Morphological and physiological responses of some halophytes to salinity stress

A pot experiment was conducted to examine whether the morphological and physiological characteristics of some halophytes may be affected by salt stress. For this purpose, a factorial experiment based on randomized complete block design was carried out with three replications. The treatments were some halophytes (Salicornia europaea, Atriplex leucoclada, and Kochia scoparia) and salinity stress levels [Electrical conductivity 0 (Hoagland’s solution), Hoagland’s solution consisting of 100, 200, 300 and 500 mM NaCl]. Among the halophytes tested, Salicornia europaea had significantly higher shoot and root of dry matters compared to the other halophytes in all salt treatments. Salinity stress resulted in an increase in photosynthetic pigments up to 200 mM and thereafter, it decreased in all of the studied plants. Photosynthetic pigments, ranked in a descending order, were high in Kochia scoparia, Salicornia europaea, and Atriplex leucoclada. In addition, salinity stress led to an enhancement in malondialdehyde (MDA) and H2O2. The tolerance of Salicornia europaea under high salinity stress was associated with low MDA and H2O2 contents as well as high contents of photosynthetic pigments. The shoot and root Na+ increased considerably by augmenting the salinity levels in all halophytic plants; however, there was a significant difference among halophytes at higher salinity levels. The shoot K+ decreased by increasing the salinity levels, but K+ partitioning pattern varied among the halophytes. Under saline conditions, the shoot and root Na+/K+ ratio of all halophytes grew. The highest and the lowest of Na+ were observed in Salicornia europaea and Kochia scoparia, respectively. Thus, the Na+/K+ ratio could be considered as an indicator of salt evaluation. Nitrogen, protein content, dry matter digestibility (DMD), and metabolizable energy (ME) were high in Salicornia europaea plants in comparison to other plants at 200–500 mM salinity levels; in contrast, acid detergent fiber (ADF) and netural detergent fiber (NDF) were low. According to the results of this study, the tolerance of halophytes towards NaCl is possibly due to the differences in damage from reactive oxygen species (ROS), especially H2O2, and toxicity to metabolism Na+

SSHA: Video Violence Recognition and Localization Using a Semi-Supervised Hard Attention Model

Current human-based surveillance systems are prone to inadequate availability and reliability. Artificial intelligence-based solutions are compelling, considering their reliability and precision in the face of an increasing adaption of surveillance systems. Exceedingly efficient and precise machine learning models are required to effectively utilize the extensive volume of high-definition surveillance imagery. This study focuses on improving the accuracy of the methods and models used in automated surveillance systems to recognize and localize human violence in video footage. The proposed model uses an I3D backbone pretrained on the Kinetics dataset and has achieved state-of-the-art accuracy of 90.4% and 98.7% on RWF and Hockey datasets, respectively. The semi-supervised hard attention mechanism has enabled the proposed method to fully capture the available information in a high-resolution video by processing the necessary video regions in great detail.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 4 equations, 3 tables, 1 algorith

An Efficient Approach To Voltage Stability Evaluation Using Tellegen’s Equations

In this paper, the adjoint networks based on Tellegen’s Theorem are used to improve the PV curve assessment. PV curve is the most widely accepted method for determining the margin of the power system state to the voltage collapse point. The repetitive power flow and continuation power flow are used to access PV curves through tracing the power flow solutions for the change of loads. Since the Minimum Jacobi matrix eigenvalue is practically close to zero at neighbor voltage collapse point, there is a restriction in order to access the voltage stability level by repetitive power flow method. This problem solved by appropriate combination of adjoint networks based on Tellegen’s Theorem and conventional equations. The proposed method was tested on SWCC test system. Comparison of three method results show advantages and efficiency of the proposed method.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v3i2.196

Chest CT Scan or RT-PCR: Which One is Appropriate for Screening of COVID-19 among the Surgical Patients in the Preoperative Period? A Case Report

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is associated with high morbidity and mortality. It has been a significant impact on the surgical care of the patients. There is still no consensus on elective surgeries under time epochs with national partial control of the disease. The objective is to report the clinical course of the surgical patient who was eventually diagnosed with COVID-19 despite preoperative screening. A 69 years old woman was referred to the surgical ward for elective low anterior resection (LAR). The complete preoperative workup was performed with acceptable results. Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) of SARS-COV-2 was not performed because the patient was asymptomatic and the surgical procedure was scheduled during the time of country's partial pandemic control; the nadir of the curve in daily reported COVID-19 patients. Following the surgery, the patient’s clinical status was stable for about 8 hours; however, the patient became anuric and hypotensive, receiving a variety of treatments for a list of differential diagnosis, including fresh lung CT scan and RT-PCR test; both of the latter were positive for COVID-19. Despite COVID-19 management and respiratory support, the patient died on day 15 of hospitalization. It seems that postponing elective surgeries if possible and general screening with RT-PCR in situations where delay in surgeries is not possible, are rationale strategies for surgical management of the patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, even when daily situation of the pandemic seems stable