Plants Polyphenols: An Alternative Source for Green Corrosion Inhibitor

Corrosion inhibitors are chemical compounds when added in a smallconcentration to the corrosive environment will significantly reduced the corrosion rate of metals or its alloys. The environmental toxicity of organic and synthetic corrosion inhibitors has prompted the search for green corrosion inhibitors as they are biodegradable, do not contain heavy metals or other toxic compounds. As in addition to being environmental friendly and ecologically acceptable, plant products are inexpensive, readily available and renewable. Although substantial research has been devoted to corrosion inhibition by plantextracts, reports on the detailed mechanisms of the inhibition process and identification of the active ingredient are still scarce. Most plant extracts constitute of oxygen and nitrogen containing compounds. Most of the oxygen-containing constituents of the extracts is a hydroxy aromatic compound such as polyphenolic compound. It is postulated that a number of OH groups around the molecule lure them to form strong links with hydrogen and form complexes with metals. The complexes caused blockages of micro anodes and/or microcathodes and hence retard the subsequent dissolution of the metal. Another suggestion was through and adsorption of polyphenols to the metals due to the presence of donoracceptor interactions between the π-electrons of aromatic ring and vacant d orbital of surface metal atoms. The present paper will highlight some of Malaysian plant extracts which are potential to be used as corrosion inhibitors for mild steel in acidic medi

Structural and Epitope Characterization of Major Allergens from Dust Mite, BLO T 21 and DER F 7

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

EmoGen: Eliminating Subjective Bias in Emotional Music Generation

Music is used to convey emotions, and thus generating emotional music is important in automatic music generation. Previous work on emotional music generation directly uses annotated emotion labels as control signals, which suffers from subjective bias: different people may annotate different emotions on the same music, and one person may feel different emotions under different situations. Therefore, directly mapping emotion labels to music sequences in an end-to-end way would confuse the learning process and hinder the model from generating music with general emotions. In this paper, we propose EmoGen, an emotional music generation system that leverages a set of emotion-related music attributes as the bridge between emotion and music, and divides the generation into two stages: emotion-to-attribute mapping with supervised clustering, and attribute-to-music generation with self-supervised learning. Both stages are beneficial: in the first stage, the attribute values around the clustering center represent the general emotions of these samples, which help eliminate the impacts of the subjective bias of emotion labels; in the second stage, the generation is completely disentangled from emotion labels and thus free from the subjective bias. Both subjective and objective evaluations show that EmoGen outperforms previous methods on emotion control accuracy and music quality respectively, which demonstrate our superiority in generating emotional music. Music samples generated by EmoGen are available via this link:https://ai-muzic.github.io/emogen/, and the code is available at this link:https://github.com/microsoft/muzic/.Comment: 12 pages, 7 page

Crystal Structure of Der f 7, a Dust Mite Allergen from Dermatophagoides farinae

10.1371/journal.pone.0044850PLoS ONE79

Detection of Newcastle disease virus in edible-nest swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus) ranched under an oil palm plantation in Sungkai, Perak, Malaysia

Newcastle Disease is regarded as one of the most important disease of avian species and was listed as ‘A’ disease by the Office International des Epizooties (OIE). Studies have shown this disease infects more than 250 species of birds. The edible-nest swiftlet industry in Malaysia is on the rise for the last 10 years and swiftlet houses can be seen everywhere. This is due to the high price of edible bird nests at international market and high income generated by the farming of edible bird nest. Nevertheless, edible-nest swiftlet (Aerodramus fuciphagus) is can either be infected with or carrying the deadly Newcastle disease virus (NDV) which is a great threat to the poultry industry in this country. In Peninsular Malaysia, no study on this subject was reported so far in this swiflet species. In this study, 60 swiftlet carcasses were sampled. Post-mortem was conducted and lung and trachea tissues were collected. Tissue samples were tested for NDV using the reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Newcastle Disease Virus was not detected in any of the samples. Thus, it can be concluded that edible nest swiftlets (Aerodramus fuciphagus) ranched under oil palm plantation in this study are not infected with or carry NDV

Perceptions and Barriers of Survivorship Care in Asia: Perceptions From Asian Breast Cancer Survivors.

PurposeWith the long-term goal to optimize post-treatment cancer care in Asia, we conducted a qualitative study to gather in-depth descriptions from multiethnic Asian breast cancer survivors on their perceptions and experiences of cancer survivorship and their perceived barriers to post-treatment follow-up.MethodsTwenty-four breast cancer survivors in Singapore participated in six structured focus group discussions. The focus group discussions were voice recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed by thematic analysis.ResultsBreast cancer survivors were unfamiliar with and disliked the term "survivorship," because it implies that survivors had undergone hardship during their treatment. Cognitive impairment and peripheral neuropathy were physical symptoms that bothered survivors the most, and many indicated that they experienced emotional distress during survivorship, for which they turned to religion and peers as coping strategies. Survivors indicated lack of consultation time and fear of unplanned hospitalization as main barriers to optimal survivorship care. Furthermore, survivors indicated that they preferred receipt of survivorship care at the specialty cancer center.ConclusionBudding survivorship programs in Asia must take survivor perspectives into consideration to ensure that survivorship care is fully optimized within the community

An oligonucleotide microarray for microRNA expression analysis based on labeling RNA with quantum dot and nanogold probe

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play important regulatory roles in animals and plants by targeting mRNAs for cleavage or translational repression. They have diverse expression patterns and might regulate various developmental and physiological processes. Profiling miRNA expression is very helpful for studying biological functions of miRNAs. We report a novel miRNA profiling microarray, in which miRNAs were directly labeled at the 3′ terminus with biotin and hybridized with complementary oligo-DNA probes immobilized on glass slides, and subsequently detected by measuring fluorescence of quantum dots labeled with streptavidin bound to miRNAs through streptavidin–biotin interaction. The detection limit of this microarray for miRNA was ∼0.4 fmol, and the detection dynamic range spanned about 2 orders of magnitude. We made a model microarray to profile 11 miRNAs from leaf and root of rice (Oryza sativa L. ssp. indica) seedlings. The analysis results of the miRNAs had a good reproducibility and were consistent with the northern blot result. To avoid using high-cost detection equipment, colorimetric detection, a method based on nanogold probe coupled with silver enhancement, was also successfully introduced into miRNA profiling microarray detection

Airborne dispersion of droplets during coughing: a physical model of viral transmission

The Covid-19 pandemic has focused attention on airborne transmission of viruses. Using realistic air flow simulation, we model droplet dispersion from coughing and study the transmission risk related to SARS-CoV-2. Although most airborne droplets are 8-16 $\mu$m in diameter, the droplets with the highest transmission potential are, in fact, 32-40 $\mu$m. Use of face masks is therefore recommended for both personal and social protection. We found social distancing effective at reducing transmission potential across all droplet sizes. However, the presence of a human body 1 m away modifies the aerodynamics so that downstream droplet dispersion is enhanced, which has implications on safe distancing in queues. Based on median viral load, we found that an average of 0.55 viral copies is inhaled at 1 m distance per cough. Droplet evaporation results in significant reduction in droplet counts, but airborne transmission remains possible even under low humidity conditions

Amplifying Player Experience to Facilitate Prosocial Outcomes in a Narrative-Based Serious Game

The rise and development of serious games have shown promise in addressing critical social issues, including school bullying. However, prior work often compares game-based interventions with the conventional non-game approach, failing to generate insights about which game features should be emphasized to create more effective games. To bridge this research gap, in light of video games' advantages for creating immersive experiences that benefit persuasion, we created a narrative-based serious game addressing school bullying and conducted two studies (Study 1, N = 130; Study 2, N = 250) to explore the persuasive effects of two game features, respectively player–avatar similarity and in-game control, on player experience (including player–avatar identification, narrative engagement, and empathy) and prosocial intention. We found mixed results subject to player perspective such that only when players took the bully's perspective did one of the game features - in-game control - successfully create the intended empathy via amplified narrative engagement toward the desirable prosocial intention