Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis – Current perspectives

Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis is a progressive neurodegenerative disease. It usually occurs 7–10 years after measles infection. The clinical course is characterized by progressive cognitive decline and behavior changes followed by focal or generalized seizures as well as myoclonus, ataxia, visual disturbance, and later vegetative state, eventually leading to death. It is diagnosed on the basis of Dyken’s criteria. There is no known cure for subacute sclerosing panencephalitis to date, but it is preventable by ensuring that an effective vaccine program for measles is made compulsory for all children younger than 5 years in endemic countries

Growth and Hemato-Immunological Response to Dietary i-Carrageenan in Labeo rohita (Hamilton, 1822) Juveniles

The study was performed over a period of 60 days to evaluate the effect of dietary carrageenan on growth, hematology, biochemistry, and innate immunity in rohu Labeo rohita. A basal diet supplemented with iota (i)Carrageenan at 5, 10 and 20g/kg was fed to three different groups of fish for 60 days. The fish were examined 15, 30, 45, and 60 days after commencement of the study. Parameters for growth (absolute growth, specific growth rate, and percentage weight gain), hematology (total erythrocyte count, total leucocyte count, thrombocyte count and hemoglobin value), biochemistry (total serum protein, albumin, globulin and albuminglobulin ratio), and innate immunity (nitroblue tetrazolium NBT, and myeloperoxidase MPO, activity) were monitored to assess the effect of the iCarrageenan based diet in L. rohita. All the parameters examined (growth, hematology, biochemistry, and innate immunity) increased significantly (P<0.05) in carrageenan-fed groups compared to the control group. However, the highest values for those parameters were found on the 60th day in the group which was fed a 10 g/kg i-Carrageenan diet. The study suggests that a 10 g/kg diet of i-carrageenan enhances immunity and the overall health status in L. rohita

Potential of Some Fungal and Bacterial Species in Bioremediation of Heavy Metals

Microorganisms including fungi and bacteria have been reported to extract heavy metals from wastewater through bioaccumulation and biosorption. An attempt was, therefore, made to isolate bacteria and fungi from sites contaminated with heavy metals for higher tolerance and removal from wastewater. Bacterial and fungal isolates were obtained from the samples collected from Karnal, Ambala and Yamunanagar districts of Haryana using enrichment culture technique. Bacterial and fungal isolates with tolerant up to 100 ppm concentration of heavy metals (Pb, Cd, Cr) were tested for their removal from liquid media containing 50 ppm concentration of Pb, Cd and Cr each. Five fungi (Penicillium chrysogenum, Aspegillus nidulans, Aspergillus flavus, Rhizopus arrhizus, Trichoderma viride) were also included in this study. Fungi Aspergillus nidulans, Rhizopus arrhizus and Trichoderma viride showed maximum uptake capacity of 25.67 mg/g for Pb, 13.15 mg/g for Cd and 2.55 mg/g of Cr, respectively. The maximum uptake capacity of tolerant bacterial isolates - BPb12 and BPb16, BCd5 and BCr14 were observed to be ~ 45 mg/g for Pb, 2.12 mg/g for Cd and 3.29 mg/g for Cr, respectively. This indicated the potential of these identified fungi and bacteria as biosorbent for removal of high concentration metals from wastewater and industrial effluents

A study on various clinical presentations of extradural hemorrhage, factors affecting treatment and early outcome

Background: In India 11% of deaths are due to trauma and 78% of injury deaths are due to head injury. The aim of this study was to analyse the clinical spectrum and to evaluate the postoperative outcome in patients with head injury with an extradural hematoma.Methods: This was a retrospective observational study which included 100 patients admitted in King George hospital, Andhra medical college, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India over the past two years (01/10/2014 to 30/09/2016) with head injury, diagnosed to have traumatic extradural hemorrhage. A detailed clinical history, physical examination and CT scan was performed in all patients. For patients who were subjected to surgery operative and post-operative findings were noted.Results: The maximum patients suffering from EDH are in the age group of 21-30 years (28%) with male predominance (95%). The most common mode of injury is RTA (58%) under the influence of alcohol. Majority of cases reached hospital within 6 hours from  time of injury (44%). 95% of patients with EDH presented with LOC followed by vomiting in 68% of cases, followed by Headache in 42% of cases. 53% of the cases presented with mass effect over brain parenchyma with frontal EDH as most common location. Out of 100 cases, surgical approach was considered in 57 patients while remaining 47 patients were managed conservatively. Recovery from clinical and functional morbidity was satisfactorily acceptable, following treatment.Conclusions: Early presentation with mild to moderate GCS has good clinical outcome with minimal disability

Thermal oxidation of Ti6Al4V alloy: Microstructural and electrochemical characterization

Thermal oxidation (TO) of Ti6Al4V alloy was performed at 500, 650 and 800 ◦C for 8, 16, 24 and 48 h in air. The morphological features, structural characteristics, microhardness and corrosion resistance in Ringer’s solution of TO Ti6Al4V alloy were evaluated and compared with those of the untreated one. The surface morphological features reveal that the oxide film formed on Ti6Al4V alloy is adherent to the substrate at 500 and 650 ◦C irrespective of the oxidation time whereas it spalls off when the alloy is oxidized at 800◦C for more than 8 h. X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurement reveals the presence of Ti(O) and -Ti phases on alloy oxidized at 500 and 650◦C, with Ti(O) as the dominant phase at 650◦C whereas the alloy oxidized at 800◦C exhibits only the rutile phase. Almost a threefold increase in hardness is observed for the alloy oxidized at 650 ◦C for 48 h when compared to that of the untreated one. Thermally oxidized Ti6Al4V alloy offers excellent corrosion resistance in Ringer’s solution when compared to that of the untreated alloy

Cloning and sequencing of complete τ-crystallin cDNA from embryonic lens of Crocodylus palustris

τ-Crystallin is a taxon-specific structural protein found in eye lenses. We present here the cloning and sequencing of complete τ-crystallin cDNA from the embryonic lens of Crocodylus palustris and establish it to be identical to the τ-enolase gene from non-lenticular tissues. Quantitatively, the τ-crystallin was found to be the least abundant crystallin of the crocodilian embryonic lenses. Crocodile τ-crystallin cDNA was isolated by RT-PCR using primers designed from the only other reported sequence from duck and completed by 5'- and 3'-rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) using crocodile gene specific primers designed in the study. The complete τ-crystallin cDNA of crocodile comprises 1305 bp long ORF and 92 and 409 bp long untranslated 5'- and 3'-ends respectively. Further, it was found to be identical to its putative counterpart enzyme τ-enolase, from brain, heart and gonad, suggesting both to be the product of the same gene. The study thus provides the first report on cDNA sequence of τ-crystallin from a reptilian species and also re-confirms it to be an example of the phenomenon of gene sharing as was demonstrated earlier in the case of peking duck. Moreover, the gene lineage reconstruction analysis helps our understanding of the evolution of crocodilians and avian species

Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

We consider the problem of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Our proposed solution trains models to produce well calibrated confidence scores for their results on individual paragraphs. We sample multiple paragraphs from the documents during training, and use a shared-normalization training objective that encourages the model to produce globally correct output. We combine this method with a state-of-the-art pipeline for training models on document QA data. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on several document QA datasets. Overall, we are able to achieve a score of 71.3 F1 on the web portion of TriviaQA, a large improvement from the 56.7 F1 of the previous best system.Comment: 11 pages, updated a referenc