Pir1 protein (Pir1p) overexpression in the females with recurrent C. albicans vaginitis requiring longer fluconazole therapy. Patients and Methods: A total of 52l vaginal samples were obtained from the females with C. albicans vaginitis. The azole susceptibility phenotype was determined according to the Clinical Laboratory for Standards Institute (CLSI) protocol for disk diffusion method and inhibition zone for fluconazole. Expression of pir1 gene and fluconazole -resistance were evaluated using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in C. albicans. Results: In the 52 isolates, 49 (94) were resistant to fluconazole. Overexpression of Pir1 gene was detected in 47 (96) fluconazole-resistant C. albicans isolates. Conclusions: The findings show fluconazole -resistance in C. albicans isolates with overexpression of Pir1p. © 2015, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences

Effect of acute caffeine administration on hyperalgesia and allodynia in a rat neuropathic pain model

Introduction: Damage to the central and peripheral nervous system causes neuropathic pain. Caffeine is a plant alkaloid and non-selective antagonist of A1, A2a and A2b adenosine receptors. It is reported that caffeine increases the threshold of pain. In this study, the effect of acute caffeine on behavioral responses of neuropathic pain was investigated. Materials and Methods: The present study was conducted on 56 adult male Wistar rats in the weight range of 220-250 g. Neuropathic pain was induced by chronic constriction injury (CCI(. Animals were randomly divided into 7 groups (n = 8): Control, Sham, CCI, CCI + Saline, and CCI + Caffeine (10, 50 and 100 mg/kg). Thermal hyperalgesia, mechanical and thermal allodynia has been done on days 4,7, 14, 21, 28 after CCI. Results: Neuropathic rats desmostrated increased pain thresholds. Notably, caffeine at a dose of 10 mg/kg significantly increased the thermal allodynia., but at doses of 50 and 100 mg/kg, it significantly decreased the thermal hyperalgesia and mechanical allodynia. Conclusion: Our findings indicated that the effects of caffeine on pain responses are dose-dependent. Probably the inhibition of adenosine A1 receptors by caffeine increases pain responses, while the inhibition of A2a and A2b adenosine receptors is associated with protective effect of caffeine against pain responses. © 2020, Semnan University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved

Deep Burst Denoising

Noise is an inherent issue of low-light image capture, one which is exacerbated on mobile devices due to their narrow apertures and small sensors. One strategy for mitigating noise in a low-light situation is to increase the shutter time of the camera, thus allowing each photosite to integrate more light and decrease noise variance. However, there are two downsides of long exposures: (a) bright regions can exceed the sensor range, and (b) camera and scene motion will result in blurred images. Another way of gathering more light is to capture multiple short (thus noisy) frames in a "burst" and intelligently integrate the content, thus avoiding the above downsides. In this paper, we use the burst-capture strategy and implement the intelligent integration via a recurrent fully convolutional deep neural net (CNN). We build our novel, multiframe architecture to be a simple addition to any single frame denoising model, and design to handle an arbitrary number of noisy input frames. We show that it achieves state of the art denoising results on our burst dataset, improving on the best published multi-frame techniques, such as VBM4D and FlexISP. Finally, we explore other applications of image enhancement by integrating content from multiple frames and demonstrate that our DNN architecture generalizes well to image super-resolution

Simple, Accurate, and Robust Nonparametric Blind Super-Resolution

This paper proposes a simple, accurate, and robust approach to single image nonparametric blind Super-Resolution (SR). This task is formulated as a functional to be minimized with respect to both an intermediate super-resolved image and a nonparametric blur-kernel. The proposed approach includes a convolution consistency constraint which uses a non-blind learning-based SR result to better guide the estimation process. Another key component is the unnatural bi-l0-l2-norm regularization imposed on the super-resolved, sharp image and the blur-kernel, which is shown to be quite beneficial for estimating the blur-kernel accurately. The numerical optimization is implemented by coupling the splitting augmented Lagrangian and the conjugate gradient (CG). Using the pre-estimated blur-kernel, we finally reconstruct the SR image by a very simple non-blind SR method that uses a natural image prior. The proposed approach is demonstrated to achieve better performance than the recent method by Michaeli and Irani [2] in both terms of the kernel estimation accuracy and image SR quality

Projected changes of rainfall seasonality and dry spells in a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario

In this diagnostic study we analyze changes of rainfall seasonality and dry spells by the end of the twenty-first century under the most extreme IPCC5 emission scenario (RCP8.5) as projected by twenty-four coupled climate models contributing to Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5). We use estimates of the centroid of the monthly rainfall distribution as an index of the rainfall timing and a threshold-independent, information theory-based quantity such as relative entropy (RE) to quantify the concentration of annual rainfall and the number of dry months and to build a monsoon dimensionless seasonality index (DSI). The RE is projected to increase, with high inter-model agreement over Mediterranean-type regions---southern Europe, northern Africa and southern Australia---and areas of South and Central America, implying an increase in the number of dry days up to 1Â month by the end of the twenty-first century. Positive RE changes are also projected over the monsoon regions of southern Africa and North America, South America. These trends are consistent with a shortening of the wet season associated with a more prolonged pre-monsoonal dry period. The extent of the global monsoon region, characterized by large DSI, is projected to remain substantially unaltered. Centroid analysis shows that most of CMIP5 projections suggest that the monsoonal annual rainfall distribution is expected to change from early to late in the course of the hydrological year by the end of the twenty-first century and particularly after year 2050. This trend is particularly evident over northern Africa, southern Africa and western Mexico, where more than 90% of the models project a delay of the rainfall centroid from a few days up to 2Â weeks. Over the remaining monsoonal regions, there is little inter-model agreement in terms of centroid changes

Preliminary report of a nationwide case-control study for identifying risk factors of tuberculosis following renal transplantation

Background. Tuberculosis (TB) is an important infection encountered posttransplantation, especially among patients in developing countries, where there are high incidences of morbidity and mortality. Materials and Methods. One hundred and twenty subjects (1) from 15 major kidney transplantation centers in Iran from 1984 to 2003 were compared with 440 controls who were matched for operative time, treatment center, and surgical team. Results. Mean ages of research subjects and controls were 38.6 and 36.6 years (P = .04), respectively. The mean duration of pretransplantation hemodialysis was 29 months (range, 2 to 192 months) in research subjects and 20 months (range, 1 to 180 months) in controls (P = .003). Positive past history of tuberculosis was detected in 4 (3.3) research subjects and in 7 (1.5) controls (P = .2). Fifty-two research subjects (43.3) and 241 controls (54.8) had pretransplantation purified protein derivative of tuberculin less than 5 mm (P = .02). Mean dosages of initial and maintenance immunosuppressive drugs in research subjects and in controls were not significantly different. Sixty research subjects (50) and 152 controls (34.5) had rejection prior to diagnosis of TB (P = .03). Conclusion. To our knowledge, this is the first study that demonstrates an increased risk of posttransplant TB by prolonged duration of pretransplant hemodialysis and number of posttransplant rejection episodes. Further study is needed to clarify these findings specifically with respect to various immunosuppressive regimens. © 2005 by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

‫ـ‬ ‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ ‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬ Evaluation of the antifungal activity of olive leaf aqueous extracts against Candida albicans PTCC-5027

Abstract In this study, antifungal property of olive leaf extracts against Candida albicans PTCC-5027 was examined. Fresh olive leaf extracts were prepared using distilled water in a Soxhlet apparatus. The antifungal activity of the extract was analyzed by measuring the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum fungicidal concentration (MFC), using the microdilution test and disc diffusion assay. The olive leaf aqueous extracts exhibited antifungal effects against the yeast with an MIC of 24 mg/ml, MFC of 48 mg/ml, and inhibition zone diameter of 21 mm. The results indicated the sensitivity of Candida albicans PTCC-5027 to olive leaf aqueous extracts

Novel formulation and evaluation of a Q10-loaded solid lipid nanoparticle cream: in vitro and in vivo studies

Effat Sadat Farboud, Saman Ahmad Nasrollahi, Zahra TabbakhiDepartment of Pharmaceutics, School of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, IranAbstract: Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) of coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) were formulated by a high-pressure homogenization method. The best formulation of SLN dispersion consisted of 13% lipid (cetyl palmitate or stearic acid), 8% surfactant (Tween 80 or Tego Care 450), and water. Stability tests, particle size analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, transmission electron microscopy, and release study were conducted to find the best formulation. A simple cream of CoQ10 and a cream containing CoQ10-loaded SLNs were prepared and compared on volunteers aged 20–30 years. SLNs with particle size between 50 nm and100 nm exhibited the most suitable stability. In vitro release profiles of CoQ10 from simple cream, SLN alone, and CoQ10-loaded SLN cream showed prolonged release for SLNs compared with the simple cream, whereas there was no significant difference between SLN alone and SLN in cream. In vitro release studies also demonstrated that CoQ10-loaded SLN and SLN cream possessed a biphasic release pattern in comparison with simple cream. In vivo skin hydration and elasticity studies on 25 volunteers suggested good dermal penetration and useful activity of Q10 on skin as a hydratant and antiwrinkle cream.Keywords: coenzyme Q10, SLN, release study&nbsp