Inhaled Insulin: Intrapulmonary or Intranasal?

Initial attempts delivered the insulin hormone intramuscularly, intravenously, and eventually subcutaneously. Other routes of administration of the drug were explored. These included oral, rectal, sublingual, buccal, transdermal, vaginal, intramuscular, intrapulmonary, and intranasal delivery systems. The purpose of these latter studies was to determine a noninjectable method to deliver insulin to patients with type 1 and 2 diabetes that would effectively lower blood sugar, control hemoglobin A1c (in much later studies), and allow patients a simpler, less invasive, and more direct control oftheir underlying disease process.  In January 2006 the United States Food and Drug Administration approved Exubera (Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, New York, NY) as the first pulmonary inhaled insulin. In actuality attempts to explore various methods to deliver insulin using intrapulmonary delivery had occurred since1925. &#xb

IDENTIFICATION OF ANTIBACTERIAL PROPERTY OF DIFFERENT MEDICINAL PLANT EXTRACTS

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the antibacterial activity of some plant extracts they are-Curcuma longa, Cinnamomum tamala, Ocimum tenuiflorum, Azadirachta indica, Datura stramonium, Zingiber officinale, Punica granatum and Cinnamomum cassia against Staphylococcus aureus and E. coli. Methods: The evaluation of antibacterial activity for different extracts of each plant was carried out by using the disc diffusion method and by pouring technique to determine the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). Results: In the disc diffusion method the plant extracts showed zone of inhibition ranging 02.0 to 16.0 mm against bacteria and In pouring technique plant extracts showed positive control against pure culture of a bacterium and their efficiency in terms of MICs where ranged from 0.2 gm/ml to 0.8 gm/ml. The extracts of Curcuma longa and Cinnamomum tamala shown high efficiency then other plant extracts in terms of zone of inhibition and also in pouring technique less amount of extracts was inhibited the growth of bacteria. Conclusion: This study indicates that extracts of these plants have antibacterial activity against bacteria. This report supports their use in the treatment of infections caused by bacteria

Revisiting the statistical estimation of activation parameters in incipient plasticity

Incipient plasticity is typically associated with thermally activated events like the nucleation of dislocations in crystalline solids and the activation of shear transformation zones in metallic glasses. A method of estimating the activation parameters of such mechanisms is to analyze the statistical distribution of critical loads obtained through a series of repeated measurements. However, this approach has been observed to produce activation volumes of the order of atomic volumes in a variety of materials and experimental setups. Such exceptionally small activation volumes have been explained by conjecturing a non-trivial mechanism of nucleation. Here, we critically analyze the inherent assumptions of the statistical method and show that unexpected activation volumes can emerge simply from the statistical fluctuations in the activation parameters themselves. To this end, we perform repeated deformation simulations of iron nanopillars under both tensile and compressive loading and measure the resulting yield stresses. Although the conventional statistical analysis exhibits extremely small atomic volumes, the atomistic simulations indicate a transition pathway that is physically incommensurate with the statistical result. Using a simple Monte Carlo scheme and analytical consideration, we show that even a relatively small dispersion in activation parameters can misleadingly suppress the measured activation volume to a significant extent. This shows that the ultra-small atomic volumes reported in the earlier studies do not need exotic mechanisms but can be explained simply as the misleading result obtained by ignoring the physically plausible reality of statistical dispersion of activation parameters.Comment: 6 figure

Achieving Starvation-Freedom with Greater Concurrency in Multi-Version Object-based Transactional Memory Systems

To utilize the multi-core processors properly concurrent programming is needed. Concurrency control is the main challenge while designing a correct and efficient concurrent program. Software Transactional Memory Systems (STMs) provides ease of multithreading to the programmer without worrying about concurrency issues such as deadlock, livelock, priority inversion, etc. Most of the STMs works on read-write operations known as RWSTMs. Some STMs work at high-level operations and ensure greater concurrency than RWSTMs. Such STMs are known as Object-Based STMs (OSTMs). The transactions of OSTMs can return commit or abort. Aborted OSTMs transactions retry. But in the current setting of OSTMs, transactions may starve. So, we proposed a Starvation-Free OSTM (SF-OSTM) which ensures starvation-freedom in object based STM systems while satisfying the correctness criteria as co-opacity. Databases, RWSTMs and OSTMs say that maintaining multiple versions corresponding to each key of transaction reduces the number of aborts and improves the throughput. So, to achieve greater concurrency, we proposed Starvation-Free Multi-Version OSTM (SF-MVOSTM) which ensures starvation-freedom while storing multiple versions corresponding to each key and satisfies the correctness criteria such as local opacity. To show the performance benefits, We implemented three variants of SF-MVOSTM (SF-MVOSTM, SF-MVOSTM-GC and SF-KOSTM) and compared it with state-of-the-art STMs.Comment: 68 pages, 24 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1709.0103

Efficient Concurrent Execution of Smart Contracts in Blockchains using Object-based Transactional Memory

This paper proposes an efficient framework to execute Smart Contract Transactions (SCTs) concurrently based on object semantics, using optimistic Single-Version Object-based Software Transactional Memory Systems (SVOSTMs) and Multi-Version OSTMs (MVOSTMs). In our framework, a multi-threaded miner constructs a Block Graph (BG), capturing the object-conflicts relations between SCTs, and stores it in the block. Later, validators re-execute the same SCTs concurrently and deterministically relying on this BG. A malicious miner can modify the BG to harm the blockchain, e.g., to cause double-spending. To identify malicious miners, we propose Smart Multi-threaded Validator (SMV). Experimental analysis shows that the proposed multi-threaded miner and validator achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art SCT execution framework.Comment: 49 pages, 26 figures, 11 table

GENERALIZATION OF CERTAIN RESULTS ON PROJECTIVE MOTION IN A FINSLER SPACE

Abstract: The paper contains a study of an infinitesimal projective motion in a Finsler space Fn(n > 2), which leaves invariant the skew- symmetric part of the covariantderivative of projective deviation tensor and it is proved that either the Finsler space Fn(n > 2) admitting such projective motion is a space of scalar curvature or the infinitesimal projective motion is necessarily an affine motion. It is established that an infinitesimal projective motion in a projectively flat as well as in a non- Riemannian symmetric Finsler space of dimension greater than 2, is necessarily anaffine motion while a symmetric Finsler space Fn(n > 2) admitting a non- affine projective motion is a Riemannian space of constant Riemannian curvature. An infinitesimal projective motion in a Finsler space Fn(n > 2) of recurrent projective deviation tensor is an affine motion if the projective motion leaves invariant the recurrence vector of the space. It is further proved that such result also holds in case of projective recurrent and recurrent Finsler space of dimension greater than 2

Evaluation of perinatal outcome in high-risk pregnancy at tertiary care centre

Background: A high risk pregnancy is one in which mother, fetus or neonate is at increased risk of morbidity or mortality before or after delivery. Hence a relatively small percentage of high risk obstetric population gives rise to a disproportionately high percentage of perinatal and maternal morbidity and mortality. The perinatal outcome can be changed significantly by early detection and special intensive care to high risk pregnancies. Hence Identification of women at risk for these complicated pregnancies with poor outcome is fundamental to antenatal check-up.Methods: 86 high risk antenatal patients attending the outpatient department and labour room were recruited after informed consent.70 normal pregnancy was taken as control group. Perinatal outcomes were compared between high risk and normal pregnancies.Results: Adverse perinatal outcomes were more in high risk pregnancies as compared to normal pregnancies.Conclusions: This study emphasizes on pregnancy related complication leading to adverse perinatal outcome so evaluating patients for high risk factors, early diagnosis, proper antenatal care, prompt treatment, regular follow up, and timely management thus can improve maternal and perinatal outcome

Optimal Resilience in Systems That Mix Shared Memory and Message Passing

We investigate the minimal number of failures that can partition a system where processes communicate both through shared memory and by message passing. We prove that this number precisely captures the resilience that can be achieved by algorithms that implement a variety of shared objects, like registers and atomic snapshots, and solve common tasks, like randomized consensus, approximate agreement and renaming. This has implications for the m&m-model of [Aguilera et al., 2018] and for the hybrid, cluster-based model of [Damien Imbs and Michel Raynal, 2013; Michel Raynal and Jiannong Cao, 2019]