STUDY ON THE ANTIMICROBIAL EFFICACY OF HAND SANITIZERS DEVELOPED BY THE PHARMACEUTICAL CORPORATION (I.M) KERALA LTD (OUSHADHI)

Hand sanitizers are used to ensure hygiene in the absence of hand washing facilities or where frequent sanitizing is required especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Handsanitizers using different combinations were prepared at Oushadhi using WHO recommendations and also to promote Kerala Government’s initiative of break the chain campaign. The campaign was launched on 15th March 2020 and it aims to cut down the progress of disease transmission. The efficacy of the batches of sanitizers prepared was tested against Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. They were also tested against common air and water contaminants found in the premises which would be of more significance to the general workforce. The susceptibility test was performed by agar well diffusion method and it revealed that the antimicrobial efficacy of the prepared hand sanitizer Batch III with Cymbopogon citratus oil was the most effective among the three combinations. A hedonic sensory evaluation was carried out for better consumer acceptability

Modelling of content-aware indicators for effective determination of shot boundaries in compressed MPEG videos

In this paper, a content-aware approach is proposed to design multiple test conditions for shot cut detection, which are organized into a multiple phase decision tree for abrupt cut detection and a finite state machine for dissolve detection. In comparison with existing approaches, our algorithm is characterized with two categories of content difference indicators and testing. While the first category indicates the content changes that are directly used for shot cut detection, the second category indicates the contexts under which the content change occurs. As a result, indications of frame differences are tested with context awareness to make the detection of shot cuts adaptive to both content and context changes. Evaluations announced by TRECVID 2007 indicate that our proposed algorithm achieved comparable performance to those using machine learning approaches, yet using a simpler feature set and straightforward design strategies. This has validated the effectiveness of modelling of content-aware indicators for decision making, which also provides a good alternative to conventional approaches in this topic

Clustering of Imperfect Transcripts Using a Novel Similarity Measure

There has been a surge of interest in last several years in methods for automatic generation of content indices for multimedia documents, particularly with respect to video and audio documents. As a result, there is much interest in methods for analyzing transcribed documents from audio and video broadcasts and telephone conversations and messages. The present paper deals with such an analysis by presenting a clustering technique to partition a set of transcribed documents into different meaningful topics. Our method determines the intersection between matching transcripts, evaluates the information contribution by each transcript, assesses the information closeness of overlapping words and calculates similarity based on Chi-square method. The main novelty of our method lies in the proposed similarity measure that is designed to withstand the imperfections of transcribed documents. Preliminary experimental results using an archive of transcribed news broadcasts demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methodology. 1

Catalytic behavior of individual Au nanocrystals in the local anodic oxidation of Si surfaces

Local anodic oxidation (LAO) of Si surfaces deposited with Au nanoislands by electroless plating and Au nanocrystals (∼3 nm) by spin coating has been carried out using a biased AFM tip. Isolated nanoislands and individual nanocrystals exhibited high catalytic activity producing oxide patterns with a height above 13 and 40 nm, respectively, in contrast to 2.5 nm high patterns observed on bare portions of the Si surface. Au nanocrystal aggregates also present on the surface exhibited relatively less activity compared to single nanocrystals. In the case of Au nanocrystal dispersion on the Si surface, etch patterns obtained after a HF wash exhibited depths of 13 and 8 nm with respect to the locations of single nanocrystal and the aggregate, respectively, compared to ∼2 nm trench depth from LAO on the bare surface. Further, nanocrystal-induced etch patterns were much narrower, ∼12 nm. In another experiment, a Au-deposited tip catalytically induced LAO on the bare Si surface with features of ∼6 nm height and the corresponding trenches of ∼2.2 nm

Cellular network formation of hydrophobic alkanethiol capped gold nanoparticles on mica surface mediated by water islands

Dendritic and cellular networks of nanoparticles are known to form commonly either by random diffusion-limited aggregation or by solvent evaporation dynamics. Using alkanethiol capped gold nanoparticles deposited on mica imaged under ambient and controlled water vapor conditions by atomic force microscope and in situ scanning electron microscope, respectively, we show a third mechanism in action. The cellular network consisting of open and closed polygons is formed by the nucleation and lateral growth of adsorbed water islands, the contact lines of which push the randomly distributed hydrophobic nanoparticles along the growth directions, eventually leading to the polygonal structure formation as the boundaries of the growing islands meet. Such nanoparticle displacement has been possible due to the weakly adhering nature of the hydrophilic substrate, mica. These results demonstrate an important but hitherto neglected effect of adsorbed water in the structure formation on hydrophilic substrates and provide a facile tool for the fabrication of nanoparticle networks without specific particle or substrate modifications and without a tight control on particle deposition conditions during the solvent evaporation

Thiol-derivatized nanocrystalline arrays of gold, silver, and platinum

A simple procedure has been developed to prepare thiol-derivatized nanoparticles of metals. The procedure involves the transfer of well-characterized metal hydrosols to a hydrocarbon medium containing the thiol. Thiol-derivatized nanoparticles Au, Ag, and Pt of near spherical shape forming nanocrystalline arrays have been characterized by X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and other techniques. Thiol-derivatized Au particles of mean diameters of 1.0, 2.1, and 4.2 nm from nanocrystalline arrays show characteristic X-ray diffraction patterns. The nanoparticles exhibit Moiré fringes when deposited on a flake of MoSe2, showing that each particle is in itself crystalline. Besides spherical nanoparticles, thiol-derivatized particles of other shapes have been prepared, hexagonal Pt nanoparticles being particularly novel. Scanning tunneling microscopy images not only confirm the size and shape of nanoparticles revealed by TEM, but also show evidence for thiol molecules on the surface