Distribution modeling, soil properties, and variation in essential oils chemical composition of Rhanterium adpressum Coss. & Dur.

Modeling the distribution of Rhanterium adpressum, an endemic species from southwestern Algeria, and the interactions of soil’s chemical properties with the variability of chemical composition of its essential oils makes the objective of this study. Obtained MaxEnt model (AUC = 0.98) showed that the general distribution of genus Rhanterium established mainly by the contribution of eight bioclimatic variables derived from temperature and precipitation (90.5%). Projection of the model in future conditions until 2070 reveals that the habitats of this species will be very affected by climate changes. The analysis of 9 soil samples shows a sandy (77–96%), alkaline, and calcareous character with an electrical conductivity between 0.2 and 1.8 dS/m at 20°C. The chemical composition of terpenoids families during a period of 5 months was dominated by monoterpene hydrocarbons (70–90%) followed by oxygen monoterpenes (4.5–9.2%), hydrocarbon sesquiterpenes (1.6–9.9%), and oxygenated sesquiterpenes (4.3–7.2%). The variation of this composition in relation with phenological cycle and physicochemical properties of the soil was discussed

Chemical Composition and Antioxidant Activity of Lipids from Ficus Carica l. Fruits

Samples of oils from seven types of Ficus carica L. fruits from Algeria were investigated through determinations of their chemical characteristics, quantifying sterols and tocopherols, and analysis of the fatty acids profiles using gas chromatography, and evaluation of antioxidant activity by 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) method and total antioxidant activity (TAA) using phosphomolybdenum methods. The results show that acid values ranged from 3.14 to 6.95 mg KOH/g indicating on the high amount of free fatty acids in the figs oils. Neutral lipids occupy a very important proportion of the crude figs oils (NL: 60.30–98.40%) compared to glycolipids (GL: 0.58–28.00%) and phospholipids (PL: 0.40-11.70%). Linoleic (11.70–34.74%) and linolenic (1.15–35.27%) were the major unsaturated fatty acids found in lipid fractions, while the main fraction of saturated fatty acid was palmitic. The tocopherols and sterols contents in fig oils ranged from 14.27 to 108.55 mg α-TE/g lipids and from 0.36 to 2.80 mg CE/g lipids respectively. The best inhibition concentration (IC50) of DPPH antioxidant activity was marked by GL (0.23–1.06 g/L) and PL (0.67–1.23 g/L). The strongest TAA was also marked by GL (IC50: 2.84 to 10.08 g/L) and PL (IC50: 3.73–11.30 g/L). This finding demonstrated for the first time that the studied figs oils possessed good antioxidant activity which may be associated with their alleged health benefits

Crosslingual automatic diacritization for Egyptian Colloquial Dialect

In this paper, the problem of missing diacritic marks in most of dialectal Arabic written resources is addressed. Our aim is to implement a scalable and extensible platform for automatically retrieving the diacritic marks for undiacritized dialectal Arabic texts. Different rule-based and statistical techniques are proposed. These include: morphological analyzer-based, maximum likelihood estimate, and statistical n-gram models. The proposed platform includes helper tools for text preprocessing and encoding conversion. Diacritization accuracy of each technique is evaluated in terms of Diacritic Error Rate (DER) and Word Error Rate (WER). The approach trains several n-gram models on different lexical units. A data pool of both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) data along with Dialectal Arabic data was used to train the models. 2016 IEEE.Scopu

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on patients with paediatric cancer in low-income, middle-income and high-income countries: a multicentre, international, observational cohort study

OBJECTIVES: Paediatric cancer is a leading cause of death for children. Children in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) were four times more likely to die than children in high-income countries (HICs). This study aimed to test the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic had affected the delivery of healthcare services worldwide, and exacerbated the disparity in paediatric cancer outcomes between LMICs and HICs. DESIGN: A multicentre, international, collaborative cohort study. SETTING: 91 hospitals and cancer centres in 39 countries providing cancer treatment to paediatric patients between March and December 2020. PARTICIPANTS: Patients were included if they were under the age of 18 years, and newly diagnosed with or undergoing active cancer treatment for Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, Wilms' tumour, sarcoma, retinoblastoma, gliomas, medulloblastomas or neuroblastomas, in keeping with the WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: All-cause mortality at 30 days and 90 days. RESULTS: 1660 patients were recruited. 219 children had changes to their treatment due to the pandemic. Patients in LMICs were primarily affected (n=182/219, 83.1%). Relative to patients with paediatric cancer in HICs, patients with paediatric cancer in LMICs had 12.1 (95% CI 2.93 to 50.3) and 7.9 (95% CI 3.2 to 19.7) times the odds of death at 30 days and 90 days, respectively, after presentation during the COVID-19 pandemic (p<0.001). After adjusting for confounders, patients with paediatric cancer in LMICs had 15.6 (95% CI 3.7 to 65.8) times the odds of death at 30 days (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected paediatric oncology service provision. It has disproportionately affected patients in LMICs, highlighting and compounding existing disparities in healthcare systems globally that need addressing urgently. However, many patients with paediatric cancer continued to receive their normal standard of care. This speaks to the adaptability and resilience of healthcare systems and healthcare workers globally