<strong>Antibacterial effects of Arctium lappa and Artemesia absinthium extracts in laboratory conditions</strong>

Introduction: Arctium lappa (Great burduck) and Artemesia absinthium are medicinal plants that some of their antibacterial and antivirus properties have been suggested in nutritional industries. The objective of this research was to study the effects of A. lappa and A. absinthium on some microorganisms including Pseudomonads aeraginosa, Haemophilus influenza, Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus cereus, Klebsiella pneumonia and Staphylococcus aureus. Methods: Extracts were prepared by maceration method and tested on Mueller Hinton agar medium based on disc diffusion method. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) were determined by micro-dilution method. Antibiotic disks used for controlling and standardizing the examination. Results: The extracts of A. lappa and A. absinthium had significant effect on S. aureus. The MIC and MBC concentrations of the extract of A. lappa on B. subtilis were respectively 600 and 750 mg/ml. Also, these values were 230 and 540 mg/ml for H. influenza. Extract of A. absinthium showed more inhibitory effect on B. subtilis. All extracts showed inhibitory effect on B. cereus. The extracts of A. lappa and A. absinthium had inhibitory effects on H. influenza and P. aeraginosa. Among antibiotics, only Ofloxacin and Ciprofloxacin had effects on H. influenza. Extract of A. lappa showed flimsy effect on K. pneumonia, while extract of A. absinthium had no effect on this bacterium. Conclusion: Due to the effects of A. lappa and A. absinthium on some bacteria, they might be good substitutes for synthetic substances

Nonintrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) Using a Deep Learning Model with a Transformer-Based Attention Mechanism and Temporal Pooling

Nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM) is an important technique for energy management and conservation. In this paper, a deep learning model based on an attention mechanism, temporal pooling, residual connections, and transformers is proposed. This article presents a novel approach for NILM to accurately discern energy consumption patterns of individual household appliances. The proposed method entails a sequence of layers, including encoders, transformers, attention, temporal pooling, and residual connections, offering a comprehensive solution for NILM while effectively capturing appliance-specific energy usage in a household. The proposed model was evaluated using UK-DALE, REDD, and REFIT datasets in both seen and unseen cases. It shows that the proposed model in this paper performs better than other methods stated in other papers in terms of F1-score and total error of the results (in terms of SAE). This model achieved an F1-score equal to 92.96 as well as a total SAE equal to −0.036, which shows its effectiveness in accurately diagnosing and estimating the energy consumption of individual home appliances. The findings of this research show that the proposed model can be a tool for energy management in residential and commercial buildings

Kinetin (N6-furfuryladenine): Cytotoxicity against MCF-7 breast cancer cell line and interaction with bovine serum albumin

N6-furfuryladenine (kinetin) is a cytokinin growth factor with several biological effects observed in human cells and fruit flies. Kinetin exists naturally in the DNA of almost all organisms tested so far, including human cells and various plants. The cytotoxicity effect of kinetin on MCF-7 breast cancer cell lines was measured by the sulforhodamine B (SRB) assay and the results showed that kinetin could inhibit cell growth in a dose-dependent manner with an IC50 value of 52 μmol/L at 96 h after the drug was added into the culture. The interaction of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with kinetin was studied in aqueous solution at physiological conditions, using constant protein concentration and various drug contents. UV-vis spectroscopic method was used to determine kinetin binding mode, the binding constant and the effects of kinetin complexation on protein structure. The spectroscopic results showed that kinetin is located along the polypeptide chains with overall affinity constant of KKinetin-BSA = 6.8 x 104 M-1.Key words: N6-furfuryladenine (kinetin), MCF-7, cytotoxicity, sulforhodamine B (SRB), bovine serum albumin (BSA)

Double‐spirals offer the development of pre‐programmable modular metastructures

Metamaterials with adjustable, sometimes unusual properties offer advantages over conventional materials with predefined mechanical properties in many technological applications. A group of metamaterials, called modular metamaterials or metastructures, are developed through the arrangement of multiple, mostly similar building blocks. These modular structures can be assembled using prefabricated modules and reconfigured to promote efficiency and functionality. Here, we developed a novel modular metastructure by taking advantage of the high compliance of pre-programmable double-spirals. First, we simulated the mechanical behavior of a four-module metastructure under tension, compression, rotation, and sliding using the finite-element method. Then, we used 3D printing and mechanical testing to illustrate the tunable anisotropic and asymmetric behavior of spiral-based metastructures in practice. Our results show the simple reconfiguration of the presented metastructure toward the desired functions. The mechanical behavior of single double-spirals and the characteristics that can be achieved through their combinations make our modular metastructure suitable for various applications in robotics, aerospace, and medical engineering