Service Failures of Railway Materials

Service failures were known to occur even before ushering in of machine age but there was no proper understanding of the underlying phenomenon and at best the attempt to overcome them lay in redesigning the components merely by thickening those sections irrespective of poor quality of material or inadequate sectional strength. In the late twenties, however, with springing up of chemical and metallurgical laboratories and with better understanding of Fatigue phenomenon which is the chief fact or underlying a vast majority of service failures, greater interest was taken in the study of performance and failures of components in service

On Relativistic Wave Equation for Particles of Integer Spins

The representation given by Mathews to describe particles of integer spins is modified in such a way that the Hamiltonian does not contain the matrix Co which is a null matrix. An extreme relativistic limit of the modified Hamiltonian is also obtained

Prevalence of depression among people who attempt suicide

Background: This is a study aimed at assessing the prevalence of major depressive disorder among persons who attempted suicide.Methods: The study involved 30 persons above 18years of age of both sexes who has attempted suicide in the recent past. An informed consent was obtained from all of them. The prevalence of depression among those suicide attempters was studied based on major ICD- 10 depression inventory. Also, intent rating based on Beck’s suicide intent scale was done to assess the severity of suicide attempt. Questionnaire was given and the details were collected.Results: The prevalence of depression is estimated to be 20%. Regarding the suicidal intent, 13 cases (43.33%) showed high intent for suicide.Conclusions: Prevalence of depression is common among people who attempt suicide. Early diagnosis and intervention will reduce suicide attempts

Benign breast diseases: experience at a teaching hospital in rural India

Background: Though benign breast diseases are very common with nearly 1/3 of women suffering some time during their life time, not many studies have focused on this entity, especially in rural areas. Our teaching hospital situated amongst the villages in rural part of India provided the right background for the study.  Objective: To determine the frequency of benign breast diseases in a teaching hospital situated in the rural setting and to analyze the role of triple assessment in assessing benign breast diseases.Study design: Prospective, descriptive study.Setting: MVJ Medical College and Research Hospital, Hoskote, Bangalore Rural district, Karnataka, India.Method of study: Data including age, complaints, clinical examination, radiological investigations and histopathological diagnosis was collected from patients presenting to the department of surgery with breast complaints. Patients with carcinoma of the breast were excluded from the study.Results: A total of 110 patients were studied between November 2009 to March 2011. Mean age of patients was 28.6 years. Fibroadenoma was the most common diagnosis in 56.4% followed by fibroadenosis in 20.9%. There was one case each of lipoma, tuberculosis and duct ectasia and two cases of atypical ductal hyperplasia. The sensitivity of clinical diagnosis in our study was 91.1% and FNAC was 100% accurate in all patients with fibroadenoma but had a sensitivity of only 78% in the diagnosis of fibroadenosis. Only 3.3% of cases of fibroadenoma were treated conservatively

Functional and radiological analysis of posterior lumbar interbody fusion in spondylolisthesis

Background:Spondylolisthesis is present in 5% of the adult population with clinical evidence of low back pain. These patients are treated initially by conservative measures, failing of which surgical intervention is mandatory. Majority of patients with varying degree of slip and disability ultimately require surgical intervention. In this study we are trying to analyse the functional outcome following posterior lumbar interbody fusion in spondylolisthesis.Methods: Posterior lumbar interbody fusion using pedicle screw and rods with cage was performed on 25 patients. 6 months follow-up was completed in 25 patients who were then reviewed at regular intervals. Out of the 25 patients, 17(68%) were females and 8(32%) were males. The mean age of the patients was 40.64 years. Out of 25 patients, 14 patients had listhesis at L4 – L5 level and another 11 at L5 – S1 level. 21(84%) were Isthmic variant and 4 (16%) were Degenerative spondylolisthesis.Results:The mean follow up period in this study of 25 patients is 19 months. Out of 25 patients, there was mean improvement of 18.96 in the Oswestry scoring index. The Visual analogue scale score showed a mean improvement of 6.48. Radiologically, the percentage of slip was decreased by a mean of 8.40%. One patient had a cage extrusion with no neurological deficit.Conclusions:The pedicle screw with rod and cage system is easy to use and provides the anatomic restoration of the isthmus in isthmic spondylolisthesis or restoring the stability after laminectomy/discectomy in degenerative spondylolisthesis. From our study, we strongly believe that this technique is very useful in low grade degenerative and isthmic spondylolisthesis

Inhibition of angiogenesis- and inflammation-inducing factors in human colon cancer cells in vitro and in ovo by free and nanoparticle-encapsulated redox dye, DCPIP

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The redox dye, DCPIP, has recently shown to exhibit anti-melanoma activity <it>in vitro </it>and <it>in vivo</it>. On the other hand, there is increasing evidence that synthetic nanoparticles can serve as highly efficient carriers of drugs and vaccines for treatment of various diseases. These nanoparticles have shown to serve as potent tools that can increase the bioavailability of the drug/vaccine by facilitating absorption or conferring sustained and improved release. Here, we describe results on the effects of free- and nanoparticle-enclosed DCPIP as anti-angiogenesis and anti-inflammation agents in a human colon cancer HCT116 cell line <it>in vitro</it>, and in induced angiogenesis <it>in ovo</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The studies described in this report indicate that (a) DCPIP inhibits proliferation of HCT116 cells <it>in vitro</it>; (b) DCPIP can selectively downregulate expression of the pro-angiogenesis growth factor, VEGF; (c) DCPIP inhibits activation of the transcriptional nuclear factor, NF-κB; (d) DCPIP can attenuate or completely inhibit VEGF-induced angiogenesis in the chick chorioallantoic membrane; (e) DCPIP at concentrations higher than 6 μg/ml induces apoptosis in HCT116 cells as confirmed by detection of caspase-3 and PARP degradation; and (f) DCPIP encapsulated in nanoparticles is equally or more effective than free DCPIP in exhibiting the aforementioned properties (a-e) in addition to reducing the expression of COX-2, and pro-inflammatory proteins IL-6 and IL-8.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We propose that, DCPIP may serve as a potent tool to prevent or disrupt the processes of cell proliferation, tissue angiogenesis and inflammation by directly or indirectly targeting expression of specific cellular factors. We also propose that the activities of DCPIP may be long-lasting and/or enhanced if it is delivered enclosed in specific nanoparticles.</p

Graphdti: A Robust Deep Learning Predictor Of Drug-Target Interactions From Multiple Heterogeneous Data

Traditional techniqueset identification, we developed GraphDTI, a robust machine learning framework integrating the molecular-level information on drugs, proteins, and binding sites with the system-level information on gene expression and protein-protein interactions. In order to properly evaluate the performance of GraphDTI, we compiled a high-quality benchmarking dataset and devised a new cluster-based cross-validation p to identify macromolecular targets for drugs utilize solely the information on a query drug and a putative target. Nonetheless, the mechanisms of action of many drugs depend not only on their binding affinity toward a single protein, but also on the signal transduction through cascades of molecular interactions leading to certain phenotypes. Although using protein-protein interaction networks and drug-perturbed gene expression profiles can facilitate system-level investigations of drug-target interactions, utilizing such large and heterogeneous data poses notable challenges. To improve the state-of-the-art in drug targrotocol. Encouragingly, GraphDTI not only yields an AUC of 0.996 against the validation dataset, but it also generalizes well to unseen data with an AUC of 0.939, significantly outperforming other predictors. Finally, selected examples of identified drug-target interactions are validated against the biomedical literature. Numerous applications of GraphDTI include the investigation of drug polypharmacological effects, side effects through off-target binding, and repositioning opportunities

TrivPlat - A monitoring, management and evaluation tool for electronic public procurement

Bad decisions in public procurement processes have two negative effects: price increase of public goods and services with an impact on public expenditure, and adversely effects on competition, with the negative result of loss of efficiency and social welfare. Electronic public procurement (EPP) has been considered an important tool for promoting competition, simplifying and ensuring transparency in decision-making processes, thus ensuring significant time and money gains. In Portugal, EPP replaced paper-based pre-contractual procedures for communication and processing based on information technologies and systems. Interested in this phenomenon, the authors of this paper structured the TrivPlat project, a tool of free access for monitoring, managing and evaluating electronic public procurement. This paper aims to present the TrivPlat project and its contributions to the discussion about additional efforts needed to be implemented in order to efficiently promote a more transparent and accountable governance, in the defense of public interest.This work is funded by FEDER funds through the Operational Program for Competitiveness Factors -COMPETE and National Funds through FCT -Foundation for Science and Technology under the Project: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674 and PEst-OE/CJP/UI0758/2013-1

On the canonical map of surfaces with q>=6

We carry out an analysis of the canonical system of a minimal complex surface of general type with irregularity q>0. Using this analysis we are able to sharpen in the case q>0 the well known Castelnuovo inequality K^2>=3p_g+q-7. Then we turn to the study of surfaces with p_g=2q-3 and no fibration onto a curve of genus >1. We prove that for q>=6 the canonical map is birational. Combining this result with the analysis of the canonical system, we also prove the inequality: K^2>=7\chi+2. This improves an earlier result of the first and second author [M.Mendes Lopes and R.Pardini, On surfaces with p_g=2q-3, Adv. in Geom. 10 (3) (2010), 549-555].Comment: Dedicated to Fabrizio Catanese on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To appear in the special issue of Science of China Ser.A: Mathematics dedicated to him. V2:some typos have been correcte

Strengthening spatial reasoning: elucidating the attentional and neural mechanisms associated with mental rotation skill development

© 2020, The Author(s). Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in many everyday tasks and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The current study examined how training on mental rotation (a spatial reasoning task) impacts the completeness of an encoded representation and the ability to rotate the representation. We used a multisession, multimethod design with an active control group to determine how mental rotation ability impacts performance for a trained stimulus category and an untrained stimulus category. Participants in the experimental group (n = 18) showed greater improvement than the active control group (n = 18) on the mental rotation tasks. The number of saccades between objects decreased and saccade amplitude increased after training, suggesting that participants in the experimental group encoded more of the object and possibly had more complete mental representations after training. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data revealed distinct neural activation associated with mental rotation, notably in the right motor cortex and right lateral occipital cortex. These brain areas are often associated with rotation and encoding complete representations, respectively. Furthermore, logistic regression revealed that activation in these brain regions during the post-training scan significantly predicted training group assignment. Overall, the current study suggests that effective mental rotation training protocols should aim to improve the encoding and manipulation of mental representations