The disappearing hand: vestibular stimulation does not improve hand localisation.

Bodily self-consciousness depends on the coherent integration of sensory information. In addition to visual and somatosensory information processing, vestibular contributions have been proposed and investigated. Vestibular information seems especially important for self-location, but remains difficult to study. This randomised controlled experiment used the MIRAGE multisensory illusion box to induce a conflict between the visually- and proprioceptively-encoded position of one hand. Over time, the perceived location of the hand slowly shifts, due to the fact that proprioceptive input is progressively weighted more heavily than the visual input. We hypothesised that left cold caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) augments this shift in hand localisation. The results from 24 healthy participants do not support our hypothesis: CVS had no effect on the estimations with which the perceived position of the hand shifted from the visually- to the proprioceptively-encoded position. Participants were more likely to report that their hand was 'no longer there' after CVS. Taken together, neither the physical nor the subjective data provide evidence for vestibular enhanced self-location

Spatio-temporal patterns of pre-eclampsia and eclampsia in relation to drinking water salinity at the district level in Bangladesh from 2016 to 2018

This analysis examines whether salinity in drinking water is associated with pre-eclampsia and eclampsia (PE/E), a leading cause of maternal morbidity and mortality. Bangladesh’s national health information system data were extracted at the district level (n = 64) to assess PE/E rates, and these were overlaid with three environmental measures approximating drinking water salinity, remotely sensed low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ), monthly rainfall data, and electrical conductivity of groundwater (i.e., water salinity). Results from a negative binomial fixed effects model suggest PE/E rates are higher with less rainfall (dry season), lower population density, and that district level rates of PE/E increase with higher groundwater salinity and in the high risk LECZ category closest to the coast. Results suggest that drinking water salinity may be associated with PE/E and that using national health surveillance data can improve understanding of this association. This approach can potentially be leveraged in the future to inform targeted interventions to high risk regions and times

Multiple criteria supplier selection: A fuzzy approach

A company must purchase a lot of diverse components and raw materials from different upstream suppliers to manufacture or assemble its products. However, it is not only a very complicated and perplexing task to select outstanding suppliers for decision-makers of strategic purchasing, but also it involves uncertainty and produces erroneous results while considering single criteria. For this reason, the decision-makers of strategic purchasing greatly require an efficient, valid and fair tool to assist them in selecting appropriate suppliers forthwith. This paper proposes a supplier selection model for any kind of company by using MATLAB fuzzy logic toolbox to help the purchasing department in selecting the most appropriate supplier. The main task in the proposed model involves determining the numerical score for different suppliers considering their respective performance in various qualitative and quantitative evaluation criteria and then selecting the best supplier having highest score. Fuzzy control is used to determine the best supplier by calculating the score in selected evaluation criteria which are provided in numerical values for the convenience of calculation

Biofortification and bioavailability of rice grain zinc as affected by different forms of foliar zinc fertilization.

BACKGROUND: Zinc (Zn) biofortification through foliar Zn application is an attractive strategy to reduce human Zn deficiency. However, little is known about the biofortification efficiency and bioavailability of rice grain from different forms of foliar Zn fertilizers. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Four different Zn forms were applied as a foliar treatment among three rice cultivars under field trial. Zinc bioavailability was assessed by in vitro digestion/Caco-2 cell model. Foliar Zn fertilization was an effective agronomic practice to promote grain Zn concentration and Zn bioavailability among three rice cultivars, especially, in case of Zn-amino acid and ZnSO(4). On average, Zn-amino acid and ZnSO(4) increased Zn concentration in polished rice up to 24.04% and 22.47%, respectively. On average, Zn-amino acid and ZnSO(4) increased Zn bioavailability in polished rice up to 68.37% and 64.43%, respectively. The effectiveness of foliar applied Zn-amino acid and ZnSO(4) were higher than Zn-EDTA and Zn-Citrate on improvement of Zn concentration, and reduction of phytic acid, as a results higher accumulation of bioavailable Zn in polished rice. Moreover, foliar Zn application could maintain grain yield, the protein and minerals (Fe and Ca) quality of the polished rice. CONCLUSIONS: Foliar application of Zn in rice offers a practical and useful approach to improve bioavailable Zn in polished rice. According to current study, Zn-amino acid and ZnSO(4) are recommended as excellent foliar Zn forms to ongoing agronomic biofortification

Clustering Techniques for Software Engineering

Software industries face a common problem which is the maintenance cost of industrial software systems. There are lots of reasons behind this problem. One of the possible reasons is the high maintenance cost due to lack of knowledge about understanding the software systems that are too large, and complex. Software clustering is an efficient technique to deal with such kind of problems that arise from the sheer size and complexity of large software systems. Day by day the size and complexity of industrial software systems are rapidly increasing. So, it will be a challenging task for managing software systems. Software clustering can be very helpful to understand the larger software system, decompose them into smaller and easy to maintenance. In this paper, we want to give research direction in the area of software clustering in order to develop efficient clustering techniques for software engineering. Besides, we want to describe the most recent clustering techniques and their strength as well as weakness. In addition, we propose genetic algorithm based software modularization clustering method. The result section demonstrated that proposed method can effectively produce good module structure and it outperforms the state of the art methods.

The amount of bioavailable Zn in the polished rice among three cultivars.

<p>Error bars indicate standard errors of the means (n = 4). Different letters indicate significant difference among Zn treatments according to LSD test (P<0.05).</p

Effect of different forms of foliar Zn fertilization on Zn concentration in rice grain.

<p>(A) Zn concentration in brown rice. (B) Zn concentration in polished rice. Error bars indicate standard errors of the means (n = 4). Different letters indicate significant difference among Zn treatments according to LSD test (P<0.05).</p

Effect of different forms of foliar Zn fertilization on the percentages of solubility, retention, transported and uptake efficiency of Zn among three rice cultivars.

a<p>Different letters after number in the same column designated significant difference by LSD_P<0.05.</p>b<p>Significant effects: NS  =  not significant at P>0.05;</p>*<p>at P<0.05;</p>**<p>at P<0.01;</p>***<p>at P<0.001.</p

Zn concentration in rice grain among three cultivars.

<p>(A) Zn concentration in brown rice. (B) Zn concentration in polished rice. Error bars indicate standard errors of the means (n = 4). Different letters indicate significant difference among Zn treatments according to LSD test (P<0.05).</p