Metamorphism of cordierite gneisses from Eastern Ghat Granulite Terrain, Andhra Pradesh, South India

Cordierite-bearing metapelites of the Eastern Ghat granulite terrain occur in close association of Khondalites, quartzites, calc-silicate rocks and charnockites. Rocks occurring between Bobbili in the north and Guntur in the south of Andhra Pradesh are studied. The association of the mineral and textural relationships suggest the following metamorphic reactions: Garnet + sillimanite + quartz = cordierite, hypersthene + sillimanite + quartz = cordierite, sillimanite + spinel = cordierite + corundum, and biotite + quartz + sillimanite = cordierite + K=feldspar. Generally the minerals are not chemically zoned except garnet-biotite showing zoning when they come in close contact with one another. The potential thermometers are provided by the Fe-Mg distribution of coexisting biotite-garnet and cordierite-garnet. Conflicting interpretation of the P/T dependence of these reactions involving cordierite are due to H2O in the cordierite. The presence of alkali feldspar-quartz assemblage which is common in these gneisses will be constrained from melting only if H2O activity is less than 0.5. The piezometric array inferred is convex towards the temperature array, indicating a rapid and isothermal crustal uplift probably aided by thrust tectonics

Chromium uptake by Fenugreek

Fenugreek (Trigonella foenum- graecum) is both herb (leaves) and a spice (seed) belonging to the family Fabaceae. Fenugreek leaves and seeds are used in the cuisine of India. Fenugreek also has medicinal value. Fenugreek seeds are known to reduce serum glucose and improve glucose tolerance and hence are prescribed to diabetic patients. In the recent past supplemental Chromium is being prescribed to diabetic patients to activate (increased- insulin binding, insulin receptor number, insulin receptor phosphorylation) insulin. Plants can uptake substantial quantities of toxic metals from contaminated soils if these soils are well ameliorated. 

It is then probable that the medicinal efficacy of Fenugreek in the case of diabetes could be enhanced if it takes up chromium from the soil. Preliminary studies are being conducted to note the chromium uptake by Fenugreek from soils which are applied with potassium dichromate

Studies on the Accumulation of Chromium in Fenugreek

Studying Cr uptake by Fenugreek, we note that the maximum concentration of Cr takes place in the shells of the pods followed by leaves, stems and seeds in that order. Interestingly, applied higher doses of Cr does not increase accumulation of Cr in the stems, rather Cr content in the stems levels off. However, the maximum dispersal/distribution of Cr taken up is in the leaves

Design of optimized three-dimensional thrust nozzle contours

Design of optimized three-dimensional thrust nozzle contour

Non-critical Heterotic Superstrings in Various Dimensions

We construct heterotic string theories on spacetimes of the form R^{d-1,1} times N=2 linear dilaton, where d=6,4,2,0. There are two lines of supersymmetric theories descending from the two supersymmetric ten-dimensional heterotic theories. These have gauge groups which are lower rank subgroups of E_{8} times E_{8} and SO(32). On turning on a (2,2) deformation which makes the two dimensional part a smooth SL_{2}(R)/U(1) supercoset, the gauge groups get broken further. In the deformed theories, there are non-trivial moduli which are charged under the surviving gauge group in the case of d=6. We construct the marginal operators on the worldsheet corresponding to these moduli.Comment: 27 pages, harvmac. v2 reference adde

Zero resource speech synthesis using transcripts derived from perceptual acoustic units

Zerospeech synthesis is the task of building vocabulary independent speech synthesis systems, where transcriptions are not available for training data. It is, therefore, necessary to convert training data into a sequence of fundamental acoustic units that can be used for synthesis during the test. This paper attempts to discover, and model perceptual acoustic units consisting of steady-state, and transient regions in speech. The transients roughly correspond to CV, VC units, while the steady-state corresponds to sonorants and fricatives. The speech signal is first preprocessed by segmenting the same into CVC-like units using a short-term energy-like contour. These CVC segments are clustered using a connected components-based graph clustering technique. The clustered CVC segments are initialized such that the onset (CV) and decays (VC) correspond to transients, and the rhyme corresponds to steady-states. Following this initialization, the units are allowed to re-organise on the continuous speech into a final set of AUs in an HMM-GMM framework. AU sequences thus obtained are used to train synthesis models. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on the Zerospeech 2019 challenge database. Subjective and objective scores show that reasonably good quality synthesis with low bit rate encoding can be achieved using the proposed AUs

Some Thiosemicarbazide Complexes of Pt(II) & Pd(II)

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