In Order to be Great, One must be a Woman: Reading Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Dilemma: A Second Book of Poems

Poets play an important role in alighting the lamp of the human mind. The technique of writing poetry comes with ̳creation‘ which is the primacy of knowledge and Sanjukta Dasgupta‘s poetry is the source of light vindicating her formidable creativity and apt awareness as a ̳progressive [woman] writer‘ of Indian Writings in English. Women writers contribute towards the female literary tradition of ecriture féminine, strengthening the genre of gynocriticism. Elaine Showalter comments ̳women writers…found [themselves]…without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again…the consciousness of their sex‘ facilitating the patriarchal interrogation through women‘s writings, accelerating the birth of a woman authored literary canon. It has enabled them to break the silence towards an egalitarian world. This essay explores the ̳micropolitics‘ of an urban environment in Dasgupta‘s Dilemma: A Second Book of Poems, and critically reconnoiters her entelechy to observe life and interrogate the stereotypes society imposes upon women

In Order to be Great, One must be a Woman: Reading Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Dilemma: A Second Book of Poems

Poets play an important role in alighting the lamp of the human mind. The technique of writing poetry comes with ̳creation‘ which is the primacy of knowledge and Sanjukta Dasgupta‘s poetry is the source of light vindicating her formidable creativity and apt awareness as a ̳progressive [woman] writer‘ of Indian Writings in English. Women writers contribute towards the female literary tradition of ecriture féminine, strengthening the genre of gynocriticism. Elaine Showalter comments ̳women writers…found [themselves]…without a history, forced to rediscover the past anew, forging again…the consciousness of their sex‘ facilitating the patriarchal interrogation through women‘s writings, accelerating the birth of a woman authored literary canon. It has enabled them to break the silence towards an egalitarian world. This essay explores the ̳micropolitics‘ of an urban environment in Dasgupta‘s Dilemma: A Second Book of Poems, and critically reconnoiters her entelechy to observe life and interrogate the stereotypes society imposes upon women

Physical Layer Detection of Hardware Keyloggers

This work addresses the problem of detecting devices which are stealthily attached to the computer for logging keystrokes from keyboards. These devices are known as hardware keyloggers (HKL). When an HKL is attached to the keyboard, certain electrical characteristics of the keyboard signal are altered. Based on these characteristics (features), differences have been identified in an accurate assertion was made about the presence of HKL. The characteristics from which the differences were obtained were used to make distributions and compared with distance-measuring methods. An experiment was done to collect data from a number of keyboards and form two distributions (training and test) to perform the comparison. It was possible to detect the presence of HKL in the keyboard with a minimum of 4 to 100 keystrokes. For justifying the stability of the features, the temperature of the surroundings was obtained and the dependence of the features on temperature was obtained. Also, an experiment was done to see whether the keyboards were uniquely affected by the HKLs. This was done without using any training data, i.e., the distribution of features which was used did not come from a known state of the system (either with HKL or not with HKL)

Differential expression of single-cell RNA-seq data using Tweedie models

The performance of computational methods and software to identify differentially expressed features in single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) has been shown to be influenced by several factors, including the choice of the normalization method used and the choice of the experimental platform (or library preparation protocol) to profile gene expression in individual cells. Currently, it is up to the practitioner to choose the most appropriate differential expression (DE) method out of over 100 DE tools available to date, each relying on their own assumptions to model scRNA-seq expression features. To model the technological variability in cross-platform scRNA-seq data, here we propose to use Tweedie generalized linear models that can flexibly capture a large dynamic range of observed scRNA-seq expression profiles across experimental platforms induced by platform- and gene-specific statistical properties such as heavy tails, sparsity, and gene expression distributions. We also propose a zero-inflated Tweedie model that allows zero probability mass to exceed a traditional Tweedie distribution to model zero-inflated scRNA-seq data with excessive zero counts. Using both synthetic and published plate- and droplet-based scRNA-seq datasets, we perform a systematic benchmark evaluation of more than 10 representative DE methods and demonstrate that our method (Tweedieverse) outperforms the state-of-the-art DE approaches across experimental platforms in terms of statistical power and false discovery rate control. Our open-source software (R/Bioconductor package) is available at https://github.com/himelmallick/Tweedieverse

Effect of Ammonia and Formic Acid on the OH^• + HCl Reaction in the Troposphere: Competition between Single and Double Hydrogen Atom Transfer Pathways

Quantum chemical calculations at QCISD and CCSD­(T) levels of theory have been performed to investigate the effect of NH₃ and HCO₂H on the reaction between OH^• and HCl. Potential energy profiles indicate that both NH₃ and HCO₂H catalyzed reactions could proceed through two different channels, namely, single and double hydrogen atom transfer. Theoretically calculated rate constants for both the catalysts show that both NH₃ and HCO₂H catalyzed channels prefer a single hydrogen atom transfer path. Besides, both NH₃ and HCO₂H catalyzed paths have higher rate constant values as compared to that of the water catalyzed path

Development of Human Pituitary Neuroendocrine Tumor Organoids to Facilitate Effective Targeted Treatments of Cushing’s Disease

(1) Background: Cushing’s disease (CD) is a serious endocrine disorder caused by an adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)-secreting pituitary neuroendocrine tumor (PitNET) that stimulates the adrenal glands to overproduce cortisol. Chronic exposure to excess cortisol has detrimental effects on health, including increased stroke rates, diabetes, obesity, cognitive impairment, anxiety, depression, and death. The first-line treatment for CD is pituitary surgery. Current surgical remission rates reported in only 56% of patients depending on several criteria. The lack of specificity, poor tolerability, and low efficacy of the subsequent second-line medical therapies make CD a medical therapeutic challenge. One major limitation that hinders the development of specific medical therapies is the lack of relevant human model systems that recapitulate the cellular composition of PitNET microenvironment. (2) Methods: human pituitary tumor tissue was harvested during transsphenoidal surgery from CD patients to generate organoids (hPITOs). (3) Results: hPITOs generated from corticotroph, lactotroph, gonadotroph, and somatotroph tumors exhibited morphological diversity among the organoid lines between individual patients and amongst subtypes. The similarity in cell lineages between the organoid line and the patient’s tumor was validated by comparing the neuropathology report to the expression pattern of PitNET specific markers, using spectral flow cytometry and exome sequencing. A high-throughput drug screen demonstrated patient-specific drug responses of hPITOs amongst each tumor subtype. Generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from a CD patient carrying germline mutation CDH23 exhibited dysregulated cell lineage commitment. (4) Conclusions: The human pituitary neuroendocrine tumor organoids represent a novel approach in how we model complex pathologies in CD patients, which will enable effective personalized medicine for these patients

Chemotypical variations in Withania Somnifera Lead to Differentially Modulated Immune Response in BALB/c Mice

Withania somnifera (Ashwagandha) is a plant with known ethnomedicinal properties and its use in Ayurvedic medicine in India is well documented. The present investigation reports on immunomodulatory efficacy of aqueous-ethanol extracts of roots of three selected Withania somnifera chemotypes designated as NMITLI 101R, NMITLI 118R and NMITLI 128R. Each chemotype was administered 10–100 mg/kg orally to BALB/c mice once daily for 14 days. The immunomodulatory consequences were recorded by determining the humoral immune response with the help of hemagglutination, plaque forming cell assay and cellular response by measuring delayed type hypersensitivity reaction. Additionally, other immune parameters such as proliferation of T and B cells, intracellular and secreted Th1 and Th2 cytokines along with modulation in ROS production by peritoneal macrophages were monitored after feeding with lower doses (3–30 mg/kg/day) of these three chemotypes individually. NMITLI 101R incited both humoral and cellular immune response in terms of higher number of antibody producing cells and enhanced foot pad swelling at the 10 mg dose as also dose dependent B and T cell proliferations. Levels of intracellular and secreted cytokines post-NMITLI 101R treatment illustrated generation of mixed Th1/Th2 response that remained more polarized towards Th1. This chemotype also generated maximum reactive oxygen species. NMITLI 118R provoked comparatively reduced immune response in all humoral and cellular parameters at lower doses but induced highly polarized Th1 cytokine response. In contrast, NMITLI 128R led to enhanced antibody production with minimal cellular response demonstrating marginally Th2 dominance at a lower dose. Taken together, it may therefore be concluded that there were distinct modulation in the immune response exhibited by the three chemotypes of Withania somnifera and NMITLI 101R appeared to possess a better immunostimulatory activity than the other chemotypes at lower doses