Quality by design micro-engineering optimisation of NSAID-loaded electrospun fibrous patches

The purpose of this study was to apply the Quality by Design (QbD) approach to the electrospinning of fibres loaded with the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) indomethacin (INDO) and diclofenac sodium (DICLO). A Quality Target Product Profile (QTPP) was made, and risk assessments (preliminary hazard analysis) were conducted to identify the impact of material attributes and process parameters on the critical quality attributes (CQAs) of the fibres. A full factorial design of experiments (DoE) of 20 runs was built, which was used to carry out experiments. The following factors were assessed: Drugs, voltage, flow rate, and the distance between the processing needle and collector. Release studies exhibited INDO fibres had greater total release of active drug compared to DICLO fibres. Voltage and distance were found to be the most significant factors of the experiment. Multivariate statistical analytical software helped to build six feasible design spaces and two flexible, universal design spaces for both drugs, at distances of 5 cm and 12.5 cm, along with a flexible control strategy. The current findings and their analysis confirm that QbD is a viable and invaluable tool to enhance product and process understanding of electrospinning for the assurance of high-quality fibres

AnimalWeb: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Dataset of Annotated Animal Faces

Being heavily reliant on animals, it is our ethical obligation to improve their well-being by understanding their needs. Several studies show that animal needs are often expressed through their faces. Though remarkable progress has been made towards the automatic understanding of human faces, this has regrettably not been the case with animal faces. There exists significant room and appropriate need to develop automatic systems capable of interpreting animal faces. Among many transformative impacts, such a technology will foster better and cheaper animal healthcare, and further advance animal psychology understanding. We believe the underlying research progress is mainly obstructed by the lack of an adequately annotated dataset of animal faces, covering a wide spectrum of animal species. To this end, we introduce a large-scale, hierarchical annotated dataset of animal faces, featuring 21.9K faces from 334 diverse species and 21 animal orders across biological taxonomy. These faces are captured `in-the-wild' conditions and are consistently annotated with 9 landmarks on key facial features. The proposed dataset is structured and scalable by design; its development underwent four systematic stages involving rigorous, manual annotation effort of over 6K man-hours. We benchmark it for face alignment using the existing art under novel problem settings. Results showcase its challenging nature, unique attributes and present definite prospects for novel, adaptive, and generalized face-oriented CV algorithms. We further benchmark the dataset for face detection and fine-grained recognition tasks, to demonstrate multi-task applications and room for improvement. Experiments indicate that this dataset will push the algorithmic advancements across many related CV tasks and encourage the development of novel systems for animal facial behaviour monitoring. We will make the dataset publicly available

A brief review on thermal behaviour of PANI as additive in heat transfer fluid

Since a decade ago, investigation on nanofluids has grown significantly owing to its enhanced thermal properties compared to conventional heat transfer fluids. This engineered nanofluid has been widely used in the thermal engineering system to improve their energy consumption by improving the thermal efficiency of the system. The addition of nano-size particles as additives dispersed in the base fluids proved to significantly either improve or diminish the behaviour of the base fluids. The behaviour of the base fluid highly depends on the properties of the additives material, such as morphology, size, and volume fraction. Among the variety of nanoparticles studied, the conducting polymers have been subject of high interest due to its high environmental stability, good electrical conductivity, antimicrobial, anti-corrosion property and significantly cheap compared to other nanoparticles. As such, the main objective of the present review is to provide an overview of the work performed on thermal properties performance of conducting polymers based nanofluids

Minimisation of image watermarking side effects through subjective optimisation

This study investigates the use of structural similarity index (SSIM) on the minimised side effect to image watermarking. For the fast implementation and more compatibility with the standard discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based codecs, watermark insertion is carried out on the DCT coefficients and hence an SSIM model for DCT-based watermarking is developed. For faster implementation, the SSIM index is maximised over independent 4 × 4 non-overlapped blocks, but the disparity between the adjacent blocks reduces the overall image quality. This problem is resolved through optimisation of overlapped blocks, but, the higher image quality is achieved at a cost of high computational complexity. To reduce the computational complexity while preserving the good quality, optimisation of semi-overlapped blocks is introduced. The authors show that while SSIM-based optimisation over overlapped blocks has as high as 64 times the complexity of the 4 × 4 non-overlapped method, with semi-overlapped optimisation the high quality of overlapped method is preserved only at a cost of less than 8 times the non-overlapped method

Caring for the collective: biopower and agential subjectification in wildlife conservation

types: ArticleCopyright © 2014 PionPost Print. Srinivasan, K. 2014. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 32, Issue 3, pp. 501 – 517 DOI:10.1068/d13101pThis paper explores turtle conservation in Odisha, India, to map the complicated ways in which animal well-being is pursued in the contemporary world. Using insights from Foucault’s work on biopolitics, it offers an account of conservation as population politics, questioning the entanglement of harm and care that infuses this space of more-than-human social change. In doing this, the paper elaborates the concept of agential subjectification in order to track the mechanisms that underlie the asymmetric circulation of biopower in human–animal interactions and to develop Foucauldian scholarship for the examination of present-day manifestations of the ‘will to improve’.RGS‑IBGCulture and Animals Foundatio

Integrating livelihoods and conservation in protected areas: Understanding the role and stakeholder views on prospects for non-timber forest products, a Bangladesh case study

Protected areas (PAs) represent a key global strategy in biodiversity conservation. In tropical developing countries, the management of PAs is a great challenge as many contain resources on which local communities rely. Collection and trading of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) is a well-established forest-based livelihood strategy, which has been promoted as a potential means for enhanced conservation and improved rural livelihoods in recent years, even though the sustainability or ecological implications have rarely been tested. We conducted an exploratory survey to understand the role and stakeholder views on conservation prospects and perceived ecological feasibility of NTFPs and harvesting schemes in a northeastern PA of Bangladesh, namely the Satchari National Park. Households (n = 101) were interviewed from three different forest dependency categories, adopting a stratified random sampling approach and using a semi-structured questionnaire. The study identified 13 locally important NTFPs, with five being critically important to supporting local livelihoods. Our study suggests that collection, processing and trading in NTFPs constitutes the primary occupation for about 18% of local inhabitants and account for an estimated 19% of their cash annual income. The household consensus on issues relating to NTFPs and their prospective role in conservation was surprisingly high, with 48% of respondents believing that promotion of NTFPs in the PA could have positive conservation value. The majority (71%) of households also had some understanding of the ecological implications of NTFP harvesting, sustainability (53%) and possible management and monitoring regimes (100%). With little known about their real application in the field, our study suggests further investigations are required to understand the ecological compatibility of traditional NTFP harvesting patterns and management. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

The Antioxidant Role of Xanthurenic Acid in the Aedes aegypti Midgut during Digestion of a Blood Meal

In the midgut of the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a vector of dengue and yellow fever, an intense release of heme and iron takes place during the digestion of a blood meal. Here, we demonstrated via chromatography, light absorption and mass spectrometry that xanthurenic acid (XA), a product of the oxidative metabolism of tryptophan, is produced in the digestive apparatus after the ingestion of a blood meal and reaches milimolar levels after 24 h, the period of maximal digestive activity. XA formation does not occur in the White Eye (WE) strain, which lacks kynurenine hydroxylase and accumulates kynurenic acid. The formation of XA can be diminished by feeding the insect with 3,4-dimethoxy-N-[4-(3-nitrophenyl)thiazol-2-yl] benzenesulfonamide (Ro-61-8048), an inhibitor of XA biosynthesis. Moreover, XA inhibits the phospholipid oxidation induced by heme or iron. A major fraction of this antioxidant activity is due to the capacity of XA to bind both heme and iron, which occurs at a slightly alkaline pH (7.5-8.0), a condition found in the insect midgut. The midgut epithelial cells of the WE mosquito has a marked increase in occurrence of cell death, which is reversed to levels similar to the wild type mosquitoes by feeding the insects with blood supplemented with XA, confirming the protective role of this molecule. Collectively, these results suggest a new role for XA as a heme and iron chelator that provides protection as an antioxidant and may help these animals adapt to a blood feeding habit

Susceptibility of Anopheles stephensi to Plasmodium gallinaceum: A Trait of the Mosquito, the Parasite, and the Environment

Vector susceptibility to Plasmodium infection is treated primarily as a vector trait, although it is a composite trait expressing the joint occurrence of the parasite and the vector with genetic contributions of both. A comprehensive approach to assess the specific contribution of genetic and environmental variation on "vector susceptibility" is lacking. Here we developed and implemented a simple scheme to assess the specific contributions of the vector, the parasite, and the environment to "vector susceptibility." To the best of our knowledge this is the first study that employs such an approach.We conducted selection experiments on the vector (while holding the parasite "constant") and on the parasite (while holding the vector "constant") to estimate the genetic contributions of the mosquito and the parasite to the susceptibility of Anopheles stephensi to Plasmodium gallinaceum. We separately estimated the realized heritability of (i) susceptibility to parasite infection by the mosquito vector and (ii) parasite compatibility (transmissibility) with the vector while controlling the other. The heritabilities of vector and the parasite were higher for the prevalence, i.e., fraction of infected mosquitoes, than the corresponding heritabilities of parasite load, i.e., the number of oocysts per mosquito.The vector's genetics (heritability) comprised 67% of "vector susceptibility" measured by the prevalence of mosquitoes infected with P. gallinaceum oocysts, whereas the specific contribution of parasite genetics (heritability) to this trait was only 5%. Our parasite source might possess minimal genetic diversity, which could explain its low heritability (and the high value of the vector). Notably, the environment contributed 28%. These estimates are relevant only to the particular system under study, but this experimental design could be useful for other parasite-host systems. The prospects and limitations of the genetic manipulation of vector populations to render the vector resistant to the parasite are better considered on the basis of this framework