Preliminary Investigation of the Corrosion Behavior of Proprietary Micro-alloyed Steels in Aerated and Deaerated Brine Solutions

The corrosion performance of fairly new generation of micro-alloyed steels was compared in different concentrations of aerated and deaerated brines. Electrochemical polarization, weight loss and surface analyses techniques were employed. The results showed a threshold of corrosion rate at 3.5 wt.% NaCl in both aerated and deaerated solutions. The average corrosion current density for steel B, for example, increased from 1.3 µA cm¯² in 1 wt.% NaCl to 1.5 µA cm¯² in 3.5 wt.% NaCl, but decreased to 1.4 µA cm¯² in 10 wt.% deaerated NaCl solutions. The aerated solutions exhibited an average of over 80% increase in corrosion current density in the respective concentrations when compared with the deaerated solution. These results can be attributed to the effects of dissolved oxygen (DO) which has a maximum solubility in 3.5 wt.% NaCl. DO as a depolarizer and electron acceptor in cathodic reactions accelerates anodic metal dissolution. The difference in carbon content and microstructures occasioned by thermo-mechanical treatment contributed to the witnessed variation in corrosion performance of the steels. Specifically, the results of the various corrosion techniques corroborated each other and showed that the corrosion rate of the micro-alloyed steels can be ranked as CR[Steel A] < CRₓ₆₅ < CR[Steel B] < CR[Steel C]

An Estimate of the Incidence of Prostate Cancer in Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Prostate cancer (PCa) is rated the second most common cancer and sixth leading cause of cancer deaths among men globally. Reports show that African men suffer disproportionately from PCa compared to men from other parts of the world. It is still quite difficult to accurately describe the burden of PCa in Africa due to poor cancer registration systems.We systematically reviewed the literature on prostate cancer in Africa and provided a continentwide incidence rate of PCa based on available data in the regio

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Evaluation of blood parameters of broiler chickens fed diet supplemented with embaceryl and chaya leaf (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius)

Haematological and serum indices of broiler chickens fed diets supplemented with Embaceryl (EMB) and chaya (Cnidoscolus aconitifolius) leaf powder (CLP) at the finisher phase were evaluated in this study using one hundred and twenty (120) chickens. Twenty four (24) chickens were assigned each to five (5) experimental treatments at varying levels of chaya leaf and embaceryl viz: 0g/kg, 2.5g/kg embaceryl, 2.5g/ kg CLP, 5.0g/kg CLP and 7.5g/kg CLP in a complete randomized design. The birds were replicated 3times and the experiment lasted for 56 days. Data generated from this study was subjected to one way analysis of variance and significant means were separated using Duncan multiple range test. The PCV (%) and Hb (g/ dl) values varies significantly (p &lt; 0.05 ) from 25.00% to 30.00 % and 08.50g/dl to 10.00g/dl respectively with birds fed basal diet with 5.0g/kg chaya leaf powder recording the highest values. The RBC and WBC were significantly influenced by the treatments, the RBC increased with increased level of phytobiotics, while WBC reduced as the levels of phytobiotics increased. Broilers fed diet supplemented with 5.0g/kg chaya leaf recorded the higher values for total protein (66.50g/dl-55.25g/dl) and albumin (39.95g/dl-34.95g/dl) respectively. However, the cholesterol level decreased with increased level of chaya leaf powder (206.50mg/ dl-152.85g/dl). The results of this study suggest that broiler chickens can be fed with diet supplemented with chaya leaf powder without any detrimental effects on haematological and serum biochemical indices.Keywords: Chaya leaf powder, embaceryl, blood, broiler