Selenite detoxification by Bacillus spp isolated from indigenous polluted sites

This investigation was proposed to monitor the ability of isolated Bacillus spp. to transform toxic forms of selenium (selenium oxyanions) to non toxic selenium. These strains reduced up to 89% selenite on average at 37ºC after time of incubation. At higher initial concentrations (100, 200, 400, 600 and 800 µg ml-1), reduction value dropped to 31%. In the presence of other metals stresses (Co, Hg and Cr at a concentration of), the average selenite reduction percentage was 48%. This reduction value shifts from 87% to 94% with the increase in incubation time (from hrs to hrs). Reduction potential of these strains decreased 81% to 27% at various initial selenium concentrations in N-broth and acetate minimal media, respectively. With the increase in the sodium concentration of the media, the measured selenite reduction was above 95%. After exposure to the UV treatment B. pichinoty lost its ability to reduce selenite while B. endophyticus and B. foraminis reduced up to 96% and 71%, of selenite, respectively. Keywords: Selenite, bacteria, Bacillus, Bioremediation, heavy metal

Gender-Based Motivational Factors For Choosing Dentistry As A Career By First Year Dental Students Of College Of Pakistan

Abstract Objective: Dentistry, also known as “Dental Medicine” is opted for various reasons like prestige, socioeconomic status or personal desire. However, some join dentistry just to fulfil the wishes of their parents. Students who choose dentistry by their own choice excel better in this field. Another general impression is that mostly female students prefer it. To have a true picture of these impressions in our society, we planned this study to identify the reasons and motives of undergraduate dental surgeons for joining dentistry. Methods: A cross-sectional study, was conducted on 278 students at Margalla College of Dentistry, from December 2020 to April 2021 after the approval of the Ethical review committee of the institute. - The probability judgmental sampling technique was used. Students who consented were included in the study. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data which was analyzed using SPSS 21. Results: In this study, about 48.4% of students selected dentistry as their first choice but out of these only 48.9% did prior career planning. Female students 76 (49.6%) opted for dentistry as compared to male students 12 (30.7%). However, there was an insignificant difference regarding career choice between both genders (p=0.591). Prominent motivating factors were flexible work patterns (63.5%), self-employment (63%), financial security (44.8%) and parents wish (25%). Conclusion: Students chose Dentistry not only due to their interests but also because of flexible work patterns, financial security and self-employment. Both genders have more or less the same inclination towards dentistry.

Impact of Agriculture Sector Development on Economic Growth: Application of Robust Linear Least Squares Regression on Pakistan’s Data Set

The objective of the study is to examine the relationship between economic growth and  agricultural crops, i.e., maize, rice, sugarcane, and wheat production in the context of Pakistan by using the last 14 years time period from 2003-2016. The study used some other exogenous factors, i.e., agriculture exports and agriculture employment, which gives conclusive findings in a given country context. The study employed robust least squares regression apparatus that gives unbiased, efficient, and reliable estimates. The results show that agricultural crops, i.e., maize and wheat production substantially increases country’s economic growth, while agricultural exports does not supported due to some structural flaws in agriculture commodity market. The results confirm the positive association between agriculture employment and economic growth that helpful to reduce Pakistan’s internal migration issues. The study emphasized the need to support rice and sugarcane production through protective prices, economic policies, and financialization in the commodity markets.&nbsp

Electroencephalography (EEG) Based Neonatal Sleep Staging and Detection Using Various Classification Algorithms

Automatic sleep staging of neonates is essential for monitoring their brain development and maturity of the nervous system. EEG based neonatal sleep staging provides valuable information about an infant’s growth and health, but is challenging due to the unique characteristics of EEG and lack of standardized protocols. This study aims to develop and compare 18 machine learning models using Automated Machine Learning (autoML) technique for accurate and reliable multi-channel EEG-based neonatal sleep-wake classification. The study investigates autoML feasibility without extensive manual selection of features or hyperparameter tuning. The data is obtained from neonates at post-menstrual age 37 ± 05 weeks. 3525 30-s EEG segments from 19 infants are used to train and test the proposed models. There are twelve time and frequency domain features extracted from each channel. Each model receives the common features of nine channels as an input vector of size 108. Each model’s performance was evaluated based on a variety of evaluation metrics. The maximum mean accuracy of 84.78% and kappa of 69.63% has been obtained by the AutoML-based Random Forest estimator. This is the highest accuracy for EEG-based sleep-wake classification, until now. While, for the AutoML-based Adaboost Random Forest model, accuracy and kappa were 84.59% and 69.24%, respectively. High performance achieved in the proposed autoML-based approach can facilitate early identification and treatment of sleep-related issues in neonates

Association of Serum PSA Levels with Histopathological Pattern of Prostate Lesions

Background: Pathological changes that mainly affect prostate gland are prostatitis, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and cancerous lesions. Digital rectal examination (DRE), Transrectal Ultrasonography (TUS), and prostate specific antigen (PSA) followed by histopathological examination, are routinely used tests for diagnosis of prostate lesions. The aim of the present study is to determine the role of serum PSA levels in differentially diagnosing the different types of prostate lesions.Material and Methods: This retrospective (observational) study was conducted in Ibn-e-Sina Hospital Multan. Data of 2189 patients who were operated from 2007 to 2017 due to prostatic lesions were included in this analysis. Patients with BPH, prostatitis, prostate carcinoma and Prostatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia (PIN) were grouped according to serum PSA levels (ranging from 0 to >100 ng/ml) into five groups. Frequencies and percentages were calculated for different histopathological findings. Association of PSA levels with different histological patterns was determined with chi-square test with P-value < 0.05 taken as significant difference.Results: Mean age of patients was 62.45+10.64 years. On histopathology, BPH was diagnosed in 1676 (76.56%) patients, prostatitis in 133 (6.07%), carcinoma in 378 (17.26%) and PIN in 02 (0.09%) patients, respectively. Serum PSA levels of 4.01-10 ng/ml were found in 1050 (62.64%) BPH patients and in 59 (44.36%) prostatitis patients. Serum PSA levels of 10.01-20 ng/ml were found in only 40 (2.4%) BPH patients, 47 (35.33%) prostatitis patients, 22 (5.82%) carcinoma patients and in 1 (50.0%) PIN patient. Serum PSA levels of 20.01-100 ng/ml were found in 32 (1.9%) BPH patients, 11 (8.27%) prostatitis patients, 302 (79.89%) carcinoma patients, and in 1 (50.0%) PIN patient. Serum PSA levels of >100 ng/ml were absent in patients with BPH and PIN, and present in 1 (0.75%) prostatitis and 54 (14.28%) carcinoma patients.Conclusion: Benign prostatic hyperplasia was the commonest lesion in our patients (76.56%) with serum PSA levels >10 ng/ml reported in all patients with prostate carcinoma and prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) patients

Impact of Agriculture Sector Development on Economic Growth: Application of Robust Linear Least Squares Regression on Pakistan’s Data Set

The objective of the study is to examine the relationship between economic growth and agricultural crops, i.e., maize, rice, sugarcane, and wheat production in the context of Pakistan by using the last 14 years time period from 2003-2016. The study used some other exogenous factors, i.e., agriculture exports and agriculture employment, which gives conclusive findings in a given country context. The study employed robust least squares regression apparatus that gives unbiased, efficient, and reliable estimates. The results show that agricultural crops, i.e., maize and wheat production substantially increases country’s economic growth, while agricultural exports does not supported due to some structural flaws in agriculture commodity market. The results confirm the positive association between agriculture employment and economic growth that helpful to reduce Pakistan’s internal migration issues. The study emphasized the need to support rice and sugarcane production through protective prices, economic policies, and financialization in the commodity markets

Evaluation of Resistance in Local Five Pakistani Chickpea Varieties against Callosobruchus Spps

During this research morphological data was recorded 1st before starting labe.  Work. In free choice test, the response of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate variety for oviposition was different. The adult emergence of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate varieties shows no significant difference. Both species of Callosobruchus in free choice test have no significant difference for percent   adult’s emergence on candidate varieties. Percent damage of both species of Callosobruchus on candidate varieties was different. Keywords: Chickpea, Cicer arietinum L, Phytic acid, legumes, beetle, weevi

Evaluation of conventional and industry 4.0 manufacturing work design factors for performance based on personal characteristics

Performance of workers can be improved by effective design of work. Several work design factors, physiological, psychological, technological, organizational and social, have been identified in research literature. These factors influence the work in different forms, especially in combination with personal characteristics of workers. Manufacturing technologies are also changing with adoption of industry 4.0 practices. The objective of the research was to test whether workers with different personal characteristics had different relationships with work design factors in the conventional setting. The findings for the current conventional setup are extrapolated on an industry 4.0 work design model with important insights and observations. Managerial implications were inferred from the results which indicated age, education and family size as important variables affecting supervision (Mea

DNA key based visual chaotic image encryption

With the exponential growth of Internet technologies, digital information exchanged over the Internet is also significantly increased. In order to ensure the security of multimedia contents over the open natured Internet, data should be encrypted. In this paper, the quantum chaotic map is utilized for random vectors generation. Initial conditions for the chaos map are computed from a DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence along with plaintext image through Secure Hash Algorithm-512 (SHA-512). The first two random vectors break the correlation among pixels of the original plaintext image via row and column permutation, respectively. For the diffusion characteristics, the permuted image is bitwise XORed with a random matrix generated through the third random vectors. The diffused image is divided into Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Most Significant Bits (MSBs) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is applied to the carrier image. The HL and HH blocks of the carrier image are replaced with LSBs and MSBs of the diffused image for the generation of a visually encrypted image. The detailed theoretical analysis and experimental simulation of the designed scheme show that the proposed encryption algorithm is highly secured. Efficiency and robustness of the proposed visually image encryption scheme is also verified via a number of attack analyses, i.e., sensitivity attack analysis (> 99%), differential attack analysis (NPCR > 99, UACI > 33), brute force attack (almost 7.9892), statistical attack (correlation coefficient values are almost 0 or less than zero), noise tolerance, and cropping attack. Further security analyses such as encryption quality (ID ≅ 1564, DH = 3.000), homogeneity (0.3798), contrast (10.4820) and energy (0.0144) of the scheme are also evaluated

Dynamic S-Box and PWLCM-Based Robust Watermarking Scheme

Due to the increased number of cyberattacks, numerous researchers are motivated towards the design of such schemes that can hide digital information in a signal. Watermarking is one of the promising technologies that can protect digital information. However, traditional watermarking schemes are either slow or less secure. In this paper, a dynamic S-Box based efficient watermarking scheme is presented. The original image was extracted at the receiver’s end without any loss of sensitive information. Firstly, the Secure Hash Algorithm is applied to the original image for the generation of the initial condition. Piece Wise Linear Chaotic Map is then used to generate 16 × 16 dynamic Substitution Box (S-Box). As an additional security feature, the watermark is substituted through dynamic S-Box. Hence, it is hard for the eavesdroppers to attack the proposed scheme due to the dynamic nature of S-Box. Lastly, lifting wavelet transform is applied to the host image and the High Low and High High blocks of host image are replaced with least significant bits and most significant bits of the substituted watermark, respectively. Robustness, efficiency and security of the proposed scheme is verified using Structure Similarity Index, Structure Dissimilarity Index, Structure Content, Mutual Information, energy, entropy, correlation tests and classical attacks analysis