Ecotourism and its effects on wildlife of Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve

The present paper focused on ecotourism and its effects on wildlife. In the present scenario the ecotourism is a grooming sector in developing nations. However, its impact on wildlife and indigenous people has become a controversial issue. Pachmarhi Biosphere Reserve site explores the multitude of interactions that exist among the welfare of wildlife, conservation biology and socio-economy of the local people.Key words: Environmental impact, ecotourism, biodiversity, flora, fauna, landscape ecology, protected area

FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF SELF-EMULSIFYING DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM OF ETORICOXIB

Objective: In the present dissertation work, the aim was to prepare self-emulsifying drug delivery systems (SEDDS) of etoricoxib to improve its solubility with a view to enhance its oral bioavailability.Methods: The prepared SEDDS was the concentrate of drug, oil, surfactants, and cosurfactant. The formulation was evaluated for various tests such as solubility, globule size, thermodynamic stability study, pH determination, ease of dispersibility, uniformity index, drug content, in-vitro release study, and in-vitro permeation study.Results: The optimized formulation F6 showed drug release (79.21±2.73%), droplet size (0.546 μm). In vitro drug release of the F6 was highly significant (p<0.05) as compared to the plain drug.Conclusion: All formulations of etoricoxib SEDDS were showed faster dissolution than plain drug (p<0.05), mean bioavailability of etoricoxib increase in respect to the plain drug. The F6 can be further used for the preparation of various solid SEDDS formulations

Effect of Crop Establishment Methods on Crop Yield, Weed Dynamics, Profitability and Nutrient Uptake Under Rice-Wheat Cropping System of Indo-Gangetic Plains of Eastern India

The rice–wheat cropping system covering 13.5 million ha in the Indo-Gangetic Plains in South-Asia is vital for food security. Water, energy and labour scarcity, increasing cost of production, diminishing farm profit and the changing climate are major challenges faced by the farmers under intensive tillage based conventional practices. In a field study, we evaluated productivity, weed dynamics, nutrient uptake and economical profitability of four wheat establishment methods during two years. The wheat establishment methods included zero-till wheat (ZTW), happy seeder planted wheat (HSW), bed planted wheat (BPW) and conventional till wheat (CTW). The treatments were completely randomized and replicated five times. Wheat grain yield under HSW was 3.4% and 4.1% higher than BPW, 8.3% and 11.0% higher than ZTW and 20.8% and 24.5% higher than CTW in 2012-13 and 2013-14, respectively. Nutrient (N, P and K) uptake in wheat grain was also higher in HSW than in the other treatments. Weed density and biomass was the lowest under HSW followed by BPT, and the highest in CTW. The weed pressure was reduced in the second growing season compared to the first. Net profit and benefit cost ratio was highest under HSW and the lowest under CTW. This record was migrated from the OpenDepot repository service in June, 2017 before shutting down

Characterisation of atmospheric aerosol by SEM-EDX and Ion-chromatography techniques for eastern Indo-Gangetic plain location, Varanasi, India

Atmospheric aerosol consists of both natural and anthropogenic origin. Studies have shown that continuous exposure to these particles is associated with a high percentage of death from respiratory and cardiovascular disease. In the present study, we have first time used both SEM-EDX analysis as well as chemical analysis to understand the differences in morphology and elemental composition of aerosols sample from a suburban clean and green area of Banaras Hindu University campus and some much polluted urban areas of the Varanasi city situated in the eastern Indo-Gangetic plain. The analysis was done by using scanning electron microscope (SEM) coupled with energy dispersive X-ray microanalyzer (EDX) and ionchromatography (IC). Analyses show that C, Ca, Na, S, Si, Al have dominated the sample

A Similarity Measure for GPU Kernel Subgraph Matching

Accelerator architectures specialize in executing SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) in lockstep. Because the majority of CUDA applications are parallelized loops, control flow information can provide an in-depth characterization of a kernel. CUDAflow is a tool that statically separates CUDA binaries into basic block regions and dynamically measures instruction and basic block frequencies. CUDAflow captures this information in a control flow graph (CFG) and performs subgraph matching across various kernel's CFGs to gain insights to an application's resource requirements, based on the shape and traversal of the graph, instruction operations executed and registers allocated, among other information. The utility of CUDAflow is demonstrated with SHOC and Rodinia application case studies on a variety of GPU architectures, revealing novel thread divergence characteristics that facilitates end users, autotuners and compilers in generating high performing code

Molecular characterization of the Indian Andigena potato core collection using microsatellite markers

Twenty-four (24) microsatellite (SSR) markers of a new PGI kit were used to validate the genetic diversity of the 77 Indian Andigena potato core collections. In SSR analysis, polymorphic information content (PIC), allelic richness per locus of microsatellite loci and cluster analysis showed the high diversity of core collection. In total, 214 SSR alleles were detected in the core collection, out of which 208 alleles were polymorphic with absolute frequencies between 2 to 58. The PIC values of SSR loci ranged from 0.61 to 0.90. SSR-based dendrogram revealed eight main groups (Clusters I to VIII) including 26 single accessions at Dice similarity coefficient value of 0.37. None of the accession showed full similarity with any other accession, except that the maximum similarity (0.83) was observed between the accessions JEX/A-316 and JEX/A-317. PCA revealed 47.31% variation in the first three components. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) analysis which resulted into maximum variation was due to within country origins and yield types. The genetic diversity of the core collection based on the microsatellite data appeared to have quite distinct genotypes that were formed by the morph-agronomic traits. These findings not only demonstrate the diverse core collection but are also useful for selecting genetically distinct potato materials to widen the genetic background of the potato gene pool.Keywords: Core collection, genetic diversity, potato, Solanum tuberosum subsp. andigena, SSRAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(10), pp. 1025-1033, 6 March, 201

Improved Electromagnetic Interference Shielding Properties of MWCNT–PMMA Composites Using Layered Structures

Electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding effectiveness (SE) of multi-walled carbon nanotubes–polymethyl methacrylate (MWCNT–PMMA) composites prepared by two different techniques was measured. EMI SE up to 40 dB in the frequency range 8.2–12.4 GHz (X-band) was achieved by stacking seven layers of 0.3-mm thick MWCNT–PMMA composite films compared with 30 dB achieved by stacking two layers of 1.1-mm thick MWCNT–PMMA bulk composite. The characteristic EMI SE graphs of the composites and the mechanism of shielding have been discussed. SE in this frequency range is found to be dominated by absorption. The mechanical properties (tensile, flexural strength and modulus) of the composites were found to be comparable or better than the pure polymer. The studies therefore show that the composite can be used as structurally strong EMI shielding material

Complex formation in liquid potassium-lead alloy

Regular associated solution model has been used to study the mixing properties of KPb liquid alloy at 848 K. The values of different thermodynamic parameters obtained from this model are compared with corresponding experimental values. Most of the computed values are in good agreement with the observed values. Keywords: Compound forming alloy; Pairwise interaction energy; Equilibrium constant DOI: 10.3126/bibechana.v7i0.4035 BIBECHANA 7 (2011) 1-

Complex formation in liquid potassium-lead alloy

Regular associated solution model has been used to study the mixing properties of KPb liquid alloy at 848 K. The values of different thermodynamic parameters obtained from this model are compared with corresponding experimental values. Most of the computed values are in good agreement with the observed values. Keywords: Compound forming alloy; Pairwise interaction energy; Equilibrium constant DOI: 10.3126/bibechana.v7i0.4035 BIBECHANA 7 (2011) 1-

Surface tension of two weakly interacting liquid alloys

We report surface tension of two weakly segregating alloys Al-Ga and Cd-In in molten state at temperatures of 1023 K and 800 K respectively using different approaches. Our analysis based on different assumptions reveal that the metal with lower surface tension tends to segregate on the surface of molten alloy and the metal with higher surface tension tends to segregate in the bulk. Different approaches predict consistency in the values of the surface tension of Al-Ga liquid alloy that increases with increase in bulk concentration of aluminium in the alloy with all values smaller than the ideal values. In Cd-In alloy the models reveal no such regularity in the surface tension; it varies slightly from the ideality. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/bibechana.v9i0.7183 BIBECHANA 9 (2013) 103-11