Wood ash and paper sludge: potential liming and nutrient source for crop production in podzolic soils

The Corner Brook Pulp and Paper Ltd (CBPPL) produces approximately 10,000 Mg of wood ash (WA) and 47,500 Mg of paper sludge (SL), annually, as waste byproducts. Among these wastes WA is landfilled as part of the disposal management program administered by the company whereas SL is burnt to generate steam for paper mill operations. This practice is not ideal due to high disposal costs and environmental concerns. In addition, WA and SL contains essential nutrients such as Ca, K and Mg that favors plant growth and could increase soil pH due to its calcium carbonate equivalent ability. One sustainable management practice is the land application of WA and SL to agricultural soil, increasing soil pH and enhancing crop growth and yield. Herein, we conducted greenhouse studies to evaluate the effect of WA and SL alone and in combination with biochar (BC) on growth, yield, nitrogen dynamics, and heavy metals mobility in the soil-plant system of annual ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.) and kale (Brassica oleracea L.). In study 1 soil with pH 5.7 and 2.7 % organic matter was used and in study 2, soil pH and organic matter were 5.2 and 4.5 % respectively. Results of the study 1 and 2 indicated that WA was effective in achieving the target soil pH of 6.3 and produced 71% and 42% more biomass than control in annual ryegrass, respectively. Similarly, WA application showed 28% and 27% higher yield than control in kale in both studies, respectively. BC addition significantly decreased 15 – 20 % Pb and Cd uptake in annual ryegrass and kale crops in both studies. Study results suggest that WA could be used as a liming and nutrient source and could be a substitute for limestone used in improving soil pH in agriculture production system. Furthermore, BC amendment with WA or SL could be a promising strategy in decreasing heavy metals uptake in agronomic and horticultural crops

Algorithmic as well as Space and Time comparison of various Deep Learning Algorithms

Deep learning is an artificial intelligence subfield within machine learning. Now- a-days, deep learning has been used in various applications like computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, social network filtering, neural machine translation, etc. Deep learning, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a set of deep neural networks mainly designed for image analysis. Deep learning strong ability is mainly due to multiple feature extraction. In this pa- per, we will discuss and compare AlexNet,VGGNet-16,Residual Network(ResNet-50,101,152)

Hydrogel on a Smart Nanomaterial Interface to Carry Therapeutics for Digitalized Glioma Treatment

Glioma is considered the primary brain tumor to cause brain illnesses, and it is difficult to treat and shows resistance to various routine therapeutics. The most common treatments to cure glioma are the surgical removal of tumors followed by adjuvant chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The latest biocompatible interfaces have been incorporated into therapeutic modalities such as the targeted delivery of drugs using hydrogels to treat and manage brain glioma. This review illustrates the applications of the multimodal hydrogel as the carrier of therapeutics, gene therapy, therapeutic tactics, and glioma devices. The scientific articles were retrieved from 2019 to 2022 on Google Scholar and the Scopus database and screened to determine whether they were suitable for review. The 20 articles that fit the study are summarized in this review. These studies indicated that the sizes of the hydrogel range from 28 nm to 500 nm. There are 16 out of 20 articles that also explain the post-surgical application of hydrogels, and 13 out of 20 articles are employed in 3D culture and other structural manifestations of hydrogels. The pros of the hydrogel include the quick formulation for a sufficient filling of irregular damage sites, solubilizing hydrophobic drugs, continuously slowing drug release, provision of a 3D cell growth environment, improving efficacy, targetability of soluble biomolecules, increasing patient compliance, and decreased side effects. The cons of the hydrogel include difficult real-time monitoring, genetic manipulations, the cumbersome synchronized release of components, and lack of safety data. The prospects of the hydrogel may include the development of electronic hydrogel sensors that can be used to enhance guidance for the precise targeting patterns using patient-specific pathological idiosyncrasies. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the precision medicine approaches that would aid in the early detection and management of solid brain tumors

Development of CAVLAB—A Control-Oriented MATLAB Based Simulator for an Underground Coal Gasification Process

The Cavity Simulation Model (CAVSIM) is a 3D, parameterisable simulator of the Underground Coal Gasification Process (UCG) that serves as a benchmark for UCG prediction. Despite yielding accurate outputs, CAVSIM has some limitations, which chiefly include inadequate graphical capabilities to visualise cavity geometry and gas production, time-ineffectiveness in terms of parametrisation, i.e., it involves editing, compiling multiple files and checking for errors, and lack of tools to synthesise a controller. Therefore, to compensate for these shortcomings, the services of third-party software, such as MATLAB, must be procured. CAVSIM was integrated with MATLAB to utilise its functionalities and toolboxes such as System Identification, Neural Network, and Optimization Toolbox etc. The integration was accomplished by designing C-mex files, and furthermore, the simulation results in both environments exhibit the same behaviour, demonstrating successful integration. Consequently, CAVSIM has also acquired a controllable structure, wherein parametrisation is now a single-click process; this is demonstrated by a case study outlining the implementation of Model Predictive Control (MPC) on a UCG plant. Moreover, the performance metrics, i.e., Mean Average Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.13, 0.23 for syngas heating value, and 0.012, 0.02 for flowrate quantitatively establishes the efficacy of CAVLAB in designing MPC for the UCG system. The novelty of this work lies in making the software package open-source with the aim of streamlining the research of multiple aspects of the UCG process

Reading Habits and Attitudes of Undergraduate Students: A Gender Based Comparative Study of Government Degree College (Boys) and Government Degree College for Women, Anantnag (J&K)

Reading habit is an essential and important aspect for crating the literate society in this world. It shapes the personality of an individual and it helps them to develop the proper thinking methods and creating new ideas.One of the main functions of library system at college level is to inculcate the reading habits among the students. Today\u27s students are the future citizens and also the nation builders of tomorrow. In present scenario, due to the influence of the social media and digital environment, students do not show much interest in reading the books, magazines and journals etc. The current study was carried out to investigate the disparity and dynamics of Reading Habits and Attitudes, also influence of social media on Reading Habits among the students of GDC (Boys) and GDC (Women). Based on the sample of 300 students, it was found that significant differences exist between the two groups of students in terms of types of reading material and reading resources used. Differences in reading habits and attitudes were also observed between male and female participants. The results clearly show that there is much disparity in reading habits and attitudes between the two genders. Social media and other digital media have greatly impacted the reading habits and Behaviour across the genders also

Enhanced Anticancer Response of Curcumin- and Piperine-Loaded Lignin-g-p (NIPAM-co-DMAEMA) Gold Nanogels against U-251 MG Glioblastoma Multiforme

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive and commonly diagnosed brain cancer and is highly resistant to routine chemotherapeutic drugs. The present study involves the synthesis of Lignin-g-p (NIPAM-co-DMAEMA) gold nanogel, loaded with curcumin and piperine, to treat GBM. The ongoing study has the application potential to (1) overcome the limitations of drugs biodistribution, (2) enhance the toxicity of anticancer drugs against GBM, and (3) identify the drugs uptake pathway. Atom transfer radical polymerization was used to synthesize the Lignin-g-PNIPAM network, crosslinked with the gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to self-assemble into nanogels. The size distribution and morphological analysis confirmed that the drug-loaded gold nanogels are spherical and exist in the size of 180 nm. The single and combinatorial toxicity effects of curcumin- and piperine-loaded Lignin-g-p (NIPAM-co-DMAEMA) gold nanogels were studied against U-251 MG GBM cells. A cytotoxicity analysis displayed anticancer properties. IC50 of curcumin- and piperine-loaded gold nanogels were recorded at 30 μM and 35 μM, respectively. Immunostaining and Western blot analysis confirmed the protein expression of caspase-3 and cleaved caspase-3 in cells treated with drug-loaded nanogels. Kinetic drug release revealed 86% release of hybrid curcumin–piperine from gold nanogel after 250 min at pH 4. Atomic absorption spectroscopic analysis confirmed that the drug-loaded nanogels have better internalization or association with the cancer cells than the GNPs or nano-gels alone. Morphological studies further confirmed that the curcumin and piperine nanogels penetrate the cells via endocytic pathways and induce caspase-3-related apoptosis. The experimental evidence shows the enhanced properties of combinatorial curcumin–piperine gold nanogels (IC50: 21 μM) to overcome the limitations of conventional chemotherapeutic treatments of glioma cells

The Concept of Change Management in Today’s Business World

Companies are most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business. The purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the concept of change management in today’s business world. Focus of the debate should be on existing literature. Keywords: Change management, Lewin’s change model, business world

Peristaltic transport of blood in terms of casson fluid model through a tube under impact of magnetic field for moderate reynolds number

The effect of moderate non-zero Reynolds number on the nonlinear peristaltic transport of a blood flow through narrow arteries, where blood flow behaves similarly as a Casson fluid under the externally applied uniform magnetic field is investigated numerically. The governing equations for blood flow model of Casson fluid are formulated to a system of nonlinear coupled partial differential equations, which are exposed to Galerkin’s finite element method. The assumptions of lubrication theory are neglected, due to which the effects of moderate Reynolds number and wave number along with other parameters are presented. To ensure the accuracy of developed code, obtained results are compared to that of available results in the literature and found in excellent agreement. The analysis shows that increasing Reynolds and Hartmann numbers enhance the velocity of the fluid. One of the findings of this study is the nonlinear behavior of pressure rise for large values of Reynolds and Hartmann numbers. Increasing wave number enhances the pressure rise in the peristaltic pumping region. The study also discussed to effect of Casson fluid parameter and time mean flow through graphs of velocity, pressure rise and contours of streamlines