Effects of static electromagnetic fields on sleep patterns: a cross-sectional study

Background: Sleep is an important process of our body and a good sleep will lead to a healthy lifestyle. In medical field, students have sleep patterns changing due to heavy academic workload. This may have ill effects on their health. Though most factors that affect sleep are modifiable and treatment for them exists still there are can be many factors that affect sleep which should be explored. The thermal model of human body is a theoretical model that accounts for thermal effects of electromagnetic waves on a given point in human body. This could be easily affect brain as it has highest electrical activity in body and may lead to sleep related disorders.Methods: This study is conducted on medical and dental students to analyse the amount of electromagnetic field they get exposed to and any changes in sleep patterns associated with it. The findings of medical and dental students are compared to see if changes in sleep patterns are due to professional course pursued. Any other confounding factors affecting this study are screened by self-rated Pacific Sleep Questionnaire.Results: There were significant changes seen in the time taken to fall asleep and total sleep period but the time taken to wake up from sleep remained unaffected. The sleeping habits of medical and dental students showed no significant changes.Conclusions: Static electromagnetic fields have significant impact on sleep onset and sleep duration. This is regardless of academic background

Effect of obesity on cognitive function: a cross-sectional study

Background: Obesity is the leading cause of many health problems. It mostly affects the brain by cerebrovascular events, but since it is a chronic low-grade inflammatory state, inflammatory cytokines in blood alter neuronal function. The jolly-fat hypothesis says that obese people have better cognition as they have more fat storage which is required to make neurotransmitters. Many studies have been done to support each of the above hypotheses but most are done in the paediatric or geriatric populations which can have other confounding factors. Obesity can be easily treated with proper dietary interventions, exercise, pharmaceutical therapies, or surgical interventions. Thus, it was worth exploring as simple lifestyle changes might lower the incidence of cognitive disabilities.Methods: This study was done on undergraduate medical students with a sample size of 120 (60 male and 60 female). Their body mass index was calculated after taking body weight and height. The cognition of subjects was studied using the Washington click reaction time test. This was correlated with body mass index using a t test to find a p value with a level of significance of 0.05.Results: High body mass index is associated with poor cognition as the p<0.05 (0.025006). There was no role of gender on body mass index or cognitive functions.Conclusions: Obesity does affect the cognitive function in healthy adult populations with no comorbidities irrespective of the gender of the individual. More prospective studies with a more sensitive battery of tests can be done to further understand this

Classification of Mild Cognitive Impairment with Deep Transfer Learning Approach using CWT based Scalogram Images

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a condition that can occur as a person gets older, and faces problems like recognition, memory, and language skills. Early detection of MCI is crucial, as it can progress to more severe conditions like Alzheimer's disease. This study proposes a method to use Scalogram images, obtained by applying Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) to EEG signals and pre-trained models like ResNet50, VGG16, InceptionV3, Inception_ResNetV2 through transfer learning to classify MCI and Healthy Control (HC). Fine-tuning of the models is also used to improve the results, and various performance metrics are employed for classification. The study concludes that Inception_ResNetV2 transfer learning yielded good results, while ResNet50 and InceptionV3 transfer learning with fine-tuning resulted in higher accuracy using a low learning rate

FABRICATION AND ELECTROCHEMICAL EVALUATION OF THE LITHIUM BATTERY, Li0.5La0.5TiO3/LiFePO4-C INTERFACE

The Li0.5La0.5TiO3 and LiFePO4/C has been prepared using sol-gel method for its interface analysis towards its application for all solid state assembly. The LiFePO4cathode material and Li0.5La0.5TiO3 solid electrolyte has been individually tested for its electrochemical reversibility. The thin film battery assembly shows severe capacity fading, which results in electrochemically non active with the chosen anode materials. In order to verify the electrochemical activity and interaction of Li0.5La0.5TiO3-LiFePO4/C interface the mixture has been tested for its electrochemical reversibility. The Li0.5La0.5TiO3-LiFePO4/C interface exhibits well resolved oxidation-reduction hype which verifies its suitability towards all solid state assemblies

Unsupervised Discovery of Extreme Weather Events Using Universal Representations of Emergent Organization

Spontaneous self-organization is ubiquitous in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. While organized structures that emerge dominate transport properties, universal representations that identify and describe these key objects remain elusive. Here, we introduce a theoretically-grounded framework for describing emergent organization that, via data-driven algorithms, is constructive in practice. Its building blocks are spacetime lightcones that embody how information propagates across a system through local interactions. We show that predictive equivalence classes of lightcones -- local causal states -- capture organized behaviors and coherent structures in complex spatiotemporal systems. Employing an unsupervised physics-informed machine learning algorithm and a high-performance computing implementation, we demonstrate automatically discovering coherent structures in two real world domain science problems. We show that local causal states identify vortices and track their power-law decay behavior in two-dimensional fluid turbulence. We then show how to detect and track familiar extreme weather events -- hurricanes and atmospheric rivers -- and discover other novel coherent structures associated with precipitation extremes in high-resolution climate data at the grid-cell level

Bioactivities of extracts from the marine sponge Halichondria panicea

In the present study, we screened the biological activity of extracts from the marine sponge Halichondria panicea collected in the Arabian Sea. Crude toxin was obtained by methanol, chloroform-methanol (2:1) and aqueous extraction. Subsequently, the protein concentration of each crude extract was determined. The impact of both sponge methanolic and aqueous extracts was found to increase activities of Na+-K+ ATP-ase and Mg++ ATP-ase. In the case of chloroform-methanol extract, higher concentrations increased acetylcholine esterase (AchE) activity. The methanolic and chloroform-methanol extracts exhibited hemolytic activity on chicken and human erythrocytes, whereas the aqueous extract failed to do so. Methanol and aqueous extracts produced an immunostimulating effect and all extracts revealed angiogenic activity. The aqueous extract yielded nine bands by SDS-PAGE on 12% gel

Kinetics and mechanism of the oxidation of some cis-Alpha- Phenylcinnamic acids by Pyridinium Chlorochromate

Oxidation of cis α-phenyl cinnamic acids by pyridinium chlorochromate (PCC) was studied in acetic acid–water mixturecontaining perchloric acid. The reaction rate is first order in [PCC] and fractional order in [H+] and has aldehyde as aproduct. The rate of reaction increases with increase in the percentage of acetic acid medium. The reactions exhibit kineticisotope effect. The activation parameters have been evaluated. The added Mn (II) decreases the rate of reaction. Theadded sodium chlorate has no effect on the reaction rate and indicates the absence of ion-ion (or) ion- dipole interaction inthe slow step. The deviation of Hammett plot is noted and a “V†shaped curve is obtained

CD3- Leukocytes Present in the Human Uterus During Early Placentation: Phenotypic and Morphologic Characterization of the CD56++ Population

In this study, the CD3- LGL/NK cells present in the pregnant human uterus have been characterized. Phenotypic and morphologic analyses of decidual LGL revealed many similarities to the minor CD56bright+, CD16- subset in peripheral blood, but there were some important differences. The relative surface density of CD56+ is greatly increased on decidual LGL to 22 x that found on the majority of CD56 peripheral blood NK cells. The CD56bright cells in decidua show LGL morphology, whereas in peripheral blood, they are .mainly agranular. Proliferation of CD56+ cells occurs predominantly during the nonpregnant secretory (luteal) phase, indicating these CD56+ uterine LGL do not migrate as terminally differentiated cells. The appearance of CD56 cells was examined at the ultrastructural level using immunoelectron microscopy. Cells with phenotypic characteristics of decidual LGL occur in a higher percentage (1.11%) in the peripheral blood of women of reproductive age than in men (0.66%). On the basis of these results, it is proposed that the CD56bright+ uterine leukocytes represent a distinctive, hormonally regulated subset possibly adapted to control human placentation

Comparison of different methods of assessing in vitro resistance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to rifampicin

Background & objectives: Definitions of in vitro resistance to rifampicin in. strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis by different methods have not been consistent, leading to variations in the interpretation and validity of results. This study compared three methods of defining in vitro resistance to rifampicin. Methods: (i) A total of 598 clinical isolates of M. tuberculosis were concurrently compared by the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) and the proportion method on Lowenstein-Jensen medium; (ii) 54 strains tested by the MIC method were retested by the proportion method and the BACTEC radiometric method; and (iii) 72 strains which yielded an MIC of 64 mg/l by the MIC method were retested by the same method. Results: Out of 598 cultures tested by the MIC and the proportion methods, identical classification as susceptible or resistant was observed in 99.7 per cent. A 100 per cent agreement was observed when 54 strains were tested by the MIC, proportion and BACTEC radiometric methods. When 72 strains with an MIC of 64 mg/l were retested by the same method, 61 (85%) yielded a lower MIC, 9 (12%) gave the same MIC while 2 (3%) yielded a higher MIC of 128 mg/l, reflecting perhaps the inherent limitations of the variations in the inoculum size. Interpretation & conclusion: All 3 definitions of resistance, viz., an MIC of 128 mg/l, a proportion of I per cent or more on 40 mg/l by the proportion method, both on L-J medium and a growth of 1 per cent or more on 2 mg/l by the radiometric method were found to be equally satisfactory