Completely biodegradable soyprotein–jute biocomposites developed using water without any chemicals as plasticizer

Soyprotein–jute fiber composites developed using water without any chemicals as the plasticizer show much better flexural and tensile properties than polypropylene–jute composites. Co-products of soybean processing such as soy oil, soyprotein concentrate and soy protein isolates are inexpensive, abundantly available and are renewable resources that have been extensively studied as potential matrix materials to develop biodegradable composites. However, previous attempts on developing soy-based composites have either chemically modified the co-products or used plasticizers such as glycerol. Chemical modifications make the composites expensive and less environmentally friendly and plasticizers decrease the properties of the composites. In this research, soyprotein composites reinforced with jute fibers have been developed using water without any chemicals as plasticizer. The effects of water on the thermal behavior of soyproteins and composite fabrication conditions on the flexural, tensile and acoustic properties of the composites have been studied. Soyprotein composites developed in this research have excellent flexural strength, tensile strength and tensile modulus, much higher than polypropylene (PP)–jute fiber composites. The soyprotein composites have better properties than the PP composites even at high relative humidity (90%)

Investigation of the Structure and Properties of Silk Fibers Produced by \u3ci\u3eActias lunas\u3c/i\u3e

This paper reports the structure and properties of silk fi­bers produced by Actias lunas in comparison to Bombyx mori and the common wild silks. Considerable efforts are being made to find new sources for natural silk and also to develop regenerated protein fibers to supplement the lim­ited amounts of B. mori and wild silks available in the mar­ket. In addition, it has been found that non-traditional silks have unique properties and utilizing uncommon wild silks can provide income and employment to indigenous peo­ple where the wild silks are found. Actias lunas belongs to the Saturniidae family of silk producing insects. However, the structure and properties of silk produced by A. lunas have not been studied. This research showed that the silk fibers produced by the luna moth had morphological and physical structure similar to that of the common wild silks but tensile properties similar to that of B. mori silk. A. lunas silk fibers are composed of higher amounts of hydropho­bic amino acids and had much less glycine than B. mori and common wild silks. With a fineness of 2 denier, breaking tenacity of 4.3 g/den and breaking elongation of 10.9 %, the tensile properties of A. lunas silk fibers were similar to that of B. mori and much better than that of the common wild silks that are coarser and have lower breaking tenac­ity. A. lunas fibers show good potential to be useful for ap­plications currently using B. mori silk

Secure Communication in wise Homes using IoT

The advancement of the Internet of Things has madeextraordinary progress in recent years in academic as well as industrial fields. There are quite a few wise home systems (WHSs) that have been developed by major companies to achieve home automation. However, the nature of wise homesinescapable raises security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose an improved energy-efficient, secure, and privacy-preserving com-munication protocol for the WHSs. In our proposed scheme, data transmissions within the WHS are secured by a symmetric encryption scheme with secret keys being generated by anarchicsystems. Meanwhile, we incorporate message authentication codes to our scheme to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. We also provide detailed security analysis and performance evaluation in comparison with our previous work in terms of computational complexity, memory cost, and communication overhead

Bioefficacy and dissipation of ?-cyfluthrin against white fly Bemisia tabaci Genn.) in okra (Abelomoschus esculentus L.)

A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of different insecticides viz., bifenthrin, flubendiamide, fipronil, quinalphos, pronofos and ?-cyfluthrin against white fly (Bemisia tabaci) of okra (Abelomoschus esculentus) by spraying twice. Among the insecticides evaluated, ? cyfluthrin at 18.75 g a.iha-1 was found to be the effective by registering 57.00 and 54.21 per cent reduction of whitefly (B. abaci) during first and second sprays, respectively. Further ?-cyfluthrin at 18.75 g a. i ha-1 was subjected to dissipation studies by collecting okra (A. esculentus) fruit samples at interval of zero, one, three, five, seven, 10 and 15 days after last spray. Results of the dissipation studies showed that the initial deposits of ?-cyfluthrin (18.75 g a.iha-1) in okra (A. esculentus) fruit sample was registered to be 0.11 mg kg-1 and dissipated to below detectable level (BDL) within five days after spray

Intrinsically Water-Stable Keratin Nanoparticles and Their \u3ci\u3ein Vivo\u3c/i\u3e Biodistribution for Targeted Delivery

Highly water-stable nanoparticles of around 70 nm and capable of distributing with high uptake in certain organs of mice were developed from feather keratin. Nanoparticles could provide novel veterinary diagnostics and therapeutics to boost efficiency in identification and treatment of livestock diseases to improve protein supply and ensure safety and quality of food. Nanoparticles could penetrate easily into cells and small capillaries, surpass detection of the immune system, and reach targeted organs because of their nanoscale sizes. Proteins with positive and negative charges and hydrophobic domains enable loading of various types of drugs and, hence, are advantageous over synthetic polymers and carbohydrates for drug delivery. In this research, the highly cross-linked keratin was processed into nanoparticles with diameters of 70 nm under mild conditions. Keratin nanoparticles were found supportive to cell growth via an in vitro study and highly stable after stored in physiological environments for up to 7 days. At 4 days after injection, up to 18% of the cells in kidneys and 4% of the cells in liver of mice were penetrated by the keratin nanoparticles

DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF RP-HPLC AND UV SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC METHODS FOR THE QUANTIFICATION OF CAPECITABINE

Objective: The objective of the present study was to develop and validate a new liquid chromatographic technique and four new spectrophotometric methods for the quantitative estimation of Capecitabine.Methods: In the first method, the chromatographic technique was carried out in isocratic technique on Shimadzu Model CBM-20A/20 Alite HPLC system, equipped with SPD M20A prominence PDA detector with Zorbax C18 (150 mm × 4.6 mm i. d, 5 µm particle size) column. The method was optimized with a mobile phase consisting of 0.1 % Acetic acid and Acetonitrile (35:65, v/v) with flow rate 0.5 ml/min. In second, third, fourth and fifth methods, spectrophotometric techniques were applied. The absorption maximum (λmax) was observed at 305 nm, 305 nm, 303 nm and 297 nm for method B (developed in 0.1 N hydrochloric acid), C (developed in sodium acetate buffer pH 4.0), D (developed in phosphate buffer pH 7.0) and E (developed in borate buffer pH 9.0) respectively. Different validation parameters such as linearity, precision, accuracy, limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ), robustness were also determined.Results: The linearity of the calibration curves for the analyte in the desired concentration range is good for both the HPLC (R2 = 0.9994) and UV methods. The LOD and LOQ were found to be 0.02354 μg/ml and 0.07162 μg/ml respectively. The % RSD values for the validation parameters (precision and accuracy) were less than 2.0%.Conclusion: The proposed chromatographic and spectrophotometric methods were validated and can be applied for the determination of Capecitabine in pharmaceutical formulations.Keywords: Capecitabine, UV spectrophotometric, ­­Forced degradation, RP-HPLC, Method validatio

A Study on Sanctuary and Seclusion Issues in Internet-of-Things

Internet-of-Things (IoT) are everywhere in our daily life. They are used in our homes, in hospitals, deployed outside to control and report the changes in environment, prevent fires, and many more beneficial functionality. However, all those benefits can come of huge risks of seclusion loss and sanctuary issues. To secure the IoT devices, many research works have been con-ducted to countermeasure those problems and find a better way to eliminate those risks, or at least minimize their effects on the user�s seclusion and sanctuary requirements. The study consists of four segments. The first segment will explore the most relevant limitations of IoT devices and their solutions. The second one will present the classification of IoT attacks. The next segment will focus on the mechanisms and architectures for authentication and access control. The last segment will analyze the sanctuary issues in different layers

Unified Quality-Aware Compression and Pulse-Respiration Rates Estimation Framework for Reducing Energy Consumption and False Alarms of Wearable PPG Monitoring Devices

Due to the high demands of tiny, compact, lightweight, and low-cost photoplethysmogram (PPG) monitoring devices, these devices are resource-constrained including limited battery power. Consequently, it highly demands frequent charge or battery replacement in the case of continuous PPG sensing and transmission. Further, PPG signals are often severely corrupted under ambulatory and exercise recording conditions, leading to frequent false alarms. In this paper, we propose a unified quality-aware compression and pulse-respiration rates estimation framework for reducing energy consumption and false alarms of wearable and edge PPG monitoring devices by exploring predictive coding techniques for jointly performing signal quality assessment (SQA), data compression and pulse rate (PR) and respiration rate (RR) estimation without the use of different domains of signal processing techniques that can be achieved by using the features extracted from the smoothed prediction error signal. By using the five standard PPG databases, the performance of the proposed unified framework is evaluated in terms of compression ratio (CR), mean absolute error (MAE), false alarm reduction rate (FARR), processing time (PT) and energy saving (ES). The compression, PR, RR estimation, and SQA results are compared with the existing methods and results of uncompressed PPG signals with sampling rates of 125 Hz and 25 Hz. The proposed unified qualityaware framework achieves an average CR of 4%, SQA (Se of 92.00%, FARR of 84.87%), PR (MAE: 0.46 ±1.20) and RR (MAE: 1.75 (0.65-4.45), PT (sec) of 15.34 ±0.01) and ES of 70.28% which outperforms the results of uncompressed PPG signal with a sampling rate of 125 Hz. Arduino Due computing platformbased implementation demonstrates the real-time feasibility of the proposed unified quality-aware PRRR estimation and data compression and transmission framework on the limited computational resources. Thus, it has great potential in improving energy-efficiency and trustworthiness of wearable and edge PPG monitoring devices.publishedVersio