Informatics for Nanomaterials Discovery and Design

CoSMIC (Combinatorial Sciences and Materials Informatics Collaboratory- http://cosmic.mse.iastate.edu) is an international collaborative research program focused on data driven discovery in materials science. Its central research theme is to develop new computational and experimental ways of accelerated mechanistic based discovery and design of materials using informatics methods. In this presentation, we describe activities of this center that are focused specifically in the field of nanosciences. Examples of our research activities include research in how informatics can be used to elucidate nanoscale mechanisms in materials, develop a rational design strategy for new nanomaterials, and enhance the quantitative analysis of spectral and imaging data at the nanoscale. Applications of the research include discovering new nanocluster chemistries of materials, extracting pico-scale information from high resolution imaging and other characterization techniques, and integrating nanomaterials data curation with informatics. Keeping with the pervasive theme of this meeting in the fields of health and environmental issues related to nanotechnology as well as nanomanufacturing, we shall highlight CoSMIC’s work in using informatics to advancing critical materials problems in these fields. CoSMIC also serves as an education portal specifically for introducing informatics concepts in the field of materials science as well as training and research workshop activities around the world

What Determines Firm Size?

Motivated by theories of the firm, which we classify as technological' or organizational,' we analyze the determinants of firm size across industries and across countries in a sample of 15 European countries. We find that, on average, firms facing larger markets are larger. At the industry level, we find firms in the utility sector are large, perhaps because they enjoy a natural, or officially sanctioned, monopoly. Capital intensive industries, high wage industries, and industries that do a lot of R&D have larger firms, as do industries that require little external financing. At the country level, the most salient findings are that countries with efficient judicial systems have larger firms, and, correcting for institutional development, there is little evidence that richer countries have larger firms. Interestingly, institutional development, such as greater judicial efficiency, seems to be correlated with lower dispersion in firm size within an industry. The effects of interactions (between an industry's characteristics and a country's environment) on size are perhaps the most novel results in the paper, and are best able to discriminate between theories. As the judicial system improves, the difference in size between firms in capital intensive industries and firms in industries that use little physical capital diminishes, a finding consistent with size of firms in industries dependent on external finance is larger in countries with better financial markets, suggesting that financial constraints limit average firm size.

Foreign investment liberalization and incentives in selected Asia-Pacific Developing Countries:Implications for the health service sector in Nepal

The prime objective and main research questions of the study are: 1) What are the practices of service sector investment liberalization and incentives from selected developing countries, and 2) How those experiences can be applied to the investment liberalization and provision of incentives in the Nepalese services sector, with focus on the health service sector? It should be pointed out that a country’s liberalizing strategy refers to a dynamic policy process through a flow in time; however since this study is presently limited to focus on a point in time (e.g. 2003), attention is given to FDI incentives in selected developing countries to tease out lessons of a broad service related investment (health) liberalization strategy.AFTA,RTA,CEPT

Wearable Intrinsically Soft, Stretchable, Flexible Devices for Memories and Computing

A recent trend in the development of high mass consumption electron devices is towards electronic textiles (e-textiles), smart wearable devices, smart clothes, and flexible or printable electronics. Intrinsically soft, stretchable, flexible, Wearable Memories and Computing devices (WMCs) bring us closer to sci-fi scenarios, where future electronic systems are totally integrated in our everyday outfits and help us in achieving a higher comfort level, interacting for us with other digital devices such as smartphones and domotics, or with analog devices, such as our brain/peripheral nervous system. WMC will enable each of us to contribute to open and big data systems as individual nodes, providing real-time information about physical and environmental parameters (including air pollution monitoring, sound and light pollution, chemical or radioactive fallout alert, network availability, and so on). Furthermore, WMC could be directly connected to human brain and enable extremely fast operation and unprecedented interface complexity, directly mapping the continuous states available to biological systems. This review focuses on recent advances in nanotechnology and materials science and pays particular attention to any result and promising technology to enable intrinsically soft, stretchable, flexible WMC

Cardioprotective and antioxidant effects of Bougainvillea glabra against isoproterenol induced myocardial necrosis in albino rats

The present study was executed to evaluate the myocardial protective effect of methanol extract of Bougainvillea glabra against isoproterenol induced myocardial necrosis in rats. Myocardial necrosis was induced by subcutaneous injection of isoproterenol (85mg/kg body weight) on 29th and 30th day at an interval of 24 hours. Myocardial necrosis was evident from the changes of marker enzymes in serum, plasma and heart tissue. The activities of serum cardiac marker enzymes such as lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), creatine kinase myoglobin (CK-MB), serum glutamate oxaloacetate transaminase (SGOT), serum glutamate pyruvate transaminase (SGPT), triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol (TC), high density lipoproteins (HDL), low density lipoproteins (LDL), very low density lipoproteins (VLDL) and total protein (TP) were estimated. In addition, plasma TBARS and plasma LDH levels were also recorded. Antioxidant parameters viz catalase (CAT), superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and malondialdehyde (MDA) levels were performed in heart tissue homogenate. The outcome of the study indicated that, pretreatment with methanol extract of Bougainvillea glabra to isoproterenol induced rats significantly prevented the altered serum cardiac marker enzymes, plasma levels and antioxidant parameters to near normal status. The cardioprotective effect was compared with propranolol (10 mg/kg, oral) which was used as the standard. Histopathological findings exposed a reduced degree of necrosis and inflammation succeeding pretreatment with Bougainvillea glabra.Based on these results, it was suggested that methanol extract of Bougainvillea glabra prevents myocardial necrosis and oxidative stress induced by isoproterenol

Anharmonic oscillators and the null bootstrap

We employ the technique of perturbative analytic null bootstrap to obtain the energy eigenvalues and ladder operators of the sextic anharmonic oscillator up to second order in the coupling. We confirm our results by deriving the same from traditional perturbation theory. We further perform the bootstrap approach on non-Hermitian PT symmetric Hamiltonians, focusing on the shifted harmonic oscillator and the celebrated cubic anharmonic oscillator.Comment: v2:references added, minor changes in the presentation at a few place

RP-HPLC METHOD DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION FOR SIMULTANIOUS ESTIMATION AND FORCED DEGRADATION STUDIES OF LAMIVUDINE AND RALTEGRAVIR IN SOLID DOSAGE FORM

Objective: A stability indicating reverse phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method was developed and validated for the estimation of the combined tablet formulation of lamivudine (LAM) and raltegravir (RAL) in dosage forms and its API.Methods: Chromatographic separation was achieved on inertsil ODS C18 5 µm (4.6 X 150 mm) using a mobile phase (MP) consisting of a mixture of mixed orthophosphoric acid (OPA): acetonitrile (ACN) in the ratio 50:50 v/v which was determined at 242 nm respectively. Results: The assay of LAM and RAL was performed with tablets, and the % assay was found to be 100.12 and 99.89 which shows that the method is useful for routine analysis. The linearity of LAM and RAL was found to be linear with a correlation coefficient of 0.998 and 0.999, which shows that the method is capable of producing good sensitivity. The retention time of LAM and RAL was 1.99 min and 4.34 min respectively; linearity range was found to lie from 15 µg/ml to 75 µg/ml for LAM, 30 µg/ml to 150 µg/ml for RAL with a correlation coefficient of 0.999 respectively. Forced degradation studies were conducted in acidic, basic, thermal, photolytic and peroxide where all the degradation peaks were monitored.Conclusion: The proposed HPLC method was found to be simple, specific, precise, accurate, rapid and economical for simultaneous estimation of LAM and RAL in bulk and tablet dosage form. Thus the validated economical method was applied for forced degradation study of LAM and RAL tablet

Essays on the economic consequences of remittances

This thesis examines three issues relating to the role of remittances in the process of economic development: the impact on economic growth, the implications of remittances on the real exchange compared to other forms of financial inflows, and the impact of remittances on expenditure patterns of households in a major remittance-dependent country, Nepal. The issues are addressed in three self-contained essays, with a stage-setting introductory chapter and a concluding chapter which summarises the key findings. The essays are mainly empirical, but well informed by the relevant analytical literature. The empirical analysis makes use of the latest econometric techniques. Chapter 2 examines the debate on the impact of remittances on economic growth using a new panel dataset covering 74 developing countries over the period 1976–2010.The novelty of the analysis is that it probes possible nonlinearity and lagged effect of the hypothesized impact of remittances on economic growth using alternative specifications. The results suggest that remittances have a positive impact on growth, with the magnitude of the impact declining beyond a remittance-GDP ratio of 7 to 9 percent. But the marginal impact is not statistically significant. There is also no evidence to suggest that the impact of remittances on growth depends on financial deepening as some previous studies have suggested. Chapter 3 examines the impact of remittances on real exchange rate (RER) using the standard dependent economy model to derive the estimation equation. The analysis is based on a new panel dataset covering 105developing countries during 1980-2011. A key novelty of the paper is the use of a theoretically consistent new real effective rate (REER) index as the dependent variable. The index uses the wholesale price index (WPI) to measure foreign prices and the GDP deflator as the measure of domestic prices whereas the REER index of the IMF, which has been commonly used in in the previous studies, uses CPI to measure both prices. The results reveal that remittances lead to significant appreciation of RER, and the magnitude of appreciation depends on the nature of the exchange rate policy regime. One percentage point increase in the remittance to GDP ratio leads to an appreciation of RER by 0.5 percent and 1.08 percent in the countries with the fixed and flexibles exchange rates, respectively. However, the impact is not statistically significant under both exchange rate regimes when the IMF index is used as the alternative measure of RER. There is also evidence that the degree of appreciation associated with remittance inflow is significantly higher compared to the inflows of official development assistance and foreign direct investment. The fourth chapter examines the impact of remittances on the expenditure patterns of households in Nepal using a panel dataset constructed from three rounds of the Nepal Living Standard Survey (1995, 2003 and 2010). The findings reveals that, contrary to popular perception about unproductive use of remittances, remittance-receiving households spend a higher proportion of total consumption expenditure on education and health