Development of concurrent infection of notoedric mange in rabbits infected with Trypanosoma evansi

This report describes observations on the development of cutaneous lesions in rabbits experimentally infected with Trypanosoma evansi. Skinscrapings revealed the presence of different developmental stages of Notoedres cati var. cuniculi and the animals were successfully treated by combined anti-Trypanosoma (diminazene aceturate @ 3.5 mg.kg-1body weight) and acaricid treatments (doramectin @ 400mg.kg-1body weight). T. evansi infection probably made the rabbits more prone to infection of notoedric mange and doramectin proved to be effective, practical and well tolerated means of treatment

Comparison among some well known control schemes with different tuning methods

AbstractThis paper presents a comparison between some well-known control schemes such as feedback, feedback plus feed-forward, cascade and cascade plus feed-forward for controlling a third-order process. The controller applied in various control schemes is a PID controller that has been tuned using Ziegler Nichols (ZN) and relay auto-tuning (RA) methods. The comparative analysis is based upon various performance measures such as rise time (tr), settling time (ts), maximum overshoot (Mp), steady-state error (ess), integral of absolute error (IAE), integral of square error (ISE), integral of time square error (ITSE), and integral of time absolute error (ITAE). Simulation results show that the RA method provides superior performance in case of feedback plus feed-forward and cascade control schemes. On the other hand, the ZN method proves to be better in case of cascade plus feed-forward control scheme

An Introduction to Patchouli (Pogostemon cablin Benth.) – A Medicinal and Aromatic Plant: It’s Importance to Mankind

Patchouli (Pogostemon cablin Benth.) is a plant from Lamiaceae family, well known for its medicinal and aromatic properties.  Patchouli is grown for its essential oil.  Patchouli essential oil is mainly obtained by steam distillation of the shade dried leaves.  It is widely appreciated for its characteristic pleasant and long lasting woody, earthy, camphoraceous odour.  It is especially notable as the essential oil extracted is internationally important and valuable, principally for the aromatherapy, perfumery, cosmetics, incense stick production and food flavouring industries.  This review attempted to give an overview of the relationship between aromatherapy and essential oils, importance of patchouli, harvesting pattern of patchouli, basics behind drying and steam distillation of patchouli crop, as well as trends existing in the various markets for essential oil application and its importance to mankind.   Keywords: patchouli, aromatherapy, drying, steam distillation, essential oil, application

An efficient optimized adaptive step-size hybrid block method for integrating w′′=f(t,w,w′) directly.

[EN]This article addresses the development and analysis of an efficient optimized hybrid block method for integrating general second order initial value problems (IVPs) of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The construction of the method is based on a combination of two methodologies, namely hybrid and block that result in an efficient implicit numerical integrator. Further, an improved strategy is obtained considering its adaptive step-size formulation. Some numerical experiments have been carried out on solving some well-known problems existing in the literature with fixed and adaptive step-size implementation of the new scheme. Numerical data reveals that the new scheme is a good alternative to existing solvers with comparable properties

Radiation tolerance studies of silicon microstrip sensors for the CBM Silicon Tracking System

Double-sided silicon microstrip sensors will be used in the Silicon Tracking System of the CBM experiment. During experimental run they will be exposed to a radiation field of up to 1x1014 1 MeV neq cm-2. Radiation tolerance studies were made on prototypes from two different vendors. Results from these prototype detectors before and after irradiation to twice that neutron fluence are discussed

Specifying and Testing kk-Safety Properties for Machine-Learning Models

Machine-learning models are becoming increasingly prevalent in our lives, for instance assisting in image-classification or decision-making tasks. Consequently, the reliability of these models is of critical importance and has resulted in the development of numerous approaches for validating and verifying their robustness and fairness. However, beyond such specific properties, it is challenging to specify, let alone check, general functional-correctness expectations from models. In this paper, we take inspiration from specifications used in formal methods, expressing functional-correctness properties by reasoning about $k$ different executions, so-called $k$-safety properties. Considering a credit-screening model of a bank, the expected property that "if a person is denied a loan and their income decreases, they should still be denied the loan" is a 2-safety property. Here, we show the wide applicability of $k$-safety properties for machine-learning models and present the first specification language for expressing them. We also operationalize the language in a framework for automatically validating such properties using metamorphic testing. Our experiments show that our framework is effective in identifying property violations, and that detected bugs could be used to train better models

Collagen in Health and Disease

Collagen is the unique, triple helical protein molecule which forms the major part of the extracellular matrix. It is the most abundant protein in the human body, representing 30% of its dry weight and is important to health because it characterizes the structure of skin, connective tissues, tendons, bones and cartilage. As collagen forms building block of body structures, any defect in collagen results in disorders, such as osteogenesis imperfecta, Ehlers-Dalnos syndrome, scurvy, systemic lupus erythematosus, systemic sclerosis, Stickler syndrome, oral submucous fibrosis, Marfan syndrome, epidermolysis bullosa, Alport syndrome. This review discusses the role of collagen in health as well as disease

Simulated unbound structures for benchmarking of protein docking in the dockground resource

Background Proteins play an important role in biological processes in living organisms. Many protein functions are based on interaction with other proteins. The structural information is important for adequate description of these interactions. Sets of protein structures determined in both bound and unbound states are essential for benchmarking of the docking procedures. However, the number of such proteins in PDB is relatively small. A radical expansion of such sets is possible if the unbound structures are computationally simulated. Results The dockground public resource provides data to improve our understanding of protein–protein interactions and to assist in the development of better tools for structural modeling of protein complexes, such as docking algorithms and scoring functions. A large set of simulated unbound protein structures was generated from the bound structures. The modeling protocol was based on 1 ns Langevin dynamics simulation. The simulated structures were validated on the ensemble of experimentally determined unbound and bound structures. The set is intended for large scale benchmarking of docking algorithms and scoring functions. Conclusions A radical expansion of the unbound protein docking benchmark set was achieved by simulating the unbound structures. The simulated unbound structures were selected according to criteria from systematic comparison of experimentally determined bound and unbound structures. The set is publicly available at http://dockground.compbio.ku.edu