Comparative study on pilling resistence standard methods

Textile fabrics are prone to develop balls of fibre on the surface, which are known as pills. The pills are formed during wear and washing, when fibres on the fabric surface “tease out” and become entangled. Under the influence of the rubbing action these loose fibres develop into small spherical bundles anchored to the fabric by a few unbroken fibres. Such a surface deterioration is generally undesirable, but the degree of consumer tolerance for a given level of pilling will depend on the garment type and fabric end use

Holographic Fabry-Perot spectrometer

We propose a spectrum analyzer based on the properties of a hologram recorded with the field transmitted by a Fabry-Perot etalon. The spectral response of this holographic Fabry-Perot spectrometer (HFPS) is analytically investigated in the paraxial approximation and compared with a conventional Fabry-Perot etalon of similar characteristics. We demonstrate that the resolving power is twice increased and the free spectral range (FSR) is reduced to one-half. The proposed spectrometer could improve the operational performance of the etalon because it can exhibit high efficiency and it would be insensible to environmental conditions such as temperature and vibrations. Our analysis also extends to another variant of the HFPS based on holographic multiplexing of the transmitted field of a Fabry-Perot etalon. This device increases the FSR, keeping the same HFPS performance. © 2011 Optical Society of America.We thank A. Cámara Iglesias for valuable discussions and advice. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project TEC 2008-04105 is acknowledged.Peer Reviewe

Concept-based query expansion for retrieving gene related publications from MEDLINE

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Advances in biotechnology and in high-throughput methods for gene analysis have contributed to an exponential increase in the number of scientific publications in these fields of study. While much of the data and results described in these articles are entered and annotated in the various existing biomedical databases, the scientific literature is still the major source of information. There is, therefore, a growing need for text mining and information retrieval tools to help researchers find the relevant articles for their study. To tackle this, several tools have been proposed to provide alternative solutions for specific user requests.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This paper presents QuExT, a new PubMed-based document retrieval and prioritization tool that, from a given list of genes, searches for the most relevant results from the literature. QuExT follows a concept-oriented query expansion methodology to find documents containing concepts related to the genes in the user input, such as protein and pathway names. The retrieved documents are ranked according to user-definable weights assigned to each concept class. By changing these weights, users can modify the ranking of the results in order to focus on documents dealing with a specific concept. The method's performance was evaluated using data from the 2004 TREC genomics track, producing a mean average precision of 0.425, with an average of 4.8 and 31.3 relevant documents within the top 10 and 100 retrieved abstracts, respectively.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>QuExT implements a concept-based query expansion scheme that leverages gene-related information available on a variety of biological resources. The main advantage of the system is to give the user control over the ranking of the results by means of a simple weighting scheme. Using this approach, researchers can effortlessly explore the literature regarding a group of genes and focus on the different aspects relating to these genes.</p

Collision avoidance on unmanned aerial vehicles using neural network pipelines and flow clustering techniques

UIDB/04111/2020 PCIF/SSI/0102/2017 IF/00325/2015Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAV), while not a recent invention, have recently acquired a prominent position in many industries, and they are increasingly used not only by avid customers, but also in high-demand technical use-cases, and will have a significant societal effect in the coming years. However, the use of UAVs is fraught with significant safety threats, such as collisions with dynamic obstacles (other UAVs, birds, or randomly thrown objects). This research focuses on a safety problem that is often overlooked due to a lack of technology and solutions to address it: collisions with non-stationary objects. A novel approach is described that employs deep learning techniques to solve the computationally intensive problem of real-time collision avoidance with dynamic objects using off-the-shelf commercial vision sensors. The suggested approach’s viability was corroborated by multiple experiments, firstly in simulation, and afterward in a concrete real-world case, that consists of dodging a thrown ball. A novel video dataset was created and made available for this purpose, and transfer learning was also tested, with positive results.publishersversionpublishe

Electroanalytical study of the antidepressant sertraline

Aflowinjection squarewave cathodic stripping voltammetric method has been developed for the determination of sertraline in a pharmaceutical preparation. The method shows linearity between peak current intensity and sertraline concentration for the interval between 0.20×10−6 and 1.20×10−6 mol L−1. Limits of detection and quantification were found to be 1.5×10−7 and 5.0×10−7 mol L−1, respectively. Up to 70 samples per hour can be analysed with a good precision (R.S.D. = 2.5%). The proposed method was successfully applied to the determination of sertraline in a commercial product. In the voltammetric determination of sertraline in flow, a high sample rate is obtained at reduced costs, opening the possibility to compete with the chromatographic methods generally used for this analysis

Design and Synthesis of CNS-targeted Flavones and Analogues with Neuroprotective Potential Against H2O2- and Aβ1-42-Induced Toxicity in SH-SY5Y Human Neuroblastoma Cells

With the lack of available drugs able to prevent the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the discovery of new neuroprotective treatments able to rescue neurons from cell injury is presently a matter of extreme importance and urgency. Here, we were inspired by the widely reported potential of natural flavonoids to build a library of novel flavones, chromen-4-ones and their C-glucosyl derivatives, and to explore their ability as neuroprotective agents with suitable pharmacokinetic profiles. All compounds were firstly evaluated in a parallel artificial membrane permeability assay (PAMPA) to assess their effective permeability across biological membranes, namely the blood-brain barrier (BBB). With this test, we aimed not only at assessing if our candidates would be well-distributed, but also at rationalizing the influence of the sugar moiety on the physicochemical properties. To complement our analysis, logD7.4 was determined. From all screened compounds, the p-morpholinyl flavones stood out for their ability to fully rescue SH-SY5Y human neuroblastoma cells against both H2O2- and Aβ1-42-induced cell death. Cholinesterase inhibition was also evaluated, and modest inhibitory activities were found. This work highlights the potential of C-glucosylflavones as neuroprotective agents, and presents the p-morpholinyl C-glucosylflavone 37, which did not show any cytotoxicity towards HepG2 and Caco-2 cells at 100 μM, as a new lead structure for further development against AD.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia-UID/Multi/0612/2019Unión Europea-D3i4AD), FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IAPP, GA 61234