Determination of prevalence of being overweight and its association with hypertension in patients referred to the healthcare center in Jandaq in 2014.

Background and aims: Obesity and overweight is a major public health problem and, alongside hypertension, is one of the risk factors of cardiovascular diseases incidence. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of overweight and its association with hypertension in the patients referred the healthcare center in Jandaq. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 400 patients (168 men and 232 women) referring to urban healthcare centers in Jandaq. By means of necessary instruments, the individuals’ weight and height were measured, and body mass index (BMI) was calculated. Also, the individuals’ blood pressure was measured and classified in accordance with the standard manual, and after filling out the questionnaires, the data analysis was done by SPSS. Results: The prevalence of overweight was 29.3 in men and 35.7 in women. The prevalence of hypertension was 29.1 in men and 35.3 in women. Family history of hypertension and cardiovascular disease was effective on the individuals’ acquiring hypertension. With the increase in the patients’ age, both BMI (P<0.035) and blood pressure (P<0.001) increased. Also, increase in BMI in the individuals was significantly associated with blood pressure rate (P<0.001). Conclusions: The prevalence rate of overweight and obesity in Jandaq is high. There was an association among the individuals’ BMI, blood pressure and age. Therefore, it is necessary to develop health education programs and to inform the public regarding the increase of mobility and improvement of the nutrition, and to implement effective interventions in health planning in this center

Directional excitation without breaking reciprocity

We propose a mechanism for directional excitation without breaking reciprocity. This is achieved by embedding an impedance matched parity-time symmetric potential in a three-port system. The amplitude distribution within the gain and loss regions is strongly influenced by the direction of the incoming field. Consequently, the excitation of the third port is contingent on the direction of incidence while transmission in the main channel is immune. Our design improves the four-port directional coupler scheme, as there is no need to implement an anechoic termination to one of the ports

A CMOS-based neural implantable optrode for optogenetic stimulation and electrical recording

This paper presents a novel integrated optrode for simultaneous optical stimulation and electrical recording for closed -loop optogenetic neuro-prosthetic applications. The design has been implemented in a commercially available 0.35μm CMOS process. The system includes circuits for controlling the optical stimulations; recording local field potentials (LFPs); and onboard diagnostics. The neural interface has two clusters of stimulation and recording sites. Each stimulation site has a bonding point for connecting a micro light emitting diode (μLED) to deliver light to the targeted area of brain tissue. Each recording site is designed to be post-processed with electrode materials to provide monitoring of neural activity. On-chip diagnostic sensing has been included to provide real-time diagnostics for post-implantation and during normal operation

PT-Symmetric Electronics

We show both theoretically and experimentally that a pair of inductively coupled active LRC circuits (dimer), one with amplification and another with an equivalent amount of attenuation, display all the features which characterize a wide class of non-Hermitian systems which commute with the joint parity-time PT operator: typical normal modes, temporal evolution, and scattering processes. Utilizing a Liouvilian formulation, we can define an underlying PT-symmetric Hamiltonian, which provides important insight for understanding the behavior of the system. When the PT-dimer is coupled to transmission lines, the resulting scattering signal reveals novel features which reflect the PT-symmetry of the scattering target. Specifically we show that the device can show two different behaviors simultaneously, an amplifier or an absorber, depending on the direction and phase relation of the interrogating waves. Having an exact theory, and due to its relative experimental simplicity, PT-symmetric electronics offers new insights into the properties of PT-symmetric systems which are at the forefront of the research in mathematical physics and related fields.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Elastic and efficient LiDAR reconstruction for large-scale exploration tasks

We present an efficient, elastic 3D LiDAR reconstruction framework which can reconstruct up to maximum LiDAR ranges (60 m) at multiple frames per second, thus enabling robot exploration in large-scale environments. Our approach only requires a CPU. We focus on three main challenges of large-scale reconstruction: integration of long-range LiDAR scans at high frequency, the capacity to deform the reconstruction after loop closures are detected, and scalability for long-duration exploration. Our system extends upon a state-of-the-art efficient RGB-D volumetric reconstruction technique, called supereight, to support LiDAR scans and a newly developed submapping technique to allow for dynamic correction of the 3D reconstruction. We then introduce a novel pose graph sparsification and submap fusion feature to make our system more scalable for large environments. We evaluate the performance using a published dataset captured by a handheld mapping device scanning a set of buildings, and with a mobile robot exploring an underground room network. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can reconstruct at 3 Hz with 60 m sensor range and ~5 cm resolution, while state-of-the-art approaches can only reconstruct to 25 cm resolution or 20 m range at the same frequency

Realization of a Tunable Artificial Atom at a Supercritically Charged Vacancy in Graphene

The remarkable electronic properties of graphene have fueled the vision of a graphene-based platform for lighter, faster and smarter electronics and computing applications. One of the challenges is to devise ways to tailor its electronic properties and to control its charge carriers. Here we show that a single atom vacancy in graphene can stably host a local charge and that this charge can be gradually built up by applying voltage pulses with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The response of the conduction electrons in graphene to the local charge is monitored with scanning tunneling and Landau level spectroscopy, and compared to numerical simulations. As the charge is increased, its interaction with the conduction electrons undergoes a transition into a supercritical regime 6-11 where itinerant electrons are trapped in a sequence of quasi-bound states which resemble an artificial atom. The quasi-bound electron states are detected by a strong enhancement of the density of states (DOS) within a disc centered on the vacancy site which is surrounded by halo of hole states. We further show that the quasi-bound states at the vacancy site are gate tunable and that the trapping mechanism can be turned on and off, providing a new mechanism to control and guide electrons in grapheneComment: 18 pages and 5 figures plus 14 pages and 15 figures of supplementary information. Nature Physics advance online publication, Feb 22 (2016

Transport Properties through Double Barrier Structure in Graphene

The mode-dependent transmission of relativistic ballistic massless Dirac fermion through a graphene based double barrier structure is being investigated for various barrier parameters. We compare our results with already published work and point out the relevance of these findings to a systematic study of the transport properties in double barrier structures. An interesting situation arises when we set the potential in the leads to zero, then our 2D problem reduces effectively to a 1D massive Dirac equation with an effective mass proportional to the quantized wave number along the transverse direction. Furthermore we have shown that the minimal conductivity and maximal Fano factor remain insensitive to the ratio between the two potentials V_2/V_1=\alpha.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures, clarifications and reference added, misprints corrected. Version to appear in JLT

Tuning a Circular p-n Junction in Graphene from Quantum Confinement to Optical Guiding

The motion of massless Dirac-electrons in graphene mimics the propagation of photons. This makes it possible to control the charge-carriers with components based on geometrical-optics and has led to proposals for an all-graphene electron-optics platform. An open question arising from the possibility of reducing the component-size to the nanometer-scale is how to access and understand the transition from optical-transport to quantum-confinement. Here we report on the realization of a circular p-n junction that can be continuously tuned from the nanometer-scale, where quantum effects are dominant, to the micrometer scale where optical-guiding takes over. We find that in the nanometer-scale junction electrons are trapped in states that resemble atomic-collapse at a supercritical charge. As the junction-size increases, the transition to optical-guiding is signaled by the emergence of whispering-gallery modes and Fabry-Perot interference. The creation of tunable junctions that straddle the crossover between quantum-confinement and optical-guiding, paves the way to novel design-architectures for controlling electronic transport.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure