DNA Computing and Implementations

DNA Computing aims to harness the molecules at the Nano level for computational purpose. DNA Computing features high data density and massive storage capability therefore, its approach can be used to solve various combinatorial Problems like solving Non Deterministic Problems (i.e. NP- Complete and NP-Hard). This Molecular Level Computational involve input and output both in the molecule form. Since DNA has already been explored as an exquisite material and is a fundamental block for manufacturing large scale Nano mechanical devices. DNA Computing is an approach towards the Biomolecular Computation where the aim is not only to process the information but also to transfer it to other molecular structures for utilization. DNA Computing is slower when an individual DNA Computes in compare to silica based chips. Its Efficiently and throughput increases as the number of DNA increase. DNA provides the possibility of massive parallelism. Starting with the Introduction about the DNA Structure, followed up by DNA Computers, this paper will discuss some recent advancements and challenges of DNA Computing. We will also discuss the possible future scope and implementation as well how the Artificial Intelligence approach can be used with DNA Based Computers to achieve a better and efficient Machine Learning

Urban Growth in Himalaya: Understanding the Process and Options for Sustainable Development <Article>

During recent years, urbanization has emerged as one of the important drivers of global environmental change transforming mountain regions, particularly in developing countries where the process of urban-growth has been fast but mostly unsystematic, unplanned and unregulated. Himalaya representing tectonically alive, densely populated, and one of the most marginalized mountain regions of the world has experienced rapid urban growth during last three decades. More recently, comparatively less accessible areas have also come under the process of rapid urbanization mainly owing to improved road connectivity, publicity and marketing of new tourist sites and the resultant growth of domestic as well as international tourism; development of horticulture; economic globalization and gradual shift from primary resource development practices to secondary and tertiary sectors; and due to absence of urban land use policy. Consequently, there has been tremendous increase in size, area, number and complexity of urban settlements in the Himalaya resulting into the expansion of urban processes (i.e., expansion of urban land use in surrounding agricultural zone, forests and rural environments) as well as increase in the intensity of urban land use (i.e., increase in the density of covered area, density of building, and increase in the density of population) within the towns. On the one hand, the growing urban areas in high mountain are now serving as the centres of growth by creating opportunities of employment, variety of socio-economic services and expansion of infrastructure; and contributing towards the development of their vast hinterland through trickledown effect; while on the other, the sprawling urban growth in fragile mountains has disrupted the critical ecosystem services. The speedy and unplanned urbanization has perturbed the hydrological regimes of Himalayan watersheds and reduced ground water recharge, and decreased the availability of water for drinking, sanitation and crop production; depleted forests and biodiversity; increased risks of natural hazards and disasters both in urban areas as well as in their peri-urban zones; and increased vulnerability of mountain inhabitants to water, food, livelihood and health insecurity. Moreover, climate change has stressed urban ecosystems by increasing the frequency, severity and intensity of extreme weather events. As in other parts of the world, urban growth cannot be stopped or reduced in Himalaya, but it can be steered in a more sustainable manner through an integrated urban-rural land use planning. Effective land use policies need to be evolved and implemented for the protection and conservation of forests, biodiversity, water resources and agricultural land

Environmental Changes and their Impact on Rural Water, Food, Livelihood, and Health Security in Kumaon Himalayas

Population growth and the resultant land use intensifications have been identified as major drivers of environmental changes in densely populated Middle Himalayan Ranges. Study carried out in Upper Kosi Catchment (107.94 km2), in Kumaon Himalaya, India indicated that 3.34% forests have been converted into cultivated and degraded land during last 30 years. These land use changes have not only reduced the availability of biomass manure to agriculture, but also caused severe depletion of water resources through reduced groundwater recharge. Nearly 33% natural springs have dried and as many as 61% villages have been facing great scarcity of water for drinking, sanitation as well as for crop production. As a result, food production has decreased by 25%, and livelihood opportunities in traditional forestry and agricultural sectors declined considerably. These situations are increasing the vulnerability of large rural population, particularly poor, landless and socially marginalized communities to food, livelihood and health insecurity

Assessing livelihood-ecosystem interdependencies and natural resource governance in Indian villages in the Middle Himalayas

© 2018, The Author(s). Mountains host high biological and cultural diversity, generating ecosystem services providing benefits over multiple scales but also suffering significant poverty and vulnerabilities. Case studies in two contrasting village communities in the Indian Middle Himalayas explore linkages between people and adjacent forest and river ecosystems. Interviews with local people and direct observations revealed low food availability and decreasing self-sufficiency, under the combined pressures of increasing foraging by wildlife (primarily pigs and monkeys) coupled with seasonal to permanent outmigration by younger men seeking more secure income and alternative livelihoods. Much of the income remitted by migrants to their villages was not retained locally but flowed back out of the Himalayan region through purchases of food produced and marketed in the plains. This threatens the economic viability of villages, also placing asymmetric pressures on resident female, elderly and young people who concentrate labour on local livestock production to the neglect of crop agriculture, further compounding land abandonment and wildlife foraging. Significant traditional knowledge remains, along with utilitarian, cultural and spiritual connections with the landscape. Many beneficiaries of locally produced ecosystem services are remote from village communities (particularly water flows downstream to the plains), but no recompense is paid to stewards of the forested Himalayan landscape. Although local people currently perceive high biodiversity as a constraint to agriculture and other economic activities, the Himalayan landscapes could potentially constitute an asset with appropriate institutional development through promotion of managed bioprospecting, guided ecotourism and payment for ecosystem services (PES) schemes for water supply and under REDD+

Socio-Economic Changes in a Himalayan Mountain Village under Rapid Economic Growth in India: The Re-Investigation of a Village in the State of Uttarakhand <Research Note>

This paper examined the recent socio-economic changes of a village in Uttarakhand that has shown rapid economic growth. We selected K Village as a study field, where we conducted a survey in 2007. Therefore, our primary intention was to examine the changes that occurred over the 10-year period since our original investigation. The research results are as follows. First, we found some changes in the employment structure. The agricultural sector continued to play an important role in employment opportunities, though the number of people who engaged in agricultural work decreased. There was an increase in non-agricultural jobs, particularly in the opportunity for office-work in Indian metropolitan areas (as well as overseas). Second, considering the benefits of tourism development in the village, some residents pointed out positive effects, such as employment creation and increase of aided businesses related to tourism. On the contrary, other residents emphasized negative effects, such as the deterioration of the environment due to improper development. Third, for the future development of agriculture, it is important to develop strategies for improving agricultural mechanization and increasing the value of products as the number of agricultural workers has marginally decreased in recent years. Fourth, we confirmed the continuous progress in income, education, and the spread of consumer goods over the 10-year period. Our 2017 reinvestigation of K Village was able to confirm the tendency for the village to continuously develop, though there were some issues to be solved.Special Issue “Developmental Challenges in Rural India: A Village Level Examination in Himalayan Mountains

Synergistic Use of Remote Sensing and Modeling for Estimating Net Primary Productivity in the Red Sea With VGPM, Eppley-VGPM, and CbPM Models Intercomparison

Primary productivity (PP) has been recently investigated using remote sensing-based models over quite limited geographical areas of the Red Sea. This work sheds light on how phytoplankton and primary production would react to the effects of global warming in the extreme environment of the Red Sea and, hence, illuminates how similar regions may behave in the context of climate variability. study focuses on using satellite observations to conduct an intercomparison of three net primary production (NPP) models--the vertically generalized production model (VGPM), the Eppley-VGPM, and the carbon-based production model (CbPM)--produced over the Red Sea domain for the 1998-2018 time period. A detailed investigation is conducted using multilinear regression analysis, multivariate visualization, and moving averages correlative analysis to uncover the models\u27 responses to various climate factors. Here, we use the models\u27 eight-day composite and monthly averages compared with satellite-based variables, including chlorophyll-a (Chla), mixed layer depth (MLD), and sea-surface temperature (SST). Seasonal anomalies of NPP are analyzed against different climate indices, namely, the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO), the multivariate ENSO Index (MEI), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the Dipole Mode Index (DMI). In our study, only the CbPM showed significant correlations with NPGO, MEI, and PDO, with disagreements relative to the other two NPP models. This can be attributed to the models\u27 connection to oceanographic and atmospheric parameters, as well as the trends in the southern Red Sea, thus calling for further validation efforts

Multi-hazard susceptibility and exposure assessment of the Hindu Kush Himalaya

Mountainous regions are highly hazardous, and these hazards often lead to loss of human life. The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), like many mountainous regions, is the site of multiple and overlapping natural hazards, but the distribution of multi-hazard risk and the populations exposed to it are poorly understood. Here, we present high-resolution transboundary models describing susceptibility to floods, landslides, and wildfires to understand population exposure to multi-hazard risk across the HKH. These models are created from historical remotely sensed data and hazard catalogs by the maximum entropy (Maxent) machine learning technique. Our results show that human settlements in the HKH are disproportionately concentrated in areas of high multi-hazard risk. In contrast, low-hazard areas are disproportionately unpopulated. Nearly half of the population in the region lives in areas that are highly susceptible to more than one hazard. Warm low-altitude foothill areas with peren- nially moist soils were identified as highly susceptible to multiple hazards. This area comprises only 31% of the study region, but is home to 49% of its population. The results also show that areas susceptible to multiple hazards are also major corridors of current migration and urban expansion, suggesting that current rates and patterns of urbanization will continue to put more people at risk. This study establishes that the population in the HKH is concentrated in areas susceptible to multiple hazards and suggests that current patterns of human movement will continue to increase exposure to multi-hazards in the HKH

Emerging pharmacotherapy for cancer patients with cognitive dysfunction

Advances in the diagnosis and multi-modality treatment of cancer have increased survival rates for many cancer types leading to an increasing load of long-term sequelae of therapy, including that of cognitive dysfunction. The cytotoxic nature of chemotherapeutic agents may also reduce neurogenesis, a key component of the physiology of memory and cognition, with ramifications for the patient's mood and other cognition disorders. Similarly radiotherapy employed as a therapeutic or prophylactic tool in the treatment of primary or metastatic disease may significantly affect cognition. A number of emerging pharmacotherapies are under investigation for the treatment of cognitive dysfunction experienced by cancer patients. Recent data from clinical trials is reviewed involving the stimulants modafinil and methylphenidate, mood stabiliser lithium, anti-Alzheimer's drugs memantine and donepezil, as well as other agents which are currently being explored within dementia, animal, and cell culture models to evaluate their use in treating cognitive dysfunction

Computation of metallic nanofluid natural convection in a two-dimensional solar enclosure with radiative heat transfer, aspect ratio and volume fraction effects

As a model of nanofluid direct absorber solar collectors (nano-DASCs), the present article describes recent numerical simulations of steady-state nanofluid natural convection in a two-dimensional enclosure. Incompressible laminar Newtonian viscous flow is considered with radiative heat transfer. The ANSYS FLUENT finite volume code (version 19.1) is employed. The enclosure has two adiabatic walls, one hot (solar receiving) and one colder wall. The Tiwari-Das volume fraction nanofluid model is used and three different nanoparticles are studied (Copper (Cu), Silver (Ag) and Titanium Oxide (TiO2)) with water as the base fluid. The solar radiative heat transfer is simulated with the P1 flux and Rosseland diffusion models. The influence of geometrical aspect ratio and solid volume fraction for nanofluids is also studied and a wider range is considered than in other studies. Mesh-independence tests are conducted. Validation with published studies from the literature is included for the copperwater nanofluid case. The P1 model is shown to more accurately predict the actual influence of solar radiative flux on thermal fluid behaviour compared with Rosseland radiative model. With increasing Rayleigh number (natural convection i.e. buoyancy effect), significant modification in the thermal flow characteristics is induced with emergence of a dual structure to the circulation. With increasing aspect ratio (wider base relative to height of the solar collector geometry) there is a greater thermal convection pattern around the whole geometry, higher temperatures and the elimination of the cold upper zone associated with lower aspect ratio. Titanium Oxide nano-particles achieve slightly higher Nusselt number at the hot wall compared with Silver nano-particles. Thermal performance can be optimized with careful selection of aspect ratio and nano-particles and this is very beneficial to solar collector designers

The dominant Anopheles vectors of human malaria in the Asia-Pacific region: occurrence data, distribution maps and bionomic précis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The final article in a series of three publications examining the global distribution of 41 dominant vector species (DVS) of malaria is presented here. The first publication examined the DVS from the Americas, with the second covering those species present in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Here we discuss the 19 DVS of the Asian-Pacific region. This region experiences a high diversity of vector species, many occurring sympatrically, which, combined with the occurrence of a high number of species complexes and suspected species complexes, and behavioural plasticity of many of these major vectors, adds a level of entomological complexity not comparable elsewhere globally. To try and untangle the intricacy of the vectors of this region and to increase the effectiveness of vector control interventions, an understanding of the contemporary distribution of each species, combined with a synthesis of the current knowledge of their behaviour and ecology is needed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Expert opinion (EO) range maps, created with the most up-to-date expert knowledge of each DVS distribution, were combined with a contemporary database of occurrence data and a suite of open access, environmental and climatic variables. Using the Boosted Regression Tree (BRT) modelling method, distribution maps of each DVS were produced. The occurrence data were abstracted from the formal, published literature, plus other relevant sources, resulting in the collation of DVS occurrence at 10116 locations across 31 countries, of which 8853 were successfully geo-referenced and 7430 were resolved to spatial areas that could be included in the BRT model. A detailed summary of the information on the bionomics of each species and species complex is also presented.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This article concludes a project aimed to establish the contemporary global distribution of the DVS of malaria. The three articles produced are intended as a detailed reference for scientists continuing research into the aspects of taxonomy, biology and ecology relevant to species-specific vector control. This research is particularly relevant to help unravel the complicated taxonomic status, ecology and epidemiology of the vectors of the Asia-Pacific region. All the occurrence data, predictive maps and EO-shape files generated during the production of these publications will be made available in the public domain. We hope that this will encourage data sharing to improve future iterations of the distribution maps.</p