Effect of Spirulina supplementation and aerobic exercise on the level of cortisol and body composition in women with type 2 diabetes

Background: Changes in the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and obesity play an important role in the development of diabetes. Aim of this study was to investigate the effect of spirulina supplementation and aerobic exercise on serum cortisol level and body composition in women with high BMI type 2 diabetes.Methods: In this semi-experimental study, 28 women with type 2 diabetes and overweight with mean age of 48.4 ±7 and body mass index 29.7±3.33, were randomly assigned to aerobic training groups + spirulina, aerobic training + placebo, spirulina and placebo. The aerobic training program included six weeks and running with a severity of 60-72% of maximum heart rate. The recipient groups received three 500 mg capsules of spirulina daily for six weeks before each meal. Blood samples were collected for pre-test and post-test stages in order to study the variables studied in fasting conditions. Data analysis was performed using one-way ANOVA and t-test with a significant level (p≤0.05) and using SPSS software.Results: Serum levels of cortisol in the aerobic- Spirulina group (p=0.02), aerobic group (p=0.00), and spirulina group (p=0.02) showed a significant decrease from the pre-test to post-test. Also, there was a significant difference in the level of cortisol between aerobic-spirulina group and aerobic group compared to control group (P≤0.05). However, there was no difference between the groups (fat percentage, BMI, WHR) in body composition indicators (P>0.05).Conclusion: Results of Cortisol Measurement and body composition showed that aerobic training along with supplementation with spirulina has a positive effect on the cortisol reduction in women with type 2 diabetes and can therefore reduce stress and improve the health of patients with type 2 diabetes and overweight.Keywords: Aerobic Exercise; Spirulina; Cortisol; Body Combination; Type 2 Diabetes; Overweigh

Sun protection factor, total phenol, flavonoid contents and antioxidant activity of medicinal plants from Iran

Purpose: To evaluate the correlation between sun protection factor (SPF) and the content of phenol and flavonoid and antioxidant activity. Methods: Different parts of 9 medicinal plants were extracted with methanol using three extraction methods (percolation, Soxhlet and ultrasonically assisted extraction) to obtain 42 crude extracts. Their phenol and flavonoid contents, and antioxidant activities were determined using Folin-Ciocalteu reagent, aluminum chloride method and DPPH radical-scavenging activity, respectively. The SPF values were determined and correlated with the phenol and flavonoid contents as well as antioxidant activities. Results: The phenol and flavonoid contents, and antioxidant activities ranged from 54.16-688.97mg GAE/g, 13.38-146.60 mg QE/g and 9.5-1472.4 µg/mL, respectively while the SPFs were between 0.067 and 0.841. The highest SPF was related to Cucumis melo L. ultrasonically assisted leaf extract (0.841) and Artemisia absinthium L., aerial parts extracted with percolation method (0.717). A significant correlation was found between SPF and phenolic (p= 0.003) and flavonoid contents (p= 0.023). Conclusion: This study showed a correlation between SPF and phenolic and flavonoid contents. Ultrasonically assisted extract of C. melo leaf has suitable SPF and can be used in sun screen formulations

Efficient Large-Scale Visual Representation Learning

In this article, we present our approach to single-modality visual representation learning. Understanding visual representations of product content is vital for recommendations, search, and advertising applications in e-commerce. We detail and contrast techniques used to fine-tune large-scale visual representation learning models in an efficient manner under low-resource settings, including several pretrained backbone architectures, both in the convolutional neural network as well as the vision transformer family. We highlight the challenges for e-commerce applications at-scale and highlight the efforts to more efficiently train, evaluate, and serve visual representations. We present ablation studies evaluating the representation offline performance for several downstream tasks, including our visually similar ad recommendations. To this end, we present a novel text-to-image generative offline evaluation method for visually similar recommendation systems. Finally, we include online results from deployed machine learning systems in production at Etsy

Antileishmanial and antibacterial activities of biologically synthesized silver nanoparticles using Alcea rosea extract (AR-AgNPs)

Recent developments in nanotechnology lead to draw scientist's interest in green synthesis nanoparticles because of their importance in all fields of sciences. This paper is an overview of Ag nanoparticles biosynthesis (AgNPs) by aerial part of Alcea rosea extract. Synthesis procedures were described, with no stabilizers or surfactants. The synthesized AR@AgNPs were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), and UV-Vis analysis. The UV-Vis spectrum of AR@AgNPs shown a characteristic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) peak at 425 nm. Scanning electron microscope revealed spherical shaped with a diameter range of 10-30 nm. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analysis demonstrated the peak in silver region confirming presence of elemental silver. Evaluation of the antibacterial and antileishmanial activity of biosynthesized silver nanoparticles was performed. AR@AgNPs exhibit effective antibacterial activity against seven ATCC strains of bacteria and eight strains of drug-resistant bacteria. Also, their activity against leishmaniasis was studied on both promastigotes and amastigotes

adSformers: Personalization from Short-Term Sequences and Diversity of Representations in Etsy Ads

In this article, we present a general approach to personalizing ads through encoding and learning from variable-length sequences of recent user actions and diverse representations. To this end we introduce a three-component module called the adSformer diversifiable personalization module (ADPM) that learns a dynamic user representation. We illustrate the module's effectiveness and flexibility by personalizing the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Post-Click Conversion Rate (PCCVR) models used in sponsored search. The first component of the ADPM, the adSformer encoder, includes a novel adSformer block which learns the most salient sequence signals. ADPM's second component enriches the learned signal through visual, multimodal, and other pretrained representations. Lastly, the third ADPM "learned on the fly" component further diversifies the signal encoded in the dynamic user representation. The ADPM-personalized CTR and PCCVR models, henceforth referred to as adSformer CTR and adSformer PCCVR, outperform the CTR and PCCVR production baselines by $+2.66\%$ and $+2.42\%$, respectively, in offline Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (ROC-AUC). Following the robust online gains in A/B tests, Etsy Ads deployed the ADPM-personalized sponsored search system to $100\%$ of traffic as of February 2023

Quality of Life in Acromegaly Disease Among Iranian Population:One Longitudinal Before-After Study

Background: The current study aimed to determine the quality of life (QoL) scores before and after treatment in patients with acromegaly.Methods: In this longitudinal before-after study, the acromegaly quality of life (AcroQoL) questionnaire was used to assess the QoL. Demographics, clinical manifestations and co-morbidity data, pituitary axis involvement, biochemical and hormonal component tests, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) before and after treatment (endoscopic transsphenoidal surgery, medication, radiotherapy) were evaluated in patients over 18 years of age. To compare the mean of continuous data, the independent t and Mann–Whitney tests were used. To compare the mean QOL score before and after the study, the paired-t and Wilcoxon tests were performed. The significance level was set at p<0.05.Results: Among 80 patients with acromegaly who underwent trans-sphenoid surgery with or without radiotherapy or medication therapy with somatostatin analogs, 52 (65%) entered the remission phase within 6 months. Associations were found between the remission phase and female gender (p=0.004) and lower growth hormone (GH) (p=0.04) but not between remission and lower insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF1) after surgery (p=0.02) or gonadal axis disorder after treatment (p<0.001) statistically. Moreover, a significant association was found between not being in the remission phase and gonadal axis disorder before treatment (p=0.04). The QoL score in all dimensions of the AcroQoL questionnaire increased 6 months after treatment (p<0.001). Total AcroQoL score was higher after treatment in the remission group (p=0.03). The psychological scale had a significantly higher score both on the total scale (p<0.001) and on the two subscales of appearance (p<0.001) and personal relationship (p=0.003).Conclusion: Because of the importance of QoL in acromegaly patients, further studies in this field are recommended

Effects of thermal vacuum nitridation of Si(100) surface via NH3 exposure

Low temperature treatments to control the Si-interface properties become more and more relevant to the broad Si-based electronics and photonics technology when the back-end-of-line processing is developed and the integration of hybrid materials on the Si platform increases. In this work we have investigated effects of NH3 nitridation of three different Si surfaces in ultrahigh-vacuum (UHV) chamber at 400 °C: (i) nitridation of well-defined Si(100) (2 × 1)+(1 × 2) cleaned by the high-temperature flash heating, (ii) nitridation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)-cleaned H-terminated Si(100) with the final HF dip, and (iii) nitridation of the RCA-treated (without the final HF dip) Si(100) which includes so-called wet-chemical oxide of SiO2. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy measurements show that nitrogen incorporates into subsurface layers of clean Si and into the SiO2 chemical-oxide layer, when the materials are exposed to NH3 background in UHV chamber without a plasma source at 400 °C or even at room temperature. XPS results indicate that the nitridation does not remove oxygen from the SiO2 chemical oxide. The nitridation of SiO2 is also found to increase the density of electron levels at 3 to 4 eV above the Fermi level. Electrical measurements of atomic-layer deposited HfO2/Si(100) capacitors with and without the nitridation support that the method has potential to decrease amount of interface defects and to control interface properties.​​​​​​​</ul

Doxorubicin-induced renal inflammation in rats: Protective role of Plantago major

Objective: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the possible protective effect of Plantago major (P. major) extract against doxorubicin (DXR)-induced renal inflammation in rats. Materials and Methods: 80 male albino rats were randomly divided into 8 groups as follows: control, DXR, Ext (extract) 600, Ext1200, dexamethasone+DXR, vitamin E+DXR, Ext600+DXR, and Ext1200+DXR. Duration of the study was 35 days and DXR was intravenously injected on the 7th day of the experiment. Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) production and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) expression levels were assessed in the left kidney. Serum creatinine concentration and osmolarity were determined on the 1st, 14th, 21st, 28th and 35th days of the experiment. Results: DXR caused a significant increase in renal expression of MCP-1 and TNF-α production compared to control animals. Administration of dexamethasone, vitamin E and P. major extract significantly improved the expression of these inflammatory mediators compared to DXR group. Compared to day 1 in DXR group, serum osmolarity showed a significant increase on days 21, 28 and 35. Also, on these days, serum osmolarity in DXR group was significantly higher than that on the same days in control group. In Vit E+DXR and Ext 1200+DXR groups, there was no significant changes in serum osmolarity among different days of the study. However, in these groups, serum osmolarity on days 21, 28 and 35 showed a significant decrease compared to the same days in DXR group. Conclusion: Present results suggest that hydroethanolic extract of P. major protected renal tissue against DXR–induced renal inflammation

Mapping local patterns of childhood overweight and wasting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2017

A double burden of malnutrition occurs when individuals, household members or communities experience both undernutrition and overweight. Here, we show geospatial estimates of overweight and wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age in 105 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2017 and aggregate these to policy-relevant administrative units. Wasting decreased overall across LMICs between 2000 and 2017, from 8.4% (62.3 (55.1–70.8) million) to 6.4% (58.3 (47.6–70.7) million), but is predicted to remain above the World Health Organization’s Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025. Prevalence of overweight increased from 5.2% (30 (22.8–38.5) million) in 2000 to 6.0% (55.5 (44.8–67.9) million) children aged under 5 years in 2017. Areas most affected by double burden of malnutrition were located in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Our estimates provide a new perspective to researchers, policy makers and public health agencies in their efforts to address this global childhood syndemic