A Web-Based Nutrition Education Intervention for Asian Indian Fathers in Florida

Research has shown that fathers, like mothers, are an important influence for forming children’s dietary and physical activity habits. Fathers’ nutrition knowledge, attitudes and child feeding practices impact children’s eating behavior and future weight status. Yet very few interventions have focused on targeting fathers for childhood obesity prevention by improving their knowledge and confidence in establishing healthy eating patterns in children. The limited studies existing in this area have focused on other ethnicities and data is missing on Asian Indians, the third largest immigrant Asian group in the United States. Asian Indian children are at equal risk for developing obesity in the United States due to dietary acculturation and consumption of diet rich in fat, sodium and sugar. There is a novel need to understand the efficacy of involving Asian Indian (AI) fathers in nutrition education interventions focused on improving their nutrition related knowledge, and its efficacy on bringing positive behavior changes for both fathers and children. The aim of this study was to examine the feasibility of a social cognitive theory-based online nutrition education program with Facebook and text message support to improve the knowledge, attitudes and child feeding practices of AI fathers along with social cognitive theory related mediators. In this pilot, quasi -experimental study without randomization, 98 fathers were involved in a 6 week web program focused on healthy eating and physical activity. 75 fathers completed both the post program and follow up questionnaires (12 weeks from baseline). Results of this study indicated a significant improvement in AI fathers’ nutrition knowledge, self-efficacy, self-regulation, overall diet quality, physical activity and a reduction in restrictive feeding practices. Improvements were also noted in previous day reported child fruit and vegetable intake, physical activity minutes and a reduction in total fat consumed/day. These findings demonstrate the preliminary efficacy of a web-based intervention to improve determinants of behavior change (knowledge and self-efficacy) of AI fathers and healthy eating and physical activity behaviors in both AI fathers and their children. Future studies should consider the role of diverse groups of AI fathers in childhood obesity prevention

4,8,9,10-Tetra­kis(4-fluoro­phen­yl)-1,3-diaza­tricyclo­[3.3.1.1]decan-6-one

In the title compound, C32H24F4N2O, all four six-membered rings that constitute the diaza­adamantanone cage adopt chair conformations. Two of the four fluoro­phenyl substituents occupy axial positions and the other two occupy equatorial positions relative to their respective C5N rings of the adamantane framework. The crystal structure is stabilized by C—H⋯O inter­actions, generating a C(5) chain along the a axis

Electronic structure of NiS_{1-x}Se_x

We investigate the electronic structure of the metallic NiS$_{1-x}$Se$_x$ system using various electron spectroscopic techniques. The band structure results do not describe the details of the spectral features in the experimental spectrum, even for this paramagnetic metallic phase. However, a parameterized many-body multi-band model is found to be successful in describing the Ni~2$p$ core level and valence band, within the same model. The asymmetric line shape as well as the weak intensity feature in the Ni~2$p$ core level spectrum has been ascribed to extrinsic loss processes in the system. The presence of satellite features in the valence band spectrum shows the existence of the lower Hubbard band, deep inside the $pd$ metallic regime, consistent with the predictions of the dynamical mean field theory.Comment: To be published in Physical Review B, 18 pages and 5 figure

Isolation and identification of Candida Species in Patients with Vulvovaginal Candidiasis

Abnormal vaginal discharge is one of the frequent complaints of women of reproductive age group. This study was carried out to determine the prevalence of vulvovaginal candidiasis(VVC) among the patients attending the tertiary care hospital with complaints of suggestive of vaginitis. This study was done in a tertiary care hospital, Chennai for a period of 1 year from January 2017 to December 2017. The study included 160 women of the age group 15 - 65 years with complaints suggestive of vaginitis. High vaginal swabs were taken and subjected to direct microscopy, cultured onto Sabouraud Dextrose Agar (SDA) and Hichrome Candida differential agar. Candida species were determined by standard microbiological methods and the results were confirmed by automated VITEK2 compact. Candida species were isolated from 56 patients which included C.albicans (25), C.tropicalis (20), C.glabrata (6), C.parapsilosis(4), C.krusei(1). Our study shows higher prevalence of non albicans Candida causing VVC. Hence, we recommend that the investigations up to species identification of Candida may be routinely followed in the microbiology laboratories

Theoretical investigation of the spin reorientation transition in epitaxial films of NiO

We study theoretically the spin reorientation transition in thin epitaxial films of NiO grown on Ag and MgO. Experimentally, the Ni spins point out‐of‐plane for films grown on the MgO substrate and in‐plane for those on the Ag substrate. We successfully explain these opposite trends in the ground state moments for the two cases and simulate the isotropic x‐ray absorption spectrum (XAS) for bulk NiO, in good agreement with experiments, on the basis of cluster configuration interaction calculations based on a NiO₆ cluster

Electronic structure of and covalency driven metal-insulator transition in BaCo<SUB>1−x</SUB>Ni<SUB>x</SUB>S<SUB>2</SUB>

We investigate the evolution of the electronic structure across the metal-to-insulator transition in the isostructural series, BaCo1&#8722;xNixS2, using electron spectroscopic studies. Our experimental results show a progressive depletion of the spectral intensity at and near the Fermi level across the series, with decreasing x. Analysis of the core-level and valence-band photoemission spectra in conjunction with detailed many-body calculations show that the ground state of the system is highly covalent. We estimate the electronic structure parameters of the system and deduce that the hopping interaction strength tpd decreases in the solid solution with a decrease of the Ni content, while Udd and &#916; do not change appreciably. Thus, the metal-to-insulator transition in this system is found to be driven primarily by covalency effects, though the static disorder in the system is expected to play an important role in determining the details of physical properties

Semantic Segmentation of Cerebellum in 2D Fetal Ultrasound Brain Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Cerebellum measurements of routinely acquired ultrasound (US) images are commonly used to estimate gestational age and to assess structural abnormalities of the developing central nervous system. Investigating associations between the developing cerebellum and neurodevelopmental outcomes post partum requires standardized cerebellum measurements from large clinical datasets. Such investigations have the potential to identify structural changes that can be used as biomarkers to predict growth and neurodevelopmental outcomes. For this purpose, high throughput, accurate, and unbiased measurements are necessary to replace existing manual, semi-automatic, and automated approaches which are tedious and lack reproducibility and accuracy. In this study, we propose a new deep learning algorithm for automated segmentation of the fetal cerebellum from 2-dimensional (2D) US images. We propose ResU-Net-c a semantic segmentation model optimized for fetal cerebellum structure. We leverage U-Net as a base model with the integration of residual blocks (Res) and introduce dilation convolution in the last two layers to segment the cerebellum (c) from noisy US images. Our experiments used a 5-fold cross-validation with 588 images for training and 146 for testing. Our ResU-Net-c achieved a mean Dice Score Coefficient, Hausdorff Distance, Recall, and Precision of 87.00&#x0025;, 28.15, 86.00&#x0025;, and 90.00&#x0025;, respectively. The superiority of the proposed method over the other U-Net based methods is statistically significant (p &#x003C; 0.001). Our proposed method can be leveraged to enable high throughput image analysis in clinical research fetal US images and can be employed in the biometric assessment in fetal US images on a larger scale

High temperature ferromagnetism in single crystalline dilute Fe-doped Ba Ti O₃

We report the observation of room temperature ferromagnetism in high quality, single crystalline dilute Fe-doped Ba Ti O3. The large equilibrium solubility of Fe ions in the matrix refutes uncertainties about secondary phase magnetism, which has often eclipsed this interesting field of research. While room temperature ferromagnetism is observed at and above 5% Fe concentrations, one finds a highly concave temperature dependence of the susceptibility. Using detailed ab initio calculation, this has been related to intrinsic magnetic inhomogeneities arising from positional disorder. Apart from providing a mechanism for the observed high temperature ferromagnetism, our results point out that intrinsic disorder is a generic and essential component of dilute magnetism

Proteomic Profiling of β‑hCG-Induced Spheres in BRCA1 Defective Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cells

Previously, we identified that β-hCG is expressed by BRCA1 mutated but not wild type breast cancers <i>in vitro</i>/<i>in vivo</i> and exhibited a novel event in β-hCG overexpressing BRCA1 mutated HCC1937 cells where the cells were able to form spheres (HCC1937 β spheres) in adherent cell culture plates even in the absence of any growth factors. These spheres express stem cell and EMT markers. In the present study, we carried out the total proteomic profiling of these HCC1937 β spheres obtained from BRCA1 defective β-hCG expressing stable breast cancer cells to analyze the cell signaling pathways that are active in these cells. Functional annotation revealed proteins (164 cellular and 97 secretory) predominantly involved in oxygen binding, nucleosome assembly, cytoskeleton organization, protein folding, etc. Many of the proteins identified from HCC1937 β spheres in this study are also up regulated in breast cancers, which are directly linked with poor prognosis in human cancer samples as analyzed using TCGA data set. Survival analysis shows that β-hCG expressing cancer patients are linked with poor survival rate. Interestingly, hemoglobins were identified at both cellular and secretory level in HCC1937 β spheres and experiments after treating with ROS inducers revealed that β-hCG induces hemoglobin and protects the cancer cells during oxidative stress. Our proteomic data strongly propose β-hCG as an oncogenic molecule associated with BRCA1 mutation, and hence, targeting β-hCG could be a strategy to treat BRCA1 defective breast cancers