Lithotripsy of Different Urinary Tract Stones by Using Seeds of Carum copticum

It has been a well-known practice to use seeds and the essential oil of Carum copticum as a strongly  antiseptic ,  antispasmodic ,  aromatic  , bitter ,  diaphoretic  ,  digestive  ,  diuretic , expectorant  and tonic. Also used for cure influenza, asthma, and rheumatoid arthritis. To our knowledge it will be the first time to use the seeds of this herb as a urinary tract stone lithotripsy.This research aimed to the use of these seeds as a lithotripsian against different types of urinary stones and determine the efficiency of these preparation against which types of stone.A liquid solution was prepared from dissolving the seeds powder in cow milk and then concentration this preparation was done by boiling at 100°C to reduce the volume of solution to the half.The treatment was given via oral administration for successive 9 days before breakfast. 350 patients with urinary stone of different type took part in this research. All patients were subjected to ultrasonography and intravenous pyelography examinations to localized the position and detect diameter of stone. The above examination and also biochemical tests for diagnosis of stones ingredients were repeated after the administration of treatment and excretion of stone fragments in urine. The results were so promising especially against pure ca-oxalate stone

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Improved local search approaches to solve the post enrolment course timetabling problem

In this work, we are addressing the post enrollment course timetabling (PE-CTT) problem. We combine different local search algorithms into an iterative two stage procedure. In the first stage, Tabu Search with Sampling and Perturbation (TSSP) is used to generate feasible solutions. In the second stage, we propose an improved variant of Simulated Annealing (SA), which we call Simulated Annealing with Reheating (SAR), to improve the solution quality of feasible solutions. SAR has three features: a novel neighborhood examination scheme, a new way of estimating local optima and a reheating scheme. SAR eliminates the need for extensive tuning as is often required in conventional SA. The proposed methodologies are tested on the three most studied datasets from the scientific literature. Our algorithms perform well and our results are competitive, if not better, compared to the benchmarks set by the state of the art methods. New best known results are provided for many instances

Modification of Flow Structure Over a Van Model by Suction Flow Control to Reduce Aerodynamics Drag

Automobile aerodynamic studies are typically undertaken to improve safety and increase fuel efficiency as well as to  find new innovation in automobile technology to deal with the problem of energy crisis and global warming. Some car companies have the objective to develop control solutions that enable to reduce the aerodynamic drag of vehicle and  significant modification progress is still possible by reducing the mass, rolling friction or aerodynamic drag. Some flow  control method provides the possibility to modify the flow separation to reduce the development of the swirling structures around the vehicle. In this study, a family van is modeled with a modified form of Ahmed\u27s body by changing the orientation of the flow from its original form (modified/reversed Ahmed body). This model is equipped with a suction on the rear side to comprehensively examine the pressure field modifications that occur. The investigation combines computational and experimental work. Computational approach used  a commercial software with standard k-epsilon flow turbulence model, and the objectives was  to determine the characteristics of the flow field and aerodynamic drag reduction that occurred in the test model. Experimental approach used load cell in order to validate the aerodynamic drag reduction obtained by computational approach. The results show that the application of a suction in the rear part of the van model give the effect of reducing the wake and the vortex formation. Futhermore, aerodynamic drag reduction close to 13.86% for the computational approach and 16.32% for the experimental have been obtained

A hyper-heuristic with two guidance indicators for bi-objective mixed-shift vehicle routing problem with time windows

In this paper, a Mixed-Shift Vehicle Routing Problem is proposed based on a real-life container transportation problem. In a long planning horizon of multiple shifts, transport tasks are completed satisfying the time constraints. Due to the different travel distances and time of tasks, there are two types of shifts (long shift and short shift) in this problem. The unit driver cost for long shifts is higher than that of short shifts. A mathematical model of this Mixed-Shift Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (MS-VRPTW) is established in this paper, with two objectives of minimizing the total driver payment and the total travel distance. Due to the large scale and nonlinear constraints, the exact search showed is not suitable to MS-VRPTW. An initial solution construction heuristic (EBIH) and a selective perturbation Hyper-Heuristic (GIHH) are thus developed. In GIHH, five heuristics with different extents of perturbation at the low level are adaptively selected by a high level selection scheme with the Hill Climbing acceptance criterion. Two guidance indicators are devised at the high level to adaptively adjust the selection of the low level heuristics for this bi-objective problem. The two indicators estimate the objective value improvement and the improvement direction over the Pareto Front, respectively. To evaluate the generality of the proposed algorithms, a set of benchmark instances with various features is extracted from real-life historical datasets. The experiment results show that GIHH significantly improves the quality of the final Pareto Solution Set, outperforming the state-of-the-art algorithms for similar problems. Its application on VRPTW also obtains promising results

Influence of mitochondrial genome rearrangement on cucumber leaf carbon and nitrogen metabolism

The MSC16 cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) mitochondrial mutant was used to study the effect of mitochondrial dysfunction and disturbed subcellular redox state on leaf day/night carbon and nitrogen metabolism. We have shown that the mitochondrial dysfunction in MSC16 plants had no effect on photosynthetic CO2 assimilation, but the concentration of soluble carbohydrates and starch was higher in leaves of MSC16 plants. Impaired mitochondrial respiratory chain activity was associated with the perturbation of mitochondrial TCA cycle manifested, e.g., by lowered decarboxylation rate. Mitochondrial dysfunction in MSC16 plants had different influence on leaf cell metabolism under dark or light conditions. In the dark, when the main mitochondrial function is the energy production, the altered activity of TCA cycle in mutated plants was connected with the accumulation of pyruvate and TCA cycle intermediates (citrate and 2-OG). In the light, when TCA activity is needed for synthesis of carbon skeletons required as the acceptors for NH4+ assimilation, the concentration of pyruvate and TCA intermediates was tightly coupled with nitrate metabolism. Enhanced incorporation of ammonium group into amino acids structures in mutated plants has resulted in decreased concentration of organic acids and accumulation of Glu

Move acceptance in local search metaheuristics for cross-domain search

Metaheuristics provide high-level instructions for designing heuristic optimisation algorithms and have been successfully applied to a range of computationally hard real-world problems. Local search metaheuristics operate under a single-point based search framework with the goal of iteratively improving a solution in hand over time with respect to a single objective using certain solution perturbation strategies, known as move operators, and move acceptance methods starting from an initially generated solution. Performance of a local search method varies from one domain to another, even from one instance to another in the same domain. There is a growing number of studies on `more general' search methods referred to as cross-domain search methods, or hyperheuristics, that operate at a high-level solving characteristically different problems, preferably without expert intervention. This paper provides a taxonomy and overview of existing local search metaheuristics along with an empirical study into the effects that move acceptance methods, as components of singlepoint based local search metaheuristics, have on the cross-domain performance of such algorithms for solving multiple combinatorial optimisation problems. The experimental results across a benchmark of nine different computationally hard problems highlight the shortcomings of existing and well-known methods for use as components of cross-domain search methods, despite being re-tuned for solving each domain

Severe autosomal recessive retinitis pigmentosa maps to chromosome 1p13.3–p21.2 between D1S2896 and D1S457 but outside ABCA4

A severe form of autosomal recessive retinitis pigmentosa (arRP) was identified in a large Pakistani family ascertained in the Punjab province of Pakistan. All affected individuals in the family had night blindness in early childhood, early complete loss of useful vision, and typical RP fundus changes plus macular degeneration. After exclusion of known arRP loci, a genome-wide scan was performed using microsatellite markers at about 10 cM intervals and calculating two-point lod scores. PCR cycle dideoxynucleotide sequencing was used to sequence candidate genes inside the linked region for mutations. RP in this family shows linkage to markers in a 10.5 cM (8.9 Mbp) region of chromosome 1p13.3–p21.2 between D1S2896 and D1S457. D1S485 yields the highest lod score of 6.54 at θ=0. Sequencing the exons and intron–exon boundaries of five candidate genes and six ESTs in this region, OLFM3, GNAI3, LOC126987, FLJ25070, DKFZp586G0123, AV729694, BU662869, BU656110, BU171991, BQ953690, and CA397743, did not identify any causative mutations. This novel locus lies approximately 4.9 cM (7.1 Mbp) from ABCA4, which is excluded from the linked region. Identification and study of this gene may help to elucidate the phenotypic diversity of arRP mapping to this region.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47597/1/439_2005_Article_54.pd