NANOSCALE CHARACTERIZATION OF FIBER/MATRIX INTERPHASE AND ITS IMPACT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF NATURAL FIBER REINFORCED POLYMER COMPOSITES

Contact resonance force microscopy (CR-FM) is a valuable technique for evaluating the interphase of natural fiber-reinforced polymer composites and for characterizing the elastic properties of cell wall layers of natural fibers. The nanoscale spatial resolution of CR-FM, combined with its ability to provide quantitative modulus images, makes it possible to investigate the mechanical properties of interphases as narrow as 30 nm in NFRPCs and thin cell wall layers in natural fibers. The nanoscale characterization of interphase and its effects on the bulk mechanical properties in this study shows that an increased interphase thickness is very essential for the improved tensile strength in lyocell/polypropylene (PP)/maleic anhydride grafted polypropylene (MAPP) composites. An optimum amount of MAPP increase the interphase thickness to the maximum of 100 nm and further addition only decreased the interphase thickness and adversely affected the strength properties. The average impact strength was found to decrease with the increasing concentration of MAPP and our results showed that matrix properties were also a determinant factor on the impact strength. After comparing the results obtained from CR-FM, tensile testing, and dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), it was quite clear that β transition was not a strong indicator of the filler –matrix interaction within these composites. For lyocell/PP/maleic anhydride grafted styrene-ethylene/butylene-styrene (MA-SEBS) composites, tensile strength was not a direct reflection of interfacial bonding. The impact strength was found to increase with addition of MA-SEBS. Interphase region showed gradient of modulus values that ranged between the modulus values of the fiber and the matrix for both lyocell/PP/MAPP and lyocell/PP/MA-SEBS composites. The interphase region showed a gradient in modulus that could be described to first order by a linear fit, with a gradual decrease in modulus from fiber to matrix. Also, it was quite evident that the interphase thickness accounts for the majority of property variations within the interphase for different treatments. This result defies the earlier perception of a flexible interphase with low modulus than the matrix formed by the elastomers in composites

Bilateral Pleural Effusions due to Pulmonary Amyloidosis as the Presenting Manifestation of Multiple Myeloma

Multiple Myeloma is a hematologic malignancy of plasma cell origin. Pleural effusion may develop in the setting of myeloma due to various reasons but is extremely uncommon as a presenting symptom. A 69-year-old Caucasian man presented with pleural effusions of undetermined etiology after extensive work up, and multiple failed pleurodesis. Lung biopsy revealed pulmonary amyloidosis and led to the diagnosis of multiple myeloma. Patient was started on chemotherapy but died within 6 weeks of his diagnosis due to multiorgan failure. Pulmonary amyloidosis should be suspected as a cause of intractable pleural effusions, even in patient who do not have evidence of lung involvement on imaging studies or typical features of multiple myeloma. Pleural effusions due to amyloidosis are often refractory to treatment, and a high index of suspicion is required for early diagnosis and treatment

Telescope: Telemetry at Terabyte Scale

Data-hungry applications that require terabytes of memory have become widespread in recent years. To meet the memory needs of these applications, data centers are embracing tiered memory architectures with near and far memory tiers. Precise, efficient, and timely identification of hot and cold data and their placement in appropriate tiers is critical for performance in such systems. Unfortunately, the existing state-of-the-art telemetry techniques for hot and cold data detection are ineffective at the terabyte scale. We propose Telescope, a novel technique that profiles different levels of the application's page table tree for fast and efficient identification of hot and cold data. Telescope is based on the observation that, for a memory- and TLB-intensive workload, higher levels of a page table tree are also frequently accessed during a hardware page table walk. Hence, the hotness of the higher levels of the page table tree essentially captures the hotness of its subtrees or address space sub-regions at a coarser granularity. We exploit this insight to quickly converge on even a few megabytes of hot data and efficiently identify several gigabytes of cold data in terabyte-scale applications. Importantly, such a technique can seamlessly scale to petabyte-scale applications. Telescope's telemetry achieves 90%+ precision and recall at just 0.009% single CPU utilization for microbenchmarks with a 5 TB memory footprint. Memory tiering based on Telescope results in 5.6% to 34% throughput improvement for real-world benchmarks with a 1-2 TB memory footprint compared to other state-of-the-art telemetry techniques

Profile of Pediatric Kidney Transplantation at a Tertiary Care Centre in Southern India

Introduction: Renal transplantation offers the best chance of survival to children with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). Patient survival and growth are superior in children with a renal allograft compared to dialysis. The aim of the study was to evaluate the outcomes of pediatric transplants done at a tertiary care hospital in Kochi, India over the study period.Materials and Methods: In this retrospective study, the data of children who underwent renal transplantation at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences from 2002 to 2016 Kochi were analyzed.Results: Thirty-four children underwent renal transplantation over a 14-year period. Thirty-three underwent live related transplant whereas one underwent deceased donor transplantation. The mean age and weight of the recipients at transplantation was 14.3 years and 35.7 kg, respectively. Fourteen children were boys and twenty were girls. Thirty-one patients underwent hemodialysis prior to transplant, 2 were taken up preemptively, and 1 patient was on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis. There were 5 documented urinary tract infections. No surgical complications were noted in the immediate post-transplant period. There were 5 episodes of acute rejection (14.7%). Two cases experienced Delayed Graft Function and the patient survival rate was 100%.Conclusions: Renal transplantation is a viable option to manage children with ESRD with satisfactory long term results and can be done in a developing nation’s set-up. Keywords: Kidney transplantation; India; Child

A COMPLEMENTARY APPROACH ON OLFACTORY DYSFUNCTION IN PARKINSONS DISEASE- RETROSPECTIVE OBSERVATIONAL STUDY

Olfactory dysfunction is a frequent non-motor symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) that involves deficits in odour detection, discrimination, and identification. Hyposmia may be related to neuronal degeneration with deposition of alpha-synuclein in primary olfactory areas as a very early component of the pathology of PD. Olfactory dysfunction also known as Gandhajnana or Gandhanaasha in Ayurveda is a result of improper functioning of different Vatasdue to either degeneration of Dhathus (Tissues) or obstruction in the normal movement of Vata. We analysed the smell test results within the population of Parkinsons patients admitted in Department of Neurology and Complementary medicine in Evangelical Hospital Hattingen from 2012 till 2017. Patients received the prescribed Allopathy and Ayurveda treatment for their ailments along with Ayurveda diet, Ayurveda massage and purification therapies. The primary and the only outcome measure was to assess the results of smelling sensation of the Parkinson’s patients already conducted by a Smell test with Sniffing Sticks supplied by Burghart Messtechnik. A paired t-test was conducted to compare scores obtained in smell test before and after treatment in each group separately. There was a significant difference in the scores of smell test in two groups. Results suggest that patients, treated first with Vasthi and then Ksheerabala oil Nasya showed significant improvement in the scores of smell test (t=-2.509, p= 0.017). The results of patients, treated with only Vasthi also showed significant improvement in the scores of smell test (t=-2.007, p= 0.053)

Computational model of extracellular glutamate in the nucleus accumbens predicts neuroadaptations by chronic cocaine

Notice: this is the author's version of a work that was accepted for publication in Neuroscience. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Neuroscience, Vol. 158, Issue #4 (2008) doi:10.1016/j.neuroscience.2008.11.014 . http://journals.elsevier.com/03064522/neuroscience/Chronic cocaine administration causes instability in extracellular glutamate in the nucleus accumbens that is thought to contribute to the vulnerability to relapse. A computational framework was developed to model glutamate in the extracellular space, including synaptic and nonsynaptic glutamate release, glutamate elimination by glutamate transporters and diffusion, and negative feedback on synaptic release via metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR2/3). This framework was used to optimize the geometry of the glial sheath surrounding excitatory synapses, and by inserting physiological values, accounted for known stable extracellular, extrasynaptic concentrations of glutamate measured by microdialysis and glutamatergic tone on mGluR2/3. By using experimental values for cocaine-induced reductions in cystine-glutamate exchange and mGluR2/3 signaling, the computational model successfully represented the experimentally observed increase in glutamate that is seen in rats during cocaine-seeking. This model provides a mathematical framework for describing how pharmacological or pathological conditions influence glutamate transmission measured by microdialysis

Electrooptic and viewing angle characteristics of a display device employing a discotic nematic liquid crystal

Recently we developed a novel liquid crystal display device employing discotic nematic material. This device exhibits the following improvements over a conventional twisted nematic (TN) display device using a calamitic nematic material. The device (i) is simple to fabricate and (ii) has excellent viewing angle characteristics showing a wide and symmetric viewing angle profile, (iii) has much less difference in the pixel capacitance between the ON and OFF states resulting in reduced cross talk problem. However the response time of the device is slower than conventional TN devices. An obvious solution to this problem is to reduce the viscosity of the material. To achieve this we have doped, in small concentrations, a long chain alkane compound to the parent room-temperature discotic nematic material. Systematic studies show that both the switch ON and switch OFF response times show a significant decrease, i.e., the device switches faster, in the case of the mixtures. It should be mentioned that wide and symmetric viewing angle characteristics remain unaffected by the addition of the dopant material. However both the switch ON and switch OFF response times are still an order of magnitude slower compared to that of conventional TN devices. Considering the fact that these response times are not very different from those for the STN displays, the achievement of symmetric and wide viewing angle characteristics with a simple fabrication process makes this device quite interesting. To make them attractive enough to be considered for commercial applications new materials with faster response have to be developed. Efforts in this direction are underway in our laboratory