Analysis of Critical State Response in Thin Films by ac Susceptibility Measurements

Harmonic analysis of the temperature dependence of the nonlinear ac susceptibility of Nb thin film gives excellent agreement with the susceptibility calculated on basis of model of the hysteretic critical state in 2D disk.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, MT20 conference, accepted for IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercon

Hepatocarcinogenic potential of the glucocorticoid antagonist RU486 in B6C3F1 mice: effect on apoptosis, expression of oncogenes and the tumor suppressor gene p53

BACKGROUND: Glucocorticoids inhibit hepatocellular proliferation and modulate the expression of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes via mechanisms involving the glucocorticoid receptor. Glucocorticoids also produce a receptor-mediated inhibitory effect on both basal and hormone-stimulated expression of a newly discovered family of molecules important for shutting off cytokine action. We therefore hypothesized that inhibiting glucocorticoid receptors may disturb hepatocellular growth and apoptosis. Consequently, we investigated the effect of RU486, a potent antagonist of the glucocorticoid receptor, on basal levels of hepatocellular proliferation and apoptosis in male B6C3F1 mice. Furthermore, we evaluated the effect of this compound on cellular genes involved in the regulation of these important processes. RESULTS: Data show that treatment of male B6F3C1 mice with RU486 (2 mg/kg/d, ip) for 7 days dramatically inhibited liver cell proliferation by about 45% and programmed hepatocellular death by approximately 66%. RU 486 also significantly increased hepatic expression of the oncogenes mdm2 and JunB, while reducing that of the tumor suppressor gene p53. CONCLUSION: Exposure to RU486 may ultimately enhance the susceptibility of the liver to cancer risk by diminishing its ability to purge itself of pre-cancerous cells via apoptosis. This effect may be mediated through increases in the hepatic expression of the oncogene mdm2, coupled with decreases in that of the tumor suppressor gene p53. The decrease in hepatocellular proliferation caused by RU 486 may be related to effects other than its anti-glucocorticoid activity

Prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low risk pregnant women attending antenatal care clinic in tertiary hospital: a cross sectional study

Background: The current study aims to identify the prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low-risk pregnant women attending the antenatal care clinic of tertiary University Hospital and to detect the most common causative organisms.Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study conducted at a tertiary University Hospital in the period between 1st November 2017 and 31st June 2018. All eligible women attending the outpatient clinic for antenatal care were approached to participate in the study. The recruited women were assessed through detailed history and clinical examination. Urine samples were taken for culture and sensitivity within two hours, in order to avoid bacterial multiplication. Urine culture and antibiotic sensitivity test were done.Results: The study included 250 women. The mean age of included women was 25.89±5.49 (18-42 years). The urine analysis results showed that 32% of cases had pus cells >5 per high power field and 10.4% of cases have protein (+). Casts were present in 0.8% of cases. RBCs >5 per high power field were present in 4.8% of cases. ASB is defined as urine culture with more than 100,000 colony forming unit; this was present in 30 cases. This indicates that the prevalence of ASB among studied cases was 12%. Enterococcus was the most prevalent organism as it was present in 36.7% among positive cases. Antibiotic sensitivity test was performed to the growing organisms indicated that teicoplanin, imipenem, cefoxitin, cefotaxime + clavulanic acid, Entrapenem, and trimethoprim + sulfamethoxazole are the most effective antibiotics against the most common organisms causing asymptomatic bacteriuria.Conclusions: The prevalence of asymptomatic bacteriuria among low-risk pregnant women is about 12%. Urine culture for asymptomatic bacteriuria should be the standard of care for evaluation of pregnant patient during antenatal care as regard presence or absence of UTI

Can a biologically-plausible hierarchy e ectively replace face detection, alignment, and recognition pipelines?

The standard approach to unconstrained face recognition in natural photographs is via a detection, alignment, recognition pipeline. While that approach has achieved impressive results, there are several reasons to be dissatisfied with it, among them is its lack of biological plausibility. A recent theory of invariant recognition by feedforward hierarchical networks, like HMAX, other convolutional networks, or possibly the ventral stream, implies an alternative approach to unconstrained face recognition. This approach accomplishes detection and alignment implicitly by storing transformations of training images (called templates) rather than explicitly detecting and aligning faces at test time. Here we propose a particular locality-sensitive hashing based voting scheme which we call “consensus of collisions” and show that it can be used to approximate the full 3-layer hierarchy implied by the theory. The resulting end-to-end system for unconstrained face recognition operates on photographs of faces taken under natural conditions, e.g., Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), without aligning or cropping them, as is normally done. It achieves a drastic improvement in the state of the art on this end-to-end task, reaching the same level of performance as the best systems operating on aligned, closely cropped images (no outside training data). It also performs well on two newer datasets, similar to LFW, but more difficult: LFW-jittered (new here) and SUFR-W.This work was supported by the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), funded by NSF STC award CCF - 1231216

Comparative analysis of anisotropic material properties of uniaxial nematics formed by flexible dimers and rod-like monomers

We report temperature dependencies of material properties such as dielectric anisotropy, birefringence, splay (K₁₁), twist (K₂₂), and bend (K₃₃) elastic constants of the uniaxial nematic (N) phase formed by flexible dimers of DTC5C9 and compare their behavior to that of a corresponding monomer MCT5. DTC5C9 forms a twist-bend nematic (Ntb) at temperatures below the N phase. Anisotropic properties of MCT5 are typical of the rod-like mesogens. In particular, birefringence increases as the temperature is reduced, following the classic behavior, described by Haller. The elastic constants also follow the standard behavior, with their ratios being practically temperature-independent. In contrast, DTC5C9 shows a dramatic departure from the standard case. Birefringence changes non-monotonously with temperature, decreasing on approaching the N-Ntb phase transition. K₃₃ decreases strongly to 0.4 pN near the N - Ntb transition, although remains finite. The ratios of the elastic constants in DTC5C9 show a strong temperature dependence that can be associated with the bend-induced changes in the orientational distribution function. The measured elastic properties are consistent with the tendency of the dimeric molecules to adopt bent configurations that give rise to the Ntb phase

Tuning the Mechanical Behavior of Density-Graded Elastomeric Foam Structures via Interlayer Properties.

The concept of density-graded foams has been proposed to simultaneously enhance strain energy dissipation and the load-bearing capacities at a reduced structural weight. From a practical perspective, the fabrication of density-graded foams is often achieved by stacking different foam densities. Under such conditions, the adhesive interlayer significantly affects the mechanical performance and failure modes of the structure. This work investigates the role of different adhesive layers on the mechanical and energy absorption behaviors of graded flexible foams with distinct density layers. Three adhesive candidates with different chemical, physical, and mechanical characteristics are used to assemble density-graded polyurea foam structures. The mechanical load-bearing and energy absorption performances of the structures are evaluated under quasi-static and dynamic loading conditions. Mechanical tests are accompanied by digital image correlation (DIC) analyses to study the local strain fields developed in the vicinity of the interface. Experimental measurements are also supplemented by model predictions that reveal the interplay between the mechanical properties of an adhesive interlayer and the macroscale mechanical performance of the graded foam structures. The results obtained herein demonstrate that the deformation patterns and macroscale properties of graded foam composites can be tuned by selecting different bonding agents. It is also shown that the proper selection of an adhesive can be a practical way to address the strength-energy dissipation dichotomy in graded structures

K-product cordial labeling of fan graphs

Let f be a map from V (G) to {0, 1, ..., k − 1} where k is an integer, 1 ≤ k ≤ |V (G)|. For each edge uv assign the label f(u)f(v)(mod k). f is called a k-product cordial labeling if |vf (i) − vf (j)| ≤ 1, and |ef (i) − ef (j)| ≤ 1, i, j ∈ {0, 1, ..., k − 1}, where vf (x) and ef (x) denote the number of vertices and edges respectively labeled with x (x = 0, 1, ..., k − 1). In this paper we prove that fan Fn and double fan DFn when k=4 and 5 admit k-product cordial labeling.Publisher's Versio

Generalized β\beta-conformal change and special Finsler spaces

In this paper, we investigate the change of Finslr metrics $$L(x,y) \to\bar{L}(x,y) = f(e^{\sigma(x)}L(x,y),\beta(x,y)),$$ which we refer to as a generalized $\beta$-conformal change. Under this change, we study some special Finsler spaces, namely, quasi C-reducible, semi C-reducible, C-reducible, $C_2$-like, $S_3$-like and $S_4$-like Finsler spaces. We also obtain the transformation of the T-tensor under this change and study some interesting special cases. We then impose a certain condition on the generalized $\beta$-conformal change, which we call the b-condition, and investigate the geometric consequences of such condition. Finally, we give the conditions under which a generalized $\beta$-conformal change is projective and generalize some known results in the literature.Comment: References added, some modifications are performed, LateX file, 24 page

On Harmonious Labeling of Corona Graphs

A graph G with q edges is said to be harmonious, if there is an injection f from the vertices of G to the group of integers modulo q such that when each edge xy is assigned the label f(x)+f(y) (mod q), the resulting edge labels are distinct. In this paper, we study the existence of harmonious labeling for the corona graphs of a cycle and a graph G and for the corona graph of K2 and a tree