A study of the lower gastrointestinal tract cancer with emphasis on gender and age of the patients in western Iran (Kermanshah) over 2006-2011

Given that the incidence of cancers in the coming years will have a growing trend due to the increased average age of the world's population, the partial control of communicable diseases, and the rapid growth of the environmental risk factors. The present work was a descriptive, comparative and analytical study. The statistical population consisted of all patients residing in Kermanshah who had been suffering from the lower gastrointestinal tract cancer for five years. The results of the present study revealed that 46.10% were male, and 53.90% were female. Further, the results indicated that the age of patients and the intensity of cancer differentiation were significantly correlated.It seemed that the lack of early diagnosis would ensue from a lack of periodic screening programs at early ages and lack of forums in which specialists could get together due to the unavailability of comparative statistics.Keywords: Cancer, Lower Gastrointestinal Tract Cancer, Western Iran, Kermanshah Cit

Potential of oak acorn with and without polyethylene glycol as an alternative to corn in broiler diets

This study was conducted to investigate the potential for replacing corn with oak acorn (OA), a tannin-rich feedstuff, and the possible role of polyethylene glycol (PEG) in reducing detrimental effects of OA on broilers. A 3 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments was used with three levels of OA (0, 150, and 200 g/kg diet), with and without 10 g/kg PEG. A total of 528 one-day-old male and female Cobb 500 broiler chicks were randomly assigned to one of six experimental treatments, with four replicates of 22 birds each. OA was included in the starter (days 1–21) and finisher (days 22–42) diets as a replacement for corn, without changing the dietary levels of other ingredients. The results indicated that dietary inclusion of OA, without PEG, significantly reduced bodyweight gain (BWG) overall (days 1–42) and resulted in worse finisher and overall feed conversion ratios (FCR). PEG had no significant effect on the performance of birds fed diets without OA, but improved overall the BWG of birds receiving 150 and 200 g/kg OA as well as finisher and overall the FCR of birds given 150 g/kg OA. Liver and pancreas weights were not significantly influenced by OA level, PEG or their interaction. Feeding with 200 g/kg OA had deleterious effects on some tibia traits. In conclusion, a significant interaction between OA level and PEG indicates that PEG has the potential to reduce the adverse effects of OA, leading to improved performance. Thus, up to 150 g/kg OA could be included in PEG-supplemented diets, without adverse effects on performance or the tibia traits of broilers.Keywords: High-tannin feedstuff, performance, poultry nutrition, tibia characteristi

Population genetic studies of Liza aurata using D-Loop sequencing in the southeast and southwest coasts of the Caspian Sea

Genetic diversity as an important marker of the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems is considered a unique and powerful tool to evaluate biological communities. In order to evaluate the genetic diversity among golden mullet species (Liza aurata) in the southeast and southwest coasts of the Caspian Sea by D-Loop gene sequencing, a total of 23 fin specimens of golden mullet were collected from the Gilan (Anzali area) and Golestan (Gomishan area) provinces. Total DNA from the samples was extracted by ammonium acetate method and the quality and quantity of the extracted DNA were assessed by spectrophotometry and electrophoresis. Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) was conducted on the target DNA and then DNA sequencing was carried out. D-loop region in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of golden mullet contained 900 base pairs (bp). Phylogenetic relationships among golden mullet were calculated by MEGA software version 5.05 and divergence time was estimated using Tahjima's test. The results obtained from this study revealed that there were high genetic differences among two regions in the Gilan and Golestan provinces. Kimura 2-parameter was used for genetic distance analysis and the genetic distance recorded between Gilan and Golestan Provinces was calculated at 0.259. The high levels of FsT were observed between Gilan and Golestan Provinces which indicates that genetic differences exist among present populations (p≤.05). Based on the results obtained from the south Caspian Sea, probably two different populations of Liza aurata are living in the Gilan and Golestan Provinces

From natural language processing to neural databases

In recent years, neural networks have shown impressive performance gains on long-standing AI problems, such as answering queries from text and machine translation. These advances raise the question of whether neural nets can be used at the core of query processing to derive answers from facts, even when the facts are expressed in natural language. If so, it is conceivable that we could relax the fundamental assumption of database management, namely, that our data is represented as fields of a pre-defined schema. Furthermore, such technology would enable combining information from text, images, and structured data seamlessly. This paper introduces neural databases, a class of systems that use NLP transformers as localized answer derivation engines. We ground the vision in NeuralDB, a system for querying facts represented as short natural language sentences. We demonstrate that recent natural language processing models, specifically transformers, can answer select-project-join queries if they are given a set of relevant facts. However, they cannot scale to non-trivial databases nor answer set-based and aggregation queries. Based on these insights, we identify specific research challenges that are needed to build neural databases. Some of the challenges require drawing upon the rich literature in data management, and others pose new research opportunities to the NLP community. Finally, we show that with preliminary solutions, NeuralDB can already answer queries over thousands of sentences with very high accuracy

Database reasoning over text

Neural models have shown impressive performance gains in answering queries from natural language text. However, existing works are unable to support database queries, such as “List/Count all female athletes who were born in 20th century”, which require reasoning over sets of relevant facts with operations such as join, filtering and aggregation. We show that while state-of-the-art transformer models perform very well for small databases, they exhibit limitations in processing noisy data, numerical operations, and queries that aggregate facts. We propose a modular architecture to answer these database-style queries over multiple spans from text and aggregating these at scale. We evaluate the architecture using WikiNLDB, a novel dataset for exploring such queries. Our architecture scales to databases containing thousands of facts whereas contemporary models are limited by how many facts can be encoded. In direct comparison on small databases, our approach increases overall answer accuracy from 85% to 90%. On larger databases, our approach retains its accuracy whereas transformer baselines could not encode the context

Changes of supercooling point and cold tolerance in overwintering adults of Brevicoryne brassicae (Hem.: Aphididae) in Tehran, Iran

The cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae (L.), is one of the major pests of the plant family Brassicaceae that causes serious damages to cabbage and oilseed rape. The cabbage aphid is also able to build up populations on ornamental cabbage during the winter months. To determine the level of cold tolerance in its overwintering populations, adult aphids were collected on cabbages planted in the field of Faculty of Agriculture, Tarbiat Modares University in autumn 2008 and winter 2009. The supercooling points and survivorship of the adults were studied at sub-zero temperatures for 24 h. The mean supercoolig point varied from -23.9 ± 0.46ºC in November to -19.8 ± 0.34ºC in May. About 70-95% of the cabbage aphid adults could tolerate -5°C/24 h in all months. The survival rate for the treated adults at -10ºC/24 was about 55% from October through November and 87% in December. The LT80 (the temperature at which 80% of population die after 24 h exposure to cold temperatures) was at its highest(-11.32°C) in May, showing the lowest level of cold tolerance in the population. The LT80 ranged from-13.81 to -14.79 °C from December to February, showing the highest level of cold tolerance. Findings indicated that cabbage aphid populations hold a high capacity to tolerate cold temperatures in the course of winter while being active and sexually reproductive at the same time that leads to their quick grow and emergence as an economic severe pest early in the next season

Chemical composition and fumigant toxicity of three citrus essential oils against eggs, larvae and adults of Callosobruchus maculatus (Col.: Bruchidae)

The fumigant toxicity of volatile fractions of peel essential oils of the Rutaceae species of Citrus reticulata Blanco, C. limon L. and C. aurantium L. was studied against eggs, larvae and adults of Callosobruchus maculatus (F.) at 27 ± 1 ºC and 65 ± 5% RH in darkness. The oils were extracted from the fruit peels using water steam distillation. The essential oils were characterized by a combination of GC and GC/MS analyses. Limonene was the major constituent of the three essential oils. The effect of different concentrations of the essential oil vapors on egg hatchability as well as larval and adult mortality was found to be significant. Citrus reticulata and C. aurantium oils were more toxic on egg hatchability than C. limon extract and caused higher mortality on larvae as well. There was no significant difference between essential oils in terms of adult mortality. The adult beetles were also exposed to the concentrations of 18.5, 37, 55.5 and 74 μl/l air. At the highest concentration (74 μl/l air), C. aurantium oil caused 100% mortality after a 6 h exposure, but the oils from C. reticulata and C. limon caused 38% and 62% mortality, at the identical exposure time, respectively. The results suggest that citrus peel oils can be effectively used as botanical fumigants against various life stages of Ca. maculatus

Cryoprotectants and their changes in cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae (Hem.: Aphididae)

Cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae (L.), is an important pest of cabbage, especially ornamental cabbages, due to its voracity and population build-up on these plants in wintertime. The cryoprotectants of B. brassicae and their changes were investigated during the cold seasons. Adult aphids were collected monthly on ornamental cabbages from October 2008 through May 2009. The amount of sugars and polyols were measured by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and the amount of glycogen was spectrophotometrically determined. The identified compounds were as follows: glucose, mannitol, myo-inositol and trehalose. Mannitol, myo-inositol and trehalose were significantly correlated with average temperature. The total amount of these compounds increased from the lowest amount (11.90 ± 3.07 µmol/g f.w.) in October to its highest (55.8 ± 8.83 µmol/g f.w.) in the coldest month, January. There appears that these three compounds, especially mannitol, play important roles in enhancing cold tolerance of B. brassicae during cold seasons. The amount of glycogen showed no significant differences during those months and varied from 4.8 ± 0.58 mg/g f.w. in October to 3.3 ± 0.98 mg/g f.w. in December. There was no significant correlation between glycogen and the cryoprotectants

Colourants on the wall paintings of a mediӕval fortress at the mount Sofeh in Isfahan, central Iran

Colourants on the twelfth century wall paintings excavated at the fortress located on the mount Sofeh in Isfahan, central Iran, were analysed using micro X-ray fluorescence (µ-XRF), micro Raman spectroscopy (µ-Raman) and high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to electrospray ionization quadropole time-of-flight (HPLC-ESI-Q-TOF). The results of the analyses showed that gypsum, atacamite, carbon black, orpiment and ultramarine blue were used as white, green, black, yellow and blue pigments, respectively. Moreover, three red colourants including red lead, red vermilion and madder red were identified in the wall paintings. Furthermore, possible sources for the colourants are discussed

Effect of cold acclimation and rapid cold hardiness on cold tolerance and cryoprotectants of the greenbug Schizaphis graminum (Hemiptera: Aphididae)

Insects can increase their survival at subzero temperatures, prior to long or short term exposure, to non-lethal cold temperatures by cold acclimation (ACC) or rapid cold hardiness (RCH). In this research, the effect of rapid or gradual decrease in temperatureon cold tolerance of adults of the greenbug, Schizaphis graminum (Rondani) was investigated. LT50 (lower lethal temperature for 50% mortality) of aphids acclimated at 10 °C for one week showed no significant differences with control (aphids reared at 20 °C). In addition to the cold acclimation, adults of S. graminum showed RCH response too.When the rearing aphids at 20 °C were transferred directlyto a range of sub-zero temperatures for 2 h, LT80 (lower lethal temperature for 80% mortality) was -11.6 °C, but acclimation at 0 °C for 5 h before transfer to -11.6 °C, induced maximum RCH, led to increase of survival to 73%. RCH was induced by cooling of the insects at 0 °C for different rates.Maximum survival (66%) was achieved by cooling at 0.05 °C/min. Accumulationof sugars and polyols is one of the major mechanismsunderlying ACC and RCH. In this study, trehalose and glucose increased considerably through ACC and RCH treatments, suggesting the role of these compounds in increasing cold tolerance of S. graminum