Oxfendazole Resistance in Gastrointestinal Nematodes of Beetal Goats at Livestock Farms of Punjab (Pakistan)

This study was carried out to screen goat farms for anthelmintic resistance (AR) against oxfendazole (OXF) and to determine contributory factors for its development. For this purpose, Beetal goat farms (n = 18) were randomly selected, with natural mixed gastrointestinal nematodosis infection. In vivo (faecal egg count reduction test) and in vitro (egg hatch assay) tests were used to ascertain the presence of AR while a scorecard was used to determine the role of possible contributory factors for oxfendazole resistance. For in vivo test, the experimental animals were divided into two groups of 10 animals each; one group received OXF treatment, while the other served as control. Pre- and post-treatment coproculture was performed to identify the species and genera of nematodes. Egg hatch assay (EHA) was used to confirm the results of FECRT. Fecal egg count reduction test (FECRT) revealed the development of resistance on six farms and post-treatment larval cultures indicated Haemonchus contortus, Trichostrongylus colubriformis, Cooperia curticei, Teladorsagia circumcincta and Oesophagostomum spp. as dominant species with resistance. Furthermore, EHA confirmed the results of FECRT. Among the presumptive factors for AR, the highest composite score was for rotation of anthelmintics followed by treatment frequency, dose rate and nature of medication. The scorecard for the development of AR, used in this study, may be helpful for the assessment of contributory factors of AR

Synthesis, Characterization and Antibacterial Activity of New 1,2- and 1,4-Bis(N’-Substituted Thioureido)benzene Derivatives

Synthesis of two series of 1,2- and 1,4-bis(thioureido)benzene derivatives was accomplished by the treatment of corresponding alkanoyl/aroyl chlorides with potassium thiocyanate in dry acetone to afford the respective isothiocyanates as intermediates. The latter were treated in situ with 1,2- and 1,4-diaminobenzene, respectively, to afford the title compounds in high yields. A total of sixteen new compounds are reported herein. The structures of the products were confirmed by spectroscopic techniques (IR, 1H and 13C NMR, mass spectrometry), elemental analysis and in case of 1d, by X-ray diffraction technique. All the synthesized compounds were also subjected to antibacterial bioevaluation against ten different Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterialstrains using levofloxacin as the standard drug and were shown to possess promising activities.KEYWORDS Bis(thioureido)benzene, antibacterial activity, crystal structure

Text stream to temporal network - A dynamic heartbeat graph to detect emerging events on twitter

© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature. Huge mounds of data are generated every second on the Internet. People around the globe publish and share information related to real-world events they experience every day. This provides a valuable opportunity to analyze the content of this information to detect real-world happenings, however, it is quite challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based approach named the Dynamic Heartbeat Graph (DHG) that not only detects the events at an early stage, but also suppresses them in the upcoming adjacent data stream in order to highlight new emerging events. This characteristic makes the proposed method interesting and efficient in finding emerging events and related topics. The experiment results on real-world datasets (i.e. FA Cup Final and Super Tuesday 2012) show a considerable improvement in most cases, while time complexity remains very attractive

A Quality-of-Things Model for Assessing the Internet-of-Thing’s Non-Functional Properties

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in a “desperate” need for a practical model that would help in differentiating things according to their non-functional properties. Unfortunately, despite IoT growth, such properties either lack or ill-defined resulting into ad-hoc ways of selecting similar functional things. This paper discusses how things’ non-functional properties are combined into a Quality-of-Things (QoT) model. This model includes properties that define the performance of things’ duties related to sensing, actuating, and communicating. Since the values of QoT properties might not always be available or confirmed, providers of things can tentatively define these values and submit them to an Independent Regulatory Authority (IRA) whose role is to ensure fair competition among all providers. The IRA assesses the values of non-functional properties of things prior to recommending those that could satisfy users’ needs. To evaluate the technical doability of the QoT model, a set of comprehensive experiments are conducted using real datasets. The results depict an acceptable level of the QoT estimation accuracy

Enhanced Heartbeat Graph for emerging event detection on Twitter using time series networks

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd With increasing popularity of social media, Twitter has become one of the leading platforms to report events in real-time. Detecting events from Twitter stream requires complex techniques. Event-related trending topics consist of a group of words which successfully detect and identify events. Event detection techniques must be scalable and robust, so that they can deal with the huge volume and noise associated with social media. Existing event detection methods mostly rely on burstiness, mainly the frequency of words and their co-occurrences. However, burstiness sometimes dominates other relevant details in the data which could be equally significant. Besides, the topological and temporal relationships in the data are often ignored. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based approach, called the Enhanced Heartbeat Graph (EHG), which detects events efficiently. EHG suppresses dominating topics in the subsequent data stream, after their first detection. Experimental results on three real-world datasets (i.e., Football Association Challenge Cup Final, Super Tuesday, and the US Election 2012) show superior performance of the proposed approach in comparison to the state-of-the-art techniques

Levetiracetam-induced pancytopenia.

Pancytopenia is a rare side effect of levetiracetam (LEV) that is associated with severe morbidity that requires hospitalization. Here, we report a patient with a right temporoparietal tumor who underwent a temporal craniotomy with resection of the mass and was started on LEV for seizure prophylaxis per the neurosurgery local protocol. The patient developed LEV-induced pancytopenia, which was successfully managed by discontinuation of this medication. Our report aims to increase awareness of this rare cause of pancytopenia among clinicians

What’s Happening Around the World? A Survey and Framework on Event Detection Techniques on Twitter

© 2019, Springer Nature B.V. In the last few years, Twitter has become a popular platform for sharing opinions, experiences, news, and views in real-time. Twitter presents an interesting opportunity for detecting events happening around the world. The content (tweets) published on Twitter are short and pose diverse challenges for detecting and interpreting event-related information. This article provides insights into ongoing research and helps in understanding recent research trends and techniques used for event detection using Twitter data. We classify techniques and methodologies according to event types, orientation of content, event detection tasks, their evaluation, and common practices. We highlight the limitations of existing techniques and accordingly propose solutions to address the shortcomings. We propose a framework called EDoT based on the research trends, common practices, and techniques used for detecting events on Twitter. EDoT can serve as a guideline for developing event detection methods, especially for researchers who are new in this area. We also describe and compare data collection techniques, the effectiveness and shortcomings of various Twitter and non-Twitter-based features, and discuss various evaluation measures and benchmarking methodologies. Finally, we discuss the trends, limitations, and future directions for detecting events on Twitter

Analysis of potential lard adulteration in chocolate and chocolate products using fourier transform infrared spectroscopy

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, in combination with attenuated total reflectance (ATR) and partial least square (PLS) regression, was used to detect the presence of lard in chocolate formulation. The spectral bands associated with lard, cocoa butter and their blends (ranging from 0% to 15% of lard in cocoa butter) were recorded, interpreted and identified. A semi-quantitative approach is proposed to measure the percent of lard in blends on the basis of spectral data at the frequency region 4000–650 cm−1, using the equation y = 0.9225x + 0.5539. The coefficient of determination (R2) was 0.9872 with a standard error (SE) of 1.305. In this paper, the potential of FTIR spectroscopy as a rapid analytical tool for the quantitative determination of adulterants especially lard, in chocolate, is demonstrated

Photodecomposition properties of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)

This study investigates the geometric and electronic properties of selected BFRs in their ground (S0) and first singlet excited (S1) states deploying methods of the density functional theory (DFT) and the time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT). We estimate the effect of the S0 → S1 transition on the elongations of the C–Br bond, identify the frontier molecular orbitals involved in the excitation process and compute partial atomic charges for the most photoreactive bromine atoms. The bromine atom attached to an ortho position in HBB (with regard to C–C bond; 2,2ʹ,4,4ʹ,6,6ʹ-hexabromobiphenyl), TBBA (with respect to the hydroxyl group; 2,2ʹ,6,6ʹ-tetrabromobisphenol A), HBDE and BTBPE (in reference to C–O linkage; 2,2ʹ,4,4ʹ,6,6ʹ-hexabromodiphenylether and 1,2-bis(2,4,6-tribromophenoxy)ethane, respectively) bears the highest positive atomic charge. This suggests that, these positions undergo reductive debromination reactions to produce lower brominated molecules. Debromination reactions ensue primarily in the aromatic compounds substituted with the highest number of bromine atoms owing to the largest stretching of the C–Br bond in the first excited state. The analysis of the frontier molecular orbitals indicates that, excitations of BFRs proceed via π→π*, or π→σ* or n→σ* electronic transitions. The orbital analysis reveals that, the HOMO-LUMO energy gap (EH−L) for all investigated bromine-substituted aromatic molecules falls lower (1.85–4.91 eV) than for their non-brominated analogues (3.39–8.07 eV), in both aqueous and gaseous media. The excitation energies correlate with the EH−L values. The excitation energies and EH−L values display a linear negative correlation with the number of bromine atoms attached to the molecule. Spectral analysis of the gaseous-phase systems reveals that, the highly brominated aromatics endure lower excitation energies and exhibit red shifts of their absorption bands in comparison to their lower brominated congeners. We attained a satisfactory agreement between the experimentally measured absorption peak (λmax) and the theoretically predicted oscillator strength (λmax) for the UV–Vis spectra. This study further confirms that, halogenated aromatics only absorb light in the UV spectral region and that effective photodegradation of these pollutants requires the presence of photocatalysts.This study has been supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC), and grants of computing time from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Australia as well as the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. A.S. and K.S. thanks Murdoch University, Australia, for a postgraduate research scholarship