Polyphenols content, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities of extracts of some wild plants collected from the south of Tunisia

25 wild plants were collected from the south of Tunisia. The dried aerial parts were extracted under a continuous reflux set-up in a Soxhlet extractor with hexane, ethyl acetate, methanol and water. The extracts were screened for total phenolic content, antioxidant and antimicrobial activities. Total phenolic contents were determined using a spectrophotometric technique, based on the Folin-Ciocalteau reagent and calculated as pyrogallol equivalents (PyE) per 100 g of dry weight (dw). Total phenolic content ranged from traces to 2225 ± 267 mg PyE/100 g dw in Periploca angustifolia hexane extract and Erodium glaucophyllum methanol extract, respectively. Total flavonoids and flavonols weremeasured by a colorimetric assay and expressed as mg of rutin equivalents (RuE) per 100 g dw and mg of quercetin equivalents (QuE) per 100 g dw respectively. The highest amounts of flavonoids of 315 mgRuE/100 g dw and of flavonols of 63 mg QuE/100 g dw was recorded in the ethyl acetate extract of Acacia radiana. The antioxidant capacity of all extracts was evaluated with the (1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl, DPPH and 2,2'-azino-bis [3-ethylbenzthiazoline-6-sulphonic acid]) ABTS tests. Several extracts showed antioxidant capacity higher than (butylated hydroxytoluene) BHT. Different trend was observed for each antioxidant system with respect to solvents used. All tested plants showedantimicrobial activity, but this activity depended closely on the nature of the solvent used and of the microorganism tested. Rhanterium suaveolens ethyl acetate extract showed the largest spectre of antibacterial activity and Bassia indica ethyl acetate extract showed the highest antifungal activity.Interestingly, some of the collected plants had a high phenolic content and powerful antioxidant and antimicrobial activities. These plants may serve as sources of antioxidants with new chemotypes and potential beneficial health properties

An elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm for the flexible job-shop scheduling problem

The flexible job shop scheduling problem (FJSP) is vital to manufacturers especially in today’s constantly changing environment. It is a strongly NP-hard problem and therefore metaheuristics or heuristics are usually pursued to solve it. Most of the existing metaheuristics and heuristics, however, have low efficiency in convergence speed. To overcome this drawback, this paper develops an elitist quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm. The algorithm aims to minimise the maximum completion time (makespan). It performs a global search with the quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm and a local search with a method that is inspired by the motion mechanism of the electrons around an atomic nucleus. Three novel algorithms are proposed and their effect on the whole search is discussed. The elitist strategy is adopted to prevent the optimal solution from being destroyed during the evolutionary process. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the best-known algorithms for FJSPs on most of the FJSP benchmarks

The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Space Environment on Adult Mammalian Organisms: A Study on Mouse Thyroid and Testis

Hormonal changes in humans during spaceflight have been demonstrated but the underlying mechanisms are still unknown. To clarify this point thyroid and testis/epididymis, both regulated by anterior pituitary gland, have been analyzed on long-term space-exposed male C57BL/10 mice, either wild type or pleiotrophin transgenic, overexpressing osteoblast stimulating factor-1. Glands were submitted to morphological and functional analysis

Burnout among surgeons before and during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: an international survey

Background: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had many significant impacts within the surgical realm, and surgeons have been obligated to reconsider almost every aspect of daily clinical practice. Methods: This is a cross-sectional study reported in compliance with the CHERRIES guidelines and conducted through an online platform from June 14th to July 15th, 2020. The primary outcome was the burden of burnout during the pandemic indicated by the validated Shirom-Melamed Burnout Measure. Results: Nine hundred fifty-four surgeons completed the survey. The median length of practice was 10 years; 78.2% included were male with a median age of 37 years old, 39.5% were consultants, 68.9% were general surgeons, and 55.7% were affiliated with an academic institution. Overall, there was a significant increase in the mean burnout score during the pandemic; longer years of practice and older age were significantly associated with less burnout. There were significant reductions in the median number of outpatient visits, operated cases, on-call hours, emergency visits, and research work, so, 48.2% of respondents felt that the training resources were insufficient. The majority (81.3%) of respondents reported that their hospitals were included in the management of COVID-19, 66.5% felt their roles had been minimized; 41% were asked to assist in non-surgical medical practices, and 37.6% of respondents were included in COVID-19 management. Conclusions: There was a significant burnout among trainees. Almost all aspects of clinical and research activities were affected with a significant reduction in the volume of research, outpatient clinic visits, surgical procedures, on-call hours, and emergency cases hindering the training. Trial registration: The study was registered on clicaltrials.gov "NCT04433286" on 16/06/2020

Monitoring of Quality of Service in Dynamically Adaptive Systems

International audienceDynamic reconfiguration has been widely recognized as an effective approach to deal with the increasing complexity of dynami-cally adaptive systems. One of the main challenges in such systems is to provide guarantees about the required runtime quality of service (QoS) attributes, such as performance, reliability, etc. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to make these systems able to monitor the QoS parameters that allow to evaluate such QoS attributes, analyze these parameters in order to detect QoS changes and therefore trigger recon-figuration actions. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows monitoring the QoS parameters of a dynamically adaptive system in or-der to detect QoS degradation. The proposed approach is based on the Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) paradigm which allows to keep the monitoring code separated from the business logic code

Reactive heuristics for disrupted multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem

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Dry mesophilic anaerobic co-digestion of vegetable wastes with animal manures using leach bed reactor

Anaerobic digestion is an environmentally sustainable technology for converting a variety of organic solid feedstocks to energy in the form of methane. To improve methane yield, the digestion of more than one waste is commonly applied. This study aimed to investigate the dry anaerobic co-digestion (TS of 20%) of vegetable wastes (VW) and animal manures (cow manure (CM) and poultry manure (PM)) through conducting biochemical methane potential (BMP) assays at different substrate to inoculum (S/I) ratio. Fractionation and fluorescence analyses showed that organic matter of VW was less accessible and less complex compared to that of CM and PM. The highest methane yields of mono-digestion experiments were registered with S/I 0.5. Best results of methane yield were observed by the co-digestion of VW and CM (284�mL/g VS), which was about 2.3-fold higher than that of VW mono-fermentation. This finding was confirmed at a laboratory-scale leach bed reactor. Result showed an increase of biogas yield from 220 to 445�mL/g VS, during mono and co-digestion, respectively. The co-digestion of VW and CM mixture led to the enhancement of both methane yield and digestate quality in comparison to mono-digestion. 2021, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.This research was supported by ERANETMED project (01 DH 17060) BIOGASMENA: Demonstration of biogas technology for rural communities in the Mena region.Scopu