Online Grocery Operations in Omni-channel Retailing:Opportunities and Challenges

Online grocery has grown rapidly in different parts of the world over the last two decades. However, it is still not clear whether online grocery retailing can be profitable in the long run. Grocery retail is a low margin, high-cost business. Picking and delivering an online grocery order is labor intensive and costly. The delivery fee typically does not cover all the fulfilment costs. Many grocery retailers are making substantial investments to develop an online sales channel next to the traditional stores. With the emergence of omnichannel grocery retail, customers are provided with a seamless experience across online and offline channels. There are many synergies that exist between online and offline distribution, which if utilized properly can lead to significant cost savings to the retailer

Giant Ringlike Radio Structures Around Galaxy Cluster Abell 3376

In the current paradigm of cold dark matter cosmology, large-scale structures are assembling through hierarchical clustering of matter. In this process, an important role is played by megaparsec (Mpc)-scale cosmic shock waves, arising in gravity-driven supersonic flows of intergalactic matter onto dark matter-dominated collapsing structures such as pancakes, filaments, and clusters of galaxies. Here, we report Very Large Array telescope observations of giant (~2 Mpc by 1.6 Mpc), ring-shaped nonthermal radio-emitting structures, found at the outskirts of the rich cluster of galaxies Abell 3376. These structures may trace the elusive shock waves of cosmological large-scale matter flows, which are energetic enough to power them. These radio sources may also be the acceleration sites where magnetic shocks are possibly boosting cosmic-ray particles with energies of up to 10^18 to 10^19 electron volts.Comment: Published on Science, 3 November 2006. Main paper and Supporting Online Materia

Exploring the role of phytochemicals as biopharmaceuticals targeting Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) virus: an Overview

ALI (Acute lung injury) and its more fatal form ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) together represent a broad spectrum of lung diseases, which are characterized by the abrupt onset of pulmonary inflammation with fluid filled alveoli resulting in hypoxia. With the advancement of several diagnostic tools, especially discovery of multiplex RT-PCR, increased the chance to investigate the involvement of different respiratory viruses in causing ARDS. There are several different viruses responsible for ARDS and among them few are capable of causing pandemic. Influenza viruses such as H5N1 and H1N1 causing pandemic in 2009. Also among different corona viruses, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and most recently a novel betacoronavirus strain, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have been identified. Till date, the therapy against virus induced ARDS has not been optimized. Naturally existing phytochemicals and plant biotechnology could offer prospective solutions for the treatment against virus induced ARDS by developing inhibitors, low-cost vaccines and antibodies, which could not only be useful for treatment but could also be used for diagnosis. In this present COVID-19 pandemic, use of plant based therapeutic approach has already been adopted by several pharma companies to treat ARDS and there are several molecules currently under clinical trials with encouraging results. This review provides detailed outlook on ARDS pandemic causing viruses, pathophysiology of viruses and role of phytochemicals and plantibodies as anti-viral agent. Further, it summarizes list of phytochemicals and their mode of action in these pathogenic viruses

Physics-Based Models, Sensitivity Analysis, and Optimization of Automotive Batteries

Replicated with permission by SAE Copyright © 2017 SAE International. Further distribution of this material is not permitted without prior permission from SAE.The analysis of nickel metal hydride (Ni-MH) battery performance is very important for automotive researchers and manufacturers. The performance of a battery can be described as a direct consequence of various chemical and physical phenomena taking place inside the container. In this paper, a physics-based model of a Ni-MH battery will be presented. To analyze its performance, the efficiency of the battery is chosen as the performance measure, which is defined as the ratio of the energy output from the battery and the energy input to the battery while charging. Parametric sensitivity analysis will be used to generate sensitivity information for the state variables of the model. The generated information will be used to showcase how sensitivity information can be used to identify unique model behavior and how it can be used to optimize the capacity of the battery. The results will be validated using a finite difference formulation.Financial support for this work has been provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Toyota, and Maplesoft

Leishmania Donovani Cell Surface Sialoglycans Regulate Susceptibility for Siglec Mediated Macrophage Invasion and Parasite Survival

Glycoconjugates play a pivotal role in the survival of Leishmania parasites in destructive surroundings. An important constituent present on many glycoconjugates is sialic acid. By virtue of their peripheral position on oligosaccharide chains of glycoconjugates, sialic acids are well suited as molecular determinants of specific biological processes, including the interaction of pathogenic microorganisms with sialylated cellular receptors. Differences in a2,3- and a2,6-sialoglycan patterns detected in clonal virulent Leishmania donovani promastigotes, correlated with the level of a2,3- and a2,6-sialyltransferase activity present in these parasites. The role of macrophage sialic acid-receptors in uptake and survival of L.donovani was studied in the murine macrophage cell line raw 264.7. Macrophage invasion was dependent on the binding to Siglec-1, while suppression of MAPK signaling was mediated through Siglec-5. Sialic acid removal by neuraminidase treatment reduced parasite infectivity. The presence of trypsin resistant sialic acid residues in the neuraminidase treated parasites grown in a serum free medium in presence of sialoglycoconjugates indicated that the parasites could salvage sialic acid from exogenous sialoglycans and reutilize it for de novo glycoprotein sialylation in L.donovani parasites. Thus, our results demonstrate the involvement of sialoglycans in the invasion as well as the survival process of L.donovani parasites

Impact of the non-biodegradable plastics and role of microbes in biotic degradation

Plastic is a group of elastic organic compounds whose definition has radically changed from being a large family of useful polymers to an indispensable part of life.  We might say we are residing in the “era of plasticene”. If we simply pause and look around, we would realize that a majority of things in our daily life comprise plastic polymers.  Currently, the international production of these polymers has spiked to around 300 million metric tons annually. Surprisingly about 50 percent of the products are discarded within a year of fabrication.  Once discarded ‘outside’ they end up ‘somewhere’ and start exerting their disruptive consequences.  Despite its enormous utility, it is now being increasingly known that these polymers are surely not without their downsides.  Several steps are taken and even more, are being investigated so the mayhem of plastic doesn't prove for a "no pilot in cockpit" situation. Here we have conducted a review work of the available literature on various biological entities that can utilize plastic while at the same time focusing our attempts to assemble information regarding the probable enzymes that do it.  We have also provided a report on the effect of different plastics on the ecosystem and the various management alternatives out there

Holography of information in de Sitter space

We study the natural norm on the space of solutions to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime. We propose that the norm is obtained by integrating the squared wavefunctional over field configurations and dividing by the volume of the diff-and-Weyl group. We impose appropriate gauge conditions to fix the diff-and-Weyl redundancy and obtain a finite expression for the norm using the Faddeev-Popov procedure. This leads to a ghost action that has zero modes corresponding to a residual conformal subgroup of the diff-and-Weyl group. By keeping track of these zero modes, we show that Higuchi's norm for group-averaged states emerges from our prescription in the nongravitational limit. We apply our formalism to cosmological correlators and propose that they should be understood as gauge-fixed observables. We identify the symmetries of these observables. In a nongravitational theory, it is necessary to specify such correlators everywhere on a Cauchy slice to identify a state in the Hilbert space. In a theory of quantum gravity, we demonstrate a version of the principle of holography of information: cosmological correlators in an arbitrarily small region suffice to completely specify the state.Comment: 44 page

The Hilbert space of de Sitter quantum gravity

We obtain solutions of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation with positive cosmological constant for a closed universe in the large-volume limit. We argue that this space of solutions provides a complete basis for the Hilbert space of quantum gravity in an asymptotically de Sitter spacetime. Our solutions take the form of a universal phase factor multiplied by distinct diffeomorphism invariant functionals, with simple Weyl transformation properties, that obey the same Ward identities as a CFT partition function. The Euclidean vacuum corresponds to a specific choice of such a functional but other choices are equally valid. Each functional can be thought of as specifying a "theory" and, in this sense, the space of solutions is like "theory space". We describe another basis for the Hilbert space where all states are represented as excitations of the vacuum that have a specific constrained structure. This gives the finite $G_N$ generalization of the basis proposed by Higuchi in terms of group averaging, which we recover in the nongravitational limit.Comment: 47 page

Shared Capacity Routing Problem – An Omni-channel Retail Study

More and more retailers allow customers to order goods online and then pick them up in a store. In this setting, these orders are typically served from a dedicated warehouse. This often means that the stores are visited by different vehicles to replenish the store inventory and to supply the pick-up points. Motivated by a collaboration with an omni- channel grocery retailer in the Netherlands, we study how to best share capacity between the routes associated with these different sales cha