Degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in petroleum products-contaminated soil using pig dung

This study determined the effect of pig dung on the degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in petroleum products-contaminated soil. Topsoil (0-15 cm depth) was collected from Teaching and Research Farm, Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria. One kilogram of the soil was measured into nine containers and contaminated with a 10 % mixture of gasoline and diesel. Pig Dung (PD) was mixed with the soil at the rate of 0, 50 and 100 g kg-1 soil in triplicate and the containers were arranged in a Completely Randomized Design. Soil samples were taken from each container at 21 and 42 days for Hydrocarbon Utilizing Bacteria (HUB) and Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH) determination using standard methods. Collected data were subjected to descriptive and inferential statistics. The HUB species identified were Bacillus, Staphylococcus, Escherichia, and Klebsiella. The TPH (mg kg-1) of the soil before the PD application was 83.55±0.22. After the amendments (at 0, 50 and 100 g kg-1), values were 63.24±0.25, 50.09±0.64, 39.56±0.15 and 49.72±1.30, 34.51±0.56, 16.89±0.36 for 21 and 42 days respectively. Pig dung enhanced degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbon in the petroleum products-contaminated soil

POTABILITY AND IRRIGATION POTENTIAL OF GROUNDWATER SOURCES AT THE FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURE, ABEOKUTA, NIGERIA

Groundwater is an important source of freshwater and its quality determines it’s potential for domestic and agricultural use. Water samples from ten boreholes located within the Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta, Nigeria were collected and analysed for physico-chemical and bacteriological properties, cations and metals using standard procedures. Results were compared with the regulatory standards while water quality index (WQI) method was used to classify the water potability. Potential of groundwater for irrigation was investigated using appropriate indices. The range of values for the measured parameters include: pH: 6.9 – 7.82; electrical conductivity(EC): 127 – 650 μS/cm; total dissolved solids (TDS): 58 to 284 mg/L; magnesium (Mg2+): 10 - 61 mg/L; nitrates (NO3-): 0.01 – 1.38 mg/L; iron (Fe): 0.02 – 0.05 mg/L; biological oxygen demand (BOD): 0.1 – 2.83 mg/L and total coliform: ND - 28×10cfu/mL. Majority of the water quality parameters fell within regulatory limits with the exception of magnesium and total coliforms. Escherichia coli, an indicator of faecal contamination was also absent in the water samples. On the average, groundwater within the study area has a WQI = 46.3 and can be classified to be of good quality for domestic use.  Sodium absorption ratio (SAR) was less than 10% and Magnesium adsorption ratio (MAR) was less 50 %, and are therefore classified as of excellent quality for irrigation purpose. Soluble sodium percentage (SSP) values range between 11.1 and 51 %. All samples were found to be good or fair for irrigation purpose with no harmful effects to the soil.     &nbsp

Complete homochirality induced by the nonlinear autocatalysis and recycling

A nonlinear autocatalysis of a chiral substance is shown to achieve homochirality in a closed system, if the back-reaction is included. Asymmetry in the concentration of two enantiomers or the enantiometric excess increases due to the nonlinear autocatalysis. Furthermore, when the back-reaction is taken into account, the reactant supplied by the decomposition of the enantiomers is recycled to produce more and more the dominant one, and eventually the homochirality is established.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Annotating patient clinical records with syntactic chunks and named entities: the Harvey corpus

The free text notes typed by physicians during patient consultations contain valuable information for the study of disease and treatment. These notes are difficult to process by existing natural language analysis tools since they are highly telegraphic (omitting many words), and contain many spelling mistakes, inconsistencies in punctuation, and non-standard word order. To support information extraction and classification tasks over such text, we describe a de-identified corpus of free text notes, a shallow syntactic and named entity annotation scheme for this kind of text, and an approach to training domain specialists with no linguistic background to annotate the text. Finally, we present a statistical chunking system for such clinical text with a stable learning rate and good accuracy, indicating that the manual annotation is consistent and that the annotation scheme is tractable for machine learning

Нарушения в геноме хозяина при экспериментальном гименолепидозе в зависимости от дозы введенного инвазивного материала при заряжении

ГИМЕНОЛЕПИДО

A demonstration of an affinity between pyrite and organic matter in a hydrothermal setting

One of the key-principles of the iron-sulphur world theory is to bring organic molecules close enough to interact with each other, using the surface of pyrite as a substrate in a hydrothermal setting. The present paper explores the relationship of pyrite and organic matter in a hydrothermal setting from the geological record; in hydrothermal calcite veins from Carboniferous limestones in central Ireland. Here, the organic matter is accumulated as coatings around, and through, pyrite grains. Most of the pyrite grains are euhedral-subhedral crystals, ranging in size from ca 0.1-0.5 mm in diameter, and they are scattered throughout the matrix of the vein calcite. The organic matter was deposited from a hydrothermal fluid at a temperature of at least 200°C, and gives a Raman signature of disordered carbon. This study points to an example from a hydrothermal setting in the geological record, demonstrating that pyrite can have a high potential for the concentration and accumulation of organic materials

Statistical tests for associations between two directed acyclic graphs.

Biological data, and particularly annotation data, are increasingly being represented in directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, while relevant biological information is implicit in the links between multiple domains, annotations from these different domains are usually represented in distinct, unconnected DAGs, making links between the domains represented difficult to determine. We develop a novel family of general statistical tests for the discovery of strong associations between two directed acyclic graphs. Our method takes the topology of the input graphs and the specificity and relevance of associations between nodes into consideration. We apply our method to the extraction of associations between biomedical ontologies in an extensive use-case. Through a manual and an automatic evaluation, we show that our tests discover biologically relevant relations. The suite of statistical tests we develop for this purpose is implemented and freely available for download