Himalayan Studies and Interdisciplinarity Workshop

Conference Report on the Himalayan Studies and Interdisciplinarity Workshop

Mean Occupation Function of High Redshift Quasars from the Planck Cluster Catalog

We characterise the distribution of quasars within dark matter halos using a direct measurement technique for the first time at redshifts as high as $z \sim 1$. Using the Planck Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) catalogue for galaxy groups and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR12 quasar dataset, we assign host clusters/groups to the quasars and make a measurement of the mean number of quasars within dark matter halos as a function of halo mass. We find that a simple power-law fit of \log\left = (2.11 \pm 0.01) \log (M) -(32.77 \pm 0.11) can be used to model the quasar fraction in dark matter halos. This suggests that the quasar fraction increases monotonically as a function of halo mass even to redshifts as high as $z\sim 1$.Comment: Accepted for publication in PAS

Phenotyping and molecular characterization of Lysinibacillus sp. P-011 (GU288531) and their role in the development of Drosophila melanogaster

The bacterial strain Lysinibacillus sp. (P-011) was isolated from the midgut of the Drosophila melanogaster larvae. The bacteria were gram positive, spore forming, rod shaped ranging from 1.86 to 2.5µm in length and 0.50 to 0.67 µm in diameter, positive for catalase, indole, oxidase, nitrate reduction, starch and gelatin hydrolysis, sensitive to tetracycline, chloramphenicol, doxycycline hydrochloride, gatifloxacin, ofloxacin, vancomycin, rifampicin, levofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, nalidixic acid, but resistant to ampicillin, streptomycin, gentamycin and kanamycin. The phylogenetic tree showed that the strain Lysinibacillus sp. P-011 (GU288531) branched with Lysinibacillus boronitolerans with 89% bootstrap support. Lysinibacillus sp. P-011 (~105 cfu/ml) played an important role on larval development of D. melanogaster under controlled environmental condition. Wild larvae when fed on normal food as well as normal food mixed with ineffective antibiotics, developed puparium within seven days whereas took more than 10 days when fed on normal food mixed with anti P-011 antibiotics and sterile food mixed with bacterial suspension and anti P-011 antibiotics. 94 to 98% cured larvae developed puparium within seven days when fed on only sterile food mixed with bacterial suspension (P-011) or sterile food mixed with bacterial suspension (P-011) and ineffective antibiotics.Key words: Drosophila melanogaster, gut-bacteria, larval development, Lysinibacillus sp. P-011 (GU288531), 16S rRNA gene sequence, phylogenetic tree

Effect of Arginine and Citrulline Supplements on Cardiovascular Health and Sports Activities: A Narrative Review on Indian Perspective

The use of nutritional supplements (NS) for improving sports performance and health has become popular, and Citrulline and Arginine are the most frequently used supplements in these fields. The global market for dietary supplements has had consistent growth in sales in the last decades. More than half of the individuals use dietary supplement extensively. Present systematic review aims to understand the role of dietary arginine and Citrulline supplements for cardiovascular health and sports performance. The complicated connection between the control of hemodynamic and overall homeostasis and Citrulline and Arginine have been established. Citrulline and Arginine play important role in protecting skeletal as well as health of cardiac muscles and structural integrity and also are involved in many metabolic processes. Arginine has successfully mediated the release of the synthesis of creatinine growth hormone, which significantly increases strength and muscle mass. Also, Arginine is necessary to produce nitric oxide, which promotes skeletal muscle growth and also enhances vascular function. Overall, arginine supplements have a reasonable positive effect on the health of the heart, muscles and bones, as well as on maintaining and escalate exercise capacity. On the other hand, Citrulline can possibly converted into Arginine in many cell types and can effectively make up shortages of Arginine and nitric oxide in various pathological and physiological circumstances. Moreover, Citrulline helps to detoxify ammonia while decreasing stress levels and fatigue and promoting performance of exercise. In order to increase and enhance human athletic activities, both arginine and Citrulline are require

Separability of State Trajectories and its Applications to Security of Cyber-Physical Systems

This article studies a fundamental problem of security of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). We focus on a class of attacks where some of the actuators could be malicious while all the sensors are considered to be honest. We introduce a novel idea of separability of state trajectories that are generated by the honest and corrupt actuators, and establish its connection to the security of CPSs in the context of detecting the presence of malicious actuators (if any,) in the system. As a defense strategy to guard the CPS against malicious attacks, we focus on the mechanism of perturbing the pre-determined control action by injecting a certain class of random process by the honest actuators called private excitation, which is assumed to have a known distribution. As primary contributions we give sufficient conditions for the existence and non-existence of a separator for linear time-invariant stochastic systems, under the assumption that the policies are randomized-Markovian and randomized history dependent. Several technical aspects of the established results are discussed extensively.Comment: 26 page