Toxicity of some insecticides against seven day old larvae of Bihar hairy caterpillar, Spilarctia obliqua Walker

The stomach toxicity of some insecticides viz., Cypermethrin, Lambda cyhalothrin and Chlorpyriphos were determined against 7d old larvae of Spilarctia obliqua by leaf dip method. Cypermethrin was found to be the most toxic insecticide during observation at 18, 24, 48 and 72 HAF. On the basis of LC50 values at different time intervals the order of toxicity was, Cypermethrin > Lambda cyhalothrin > Chlorpyriphos and the LC50 (%) values being 0.003, 0.054, 0.107 at 24 HAF, 0.002, 0.045 and 0.101 at 48 HAF, 0.016, 0.039 and 0.085 at 72 HAF respectively. A comparative dose mortality (50%) response expressed in terms of relative toxicity indicated that RT values for Cypermethrin, Lambda cyhalothrin, and Chlorpyriphos were 35.66, 1.98 and 1.00 at 24HAF, 50.5, 2.24 and 1.00 at 48 HAF, 5.31, 2.17 and 1.00 at 72 HAF. Chlorpyriphos in particular, showed very low RT value indicating far less stomach toxicity to S. obliqua as compared to Cypermethrin and Lambda-cyhalothrin. These findings can be helpful for the selection of suitable insecticides for effective pest management under field condition

Mixture Design to Mitigate Bridge Deck Cracking

The main concern of this study is to develop different mixture designs that help to mitigate bridge deck cracking. The Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) supported this research project. This study correlates shrinkage measurements with compressive strength, static and dynamic modulus, splitting tensile strength, and resistivity to develop mixture designs with low cracking. Permeability is also one of the factor behind durability and, so, resistivity is investigated in this study. This study does not consider any autogenous and chemical shrinkage because ODOT prefers water to cementitious material ratio (w/c) in the range of 0.42-0.45 at which these type of shrinkage is not significant. This study does not consider early age tension and compression creep because of budget restrictions. This study presents several repetition of mixtures and their repeated measurements and test results to investigate repeatability.Chapter two contains three different parts: 2.1 Background and Literature Review, 2.2 Methods, 2.3 Results and Discussion. Chapter three talks about Conclusion and Recommendations.Civil Engineerin

A comparative study of atorvastatin and rosuvastatin in dyslipidemia

Background: To compare the drugs: Atorvastatin (10mg) and Rosuvastatin (5mg) in patients with Dyslipidemia.Methods: This open-label, randomized, parallel group, comparative, prospective study of six months duration included 100 patients. The age group of patients varied from 30 to 69 years with dyslipidemia. Patients were divided in to 2 groups. 50 patients in group-1 received Atorvastatin 10mg once daily and 50 patients in group-2 received Rosuvastatin 5 mg once daily. The level of TC, TG, LDL, VLDL and HDL were assessed at baseline and at the end of 3 months and 6 months.Results: At 3 months, LDL was reduced significantly more with 5mg Rosuvastatin than with Atorvastatin 10 mg [43.68% vs. 40.74% (P 0.0049)]. At 6 months, Rosuvastatin 5mg reduced LDL significantly more than Atorvastatin 10 mg [48.69% vs. 43.85% (P 0.00)]. TC, HDL, TG and VLDL were more favourably modified by Rosuvastatin at 6 months (P <0.005). Reduction of total cholesterol levels in Rosuvastatin group was not statistically significant when compared with Atorvastatin group (P 0.103).Conclusions: Rosuvastatin 5mg was more efficacious than Atorvastatin 10mg for the improvement of lipid profile during the period of 6 months follow-up drug therapy in patients with dyslipidemia

Monitoring Social Distancing Using OpenCv

The paper proposes a method for social separating identification based on deep understanding of how to measure the gap between people in order to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. By evaluating with the aid of videos as feedback, the position instrument was developed to make people aware of the importance of keeping a safe distance from one another. The input video outline from the camera has been used as details, along with a free and open source object location system based on YOLOv3. Calculation that was used to determine walker recognition. After that, the input frame outline was modified to elevated perspective for distance estimation in the 2-Dimensional plane. The RED edge and line represent the range between individuals being measured and a part of the rebellious pairing of individuals during the showcase. The proposed strategy is accepted using a pre-recorded feedback frame of people walking around the city on foot. This result demonstrates how the presented methodology can make decisions about social removing estimates for a large number of people in the input picture. As the discovery apparatus was gradually introduced, this developed technique evolved as well

NFC Based Health Monitoring System

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a technology in which electronic devices can interact and is easy to connect devices with one touch. It is a used for small range like range of NFC is 10cm. NFC technology can be inculcated in Tags. Unique identification number can be used to store data. Many real-time applications uses this NFC tag feature. As the world is heading towards development in mobile technology many applications can use mobiles. Nowadays, most of the mobile phones are NFC enabled. NFC can be used for distinct identification of patients in hospitals. It will be a major heap in automation of Healthcare. NFC-based identification decreases wrong diagnosis and treatments to patients in busy and updated hospitals. Efficiency and Accuracy are the two significant aspects in healthcare services. Using NFC in fields like healthcare promises these aspects . NFC provides an easily usable wireless-communication interface. Technical as well as non-technical people like Doctors, Nurses, and all other staff of the hospital can easily use it. Hence, NFC- Based Healthcare can be used for providing accuracy and Automation in healthcare. It also reduces the cost of healthcare in developing countries

Prevalence of pterygium and outcome of pterygium surgery in hilly western Nepal

Introduction: Surgical removal is the treatment of choice for pterygium; however, prevention of recurrence is a challenge. Several techniques have been tried to reduce the fibro-vascular activity aiming to reduce rate of recurrence such as B-irradiation, conjunctival and limbal auto-grafting, anti-mitotic drugs, and amniotic membrane transplantation. This study reports the magnitude of the disease in a hilly region of western Nepal and outcome of excision and conjunctival autografting for pterygium surgery. Methods: A prospective study was done from 1st July 2015 to 31st December 2016 in which all patients with primary pterygium presented to Palpa Lions Lacoul Eye Hospital from 1st July 2015 to 30th June 2016 were treated and followed up for next six months. Patients were treated medically or surgically as indicated. Data on age, sex, visual acuity, extent of disease, treatment modality, complications, and outcome were collected and analyzed by descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, t-test, and Anova tests. P value less than 0.05 was considered significant. Results: There were 18,960 patients in total attending hospital for various conditions among which 290 (1.5%) had pterygium. There were 186 (64.1%) female and 104 (35.9%) male and this difference was significant (p&lt;0.001). The mean age was 47.42 yrs (SD=14.23) with age ranging from 20 to 80 years. Right eye was affected more (43.1%) than left eye (33.1%); remaining 23.8% had bilateral disease. Grade-1 disease occurred in younger age compared to Grade-2 and Grade-3 disease. All grade-1 patients were managed medically; grade-2 and grade-3 patients were equally likely to be managed medically or surgically. There were no major intra or post-operative complications. Minor post-operative complications noted were subconjunctival hemorrhage, corneal scarring, suture gaping, and conjunctival cyst among others. Conclusion: Despite much advanced techniques in pterygium surgery, pterygium excision combined with conjunctival autograft is found to be a safe and effective method for treating pterygium in developing world

Beyond Cumulative Sum Charting in Non-Stationarity Detection and Estimation

In computer science, stochastic processes, and industrial engineering, stationarity is often taken to imply a stable, predictable flow of events and non-stationarity, consequently, a departure from such a flow. Efficient detection and accurate estimation of non-stationarity are crucial in understanding the evolution of the governing dynamics. Pragmatic considerations include protecting human lives and property in the context of devastating processes such as earthquakes or hurricanes. Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) charting, the prevalent technique to weed out such non-stationarities, suffers from assumptions on a priori knowledge of the pre and post-change process parameters and constructs such as time discretization. In this paper, we have proposed two new ways in which non-stationarity may enter an evolving system - an easily detectable way, which we term strong corruption, where the post-change probability distribution is deterministically governed, and an imperceptible way which we term hard detection, where the post-change distribution is a probabilistic mixture of several densities. In addition, by combining the ordinary and switched trend of incoming observations, we develop a new trend ratio statistic in order to detect whether a stationary environment has changed. Surveying a variety of distance metrics, we examine several parametric and non-parametric options in addition to the established CUSUM and find that the trend ratio statistic performs better under the especially difficult scenarios of hard detection. Simulations (both from deterministic and mixed inter-event time densities), sensitivity-specificity type analyses, and estimated time of change distributions enable us to track the ideal detection candidate under various non-stationarities. Applications on two real data sets sampled from volcanology and weather science demonstrate how the estimated change points are in agreement with those obtained in some of our previous works, using different methods. Incidentally, this study sheds light on the inverse nature of dependence between the Hawaiian volcanoes Kilauea and Mauna Loa and demonstrates how inhabitants of the now-restless Kilauea may be relocated to Mauna Loa to minimize the loss of lives and moving costs

Seasonal and year-round intercropping systems for smallholder farmers : results from on-farm intercropping trials on terraces in Nepal on maize, millet, mustard, wheat and ginger

We would like to thank the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund (CIFSRF), jointly sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Ottawa) and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) for funding.Low yield and total land productivity are major challenges associated with smallholder terrace agriculture in developing countries. Crop intensification and diversification by introducing legumes as intercrop could help alleviate these challenges. We compared 10 intercrop combinations with sole cropping system for two rotation cycles (2015-17) to identify the most productive and economic intercrop combinations for smallholder terrace agriculture. In the spring-summer season (March/April-July/August), cowpea (var. Makaibodi and Suryabodi) and bean were intercropped with maize in rows of 1:1 whereas soybean, blackgram and horsegram were broadcasted with millet (30:70 ratios) during summer-rainy season (July/August-November/December). Pea and lentil were used as winter intercrop (November/December-March/April) in wheat (30:70 ratios) while mustard was planted with pea. Ginger was planted with maize in 1:1 rows during spring-summer season in which the maize rows were replaced by soybean and lentil during summer-rainy and winter season, respectively

Linkages among forest, water, and wildlife: a case study from Kalapani community forest in Lamahi bottleneck area in Terai Arc Landscape.

Forest and water are important entities for sustaining life on earth. In a terrestrial ecosystem, linkages between the entities creates a mosaic benefiting the wildlife by creating the suitable habitat. In turn, communities get benefits stemming up from ecosystem services such as fodder, fuelwood, and water. We present a case study from a forest restoration project to assess the linkages between forest, water and wildlife across Lamahi bottleneck area in Terai Arc Landscape. We used combination of surveys such as forest area and canopy cover change (2001-2016) analysis followed by household questionnaire, water hole, camera trapping including process documentation. Forest area has increased by ~20 km2 in last 16 yrs. followed by number of water spouts along the identified tributaries. Water spouts are conserved in the form of conservation pond by the communities living downstream and utilized in the vegetable farming. Communities have benefited financially (~ US$ 1,252) contributing to their income level from the sale of fresh season vegetables in nearby market. Camera trap survey including the assessment of historical records showed presence of wildlife including elephant, hyena and other small carnivores in and around bottleneck forest. Both, motivation and enthusiastic support from local communities followed by the conducive government policies led to improve condition of natural resources over the period. This has also created a mosaic habitat for wildlife forming functional connectivity along the linear Terai Arc Landscape

Pan-Cancer Analysis of lncRNA Regulation Supports Their Targeting of Cancer Genes in Each Tumor Context

Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are commonly dys-regulated in tumors, but only a handful are known toplay pathophysiological roles in cancer. We inferredlncRNAs that dysregulate cancer pathways, onco-genes, and tumor suppressors (cancer genes) bymodeling their effects on the activity of transcriptionfactors, RNA-binding proteins, and microRNAs in5,185 TCGA tumors and 1,019 ENCODE assays.Our predictions included hundreds of candidateonco- and tumor-suppressor lncRNAs (cancerlncRNAs) whose somatic alterations account for thedysregulation of dozens of cancer genes and path-ways in each of 14 tumor contexts. To demonstrateproof of concept, we showed that perturbations tar-geting OIP5-AS1 (an inferred tumor suppressor) andTUG1 and WT1-AS (inferred onco-lncRNAs) dysre-gulated cancer genes and altered proliferation ofbreast and gynecologic cancer cells. Our analysis in-dicates that, although most lncRNAs are dysregu-lated in a tumor-specific manner, some, includingOIP5-AS1, TUG1, NEAT1, MEG3, and TSIX, synergis-tically dysregulate cancer pathways in multiple tumorcontexts