Graphene: The Material of Today and Tomorrow

Graphene has astounding aptitudes owing to its unique band structure characteristics outlining its enhanced electrical capabilities for a material with the highest characteristic mobility known to exist at room temperature. Graphene, one-atom-thick, a planar sheet of carbon atoms densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice, has grabbed considerable attention due to its exceptional electronic and optoelectronic properties. Reported properties and applications of this two-dimensional form of carbon structure have opened up new opportunities for the future devices and application in various fields. Though graphene is recognized as one of the best electronic materials, synthesizing single sheet of graphene has been less explored. This review article aims to present an overview of the progression of research in graphene, in the area of synthesis, properties and applications. Wherever applicable, the limitations of present knowledge base and future research directions have also been discusse

Decolonizing nature/knowledge: Indigenous environmental thought and feminist praxis

This faculty-student collaborative article is a result of a graduate seminar on ‘Environmental Education’ taught at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for Educational Development in Karachi, and it illuminates new perspectives and pedagogies of nature from the global South, specifically South Asia. Drawing inspiration from feminist and indigenous thought, the narratives of ecology shared here center the place of emotions, experience, memory and spiritual intimacy, offering one means of decolonizing environmental studies and expanding our understanding of ‘environmental consciousness’. These narratives defy ontologies of nature-human separation, capturing not just the co-existence of animals, spirits and humans but their co-constitution. Such indigenous ecologies of knowledge and wisdom, we argue, offer a timely corrective to fragmented and exploitative constructions of the natural environment as mere resource, pleasure, or commodity, while providing a profound, alternative basis for a richly layered, spirited, environmental education

Cross-Lingual Text Reuse Detection at Document Level for English-Urdu Language Pair

In recent years, the problem of Cross-Lingual Text Reuse Detection (CLTRD) has gained the interest of the research community due to the availability of large digital repositories and automatic Machine Translation (MT) systems. These systems are readily available and openly accessible, which makes it easier to reuse text across languages but hard to detect. In previous studies, different corpora and methods have been developed for CLTRD at the sentence/passage level for the English-Urdu language pair. However, there is a lack of large standard corpora and methods for CLTRD for the English-Urdu language pair at the document level. To overcome this limitation, the significant contribution of this study is the development of a large benchmark cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse corpus, called the TREU (Text Reuse for English-Urdu) corpus. It contains English to Urdu real cases of text reuse at the document level. The corpus is manually labelled into three categories (Wholly Derived = 672, Partially Derived = 888, and Non Derived = 697) with the source text in English and the derived text in the Urdu language. Another contribution of this study is the evaluation of the TREU corpus using a diversified range of methods to show its usefulness and how it can be utilized in the development of automatic methods for measuring cross-lingual (English-Urdu) text reuse at the document level. The best evaluation results, for both binary ( F 1 = 0.78) and ternary ( F 1 = 0.66) classification tasks, are obtained using a combination of all Translation plus Mono-lingual Analysis (T+MA) based methods. The TREU corpus is publicly available to promote CLTRD research in an under-resourced language, i.e. Urdu

Development and Characterization of Porous Hydroxyapatite Scaffold by Using Polymeric Sponge Method

In recent years, scrupulous attention has been given to the preparation of porous hydroxyapatite (HA). Porous HA exhibits strong bonding to the bone and provide a mechanical interlock leading to a firm fixation of the material. Bone tissue grows well into the pores, increasing strength of the HA implant. Its high surface area leads to excellent osteoconductivity and resorbability providing fast bone ingrowth. This paper briefly describes the preparation of porous HA scaffold by polymeric sponge method for artificial bone application. The technique of saturating a body of porous polyurethane foam with slurry containing HA powder, water and additives was applied and proved to be successful. The characterization of the hydroxyapatite porous scaffolds was assessed by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)