Serum magnesium levels in newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus and its relation with microvascular complications of diabetes

Background: Prevalence of hypomagnesaemia is significantly higher in diabetic patients with microvascular complications compared to diabetics with no microvascular complications. The aim of this study is to measure levels of serum magnesium in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus and study its association with the presenting microvascular complications.Methods: This was hospital based, one year cross-sectional study carried out in Department of Medicine, IGMC Shimla in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus. Total 53 patients were enrolled in this study who presented in medicine OPD or admitted in medicine ward.Results: Serum Magnesium value of the patients ranged from 1.20-3.0 mg/dl with mean value of 1.9±0.3 mg/dl. Fourteen patients (26.4%) had hypomagnesaemia. A total of 34 (64.2%) patients presented with complications of diabetes in which proteinuria was present in 34 (64.2%), retinopathy in 4 (7.5%) and neuropathy in 1 (1.9%). Fourteen (41.2%) patients with hypomagnesaemia presented with complications of diabetes (p value=0.003). 34 (64.2%) patients presented with proteinuria out of which 14 (41.2%) patients had hypomagnesaemia while 20 (58.8%) had normomagnesaemia (p=0.03). One (1.9%) patient had neuropathy and hypomagnesaemia was also present in this patient (p=0.6). Four patients (7.5%) presented with retinopathy out of which 3 (5.7%) had hypomagnesaemia while 1 (1.9%) had normomagnesaemia.Conclusions: Hypomagnesaemia is associated with microvascular complications of diabetes. Also there is statistically significant relationship between proteinuria and hypomagnesaemia in patients with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus

The Hindu, the Muslim, and the Border in Nationalist South Asian Cinema

Así como el personaje del ‘terrorista’ (generalmente musulmán o paquistaní) está presente en muchos filmes de Bollywood, el nacionalismo hindú está tomando la iniciativa en la esfera política del país. Sin embargo el cine indio también puede hacerse eco de acontecimientos ocurridos en Paquistán, donde desde los años Setenta se ha manifestado un proceso de islamización de la sociedad, con una indudable impronta wahabí. Estimo que la historia reciente de Paquistán intenta deshacerse de su legado hindostánico, a la vez que señalo que los estudios sobre el musulmán en “Bollywood” pecan de simplificarlo como un arquetipo, si no una caricatura. Pero la frontera entre India y Paquistán, entre Yo y el Otro, es decir, entre musulmanes e hindúes es más porosa de lo que cabe imaginar, lo que me lleva a concluir en las opciones de mantenerla y subvertirla.There is but no question that we can speak about the emergence of the (usually Pakistani or Muslim) ‘terrorist’ figure in many Bollywood films, and likewise there is the indisputable fact of the rise of Hindu nationalism in the political and public sphere. Indian cinema, however, may also be viewed in the backdrop of political developments in Pakistan, where the project of Islamicization can be dated to least the late 1970s and where the turn to a Wahhabi-inspired version of Islam is unmistakable. I argue that the recent history of Pakistan must be seen as instigated by a disavowal of the country’s Indic self, and similarly I suggest that scholarly and popular studies of the ‘representation’ of the Muslim in “Bollywood” rather too easily assume that such a figure is always the product of caricature and stereotyping. But the border between Pakistan and India, between the self and the other, and the Hindu and the Muslim is rather more porous than we have imagined, and I close with hints at what it means to both retain and subvert the border

India in the world: Hinduism, the Diaspora, and the Anxiety of Influence

The Indian diaspora has come out of the shadows in recent years. South Asians have transformed the face of the country that once colonized them. While software engineers were bringing Indians into the top echelons of the American corporate world, both Trinidad and Fiji witnessed the ascendancy of prime ministers of Indian descent. Even Bollywood, which always had a global presence in the southern hemisphere, has now come to the attention of the West. The comparatively small Indian diaspora has indubitably become a part of world culture. Curiously, this "triumph", if  one may call it that, is accompanied by an immense anxiety, an anxiety of influence. Though Indians have done very well for themselves in the US, there is a widespread feeling that they remain invisible. Most professional Indians, especially Hindus, are persuaded that the world rides roughshod over them. The inability of the Indian nation-state to flex its muscles overseas is profoundly disturbing to Hindus, and though the recognition that yoga, samosas, curry, spiritual gurus, and beauty queens have brought to India is appreciated, Indians would much rather see India respected, even feared, as a world power. This anxiety of influence is conjoined with another -- namely, an anxiety that Hinduism is not quite a proper, and certainly not a world, religion. The transformations wrought within Hinduism in recent years, which are calculated to masculinize and homogenize the faith, are more productively viewed in this context

Presumed Acute Adenoviral Dacryoadenitis Associated with Epidemic Keratoconjunctivitis: A Case Report

Acute dacryoadenitis is an uncommon ophthalmic disorder that involves inflammation of the lacrimal gland. It is caused by various bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. The most frequently involved causative microorganisms are staphylococcus and mumps virus. In this case report a 16‑year‑old male child with acute dacryoadenitis associated with adenoviral epidemic keratoconjunctivitis is described. As far we are aware of, this is the first case of presumed adenovirus‑induced acute dacryoadenitis associated with keratoconjunctivitis.Keywords: Acute dacryoadenitis, adenoviral keratoconjunctivitis, epidemic keratoconjunctivitis, lacrimal gland, lymphadenopath

Robot Localization and Mapping Final Report -- Sequential Adversarial Learning for Self-Supervised Deep Visual Odometry

Visual odometry (VO) and SLAM have been using multi-view geometry via local structure from motion for decades. These methods have a slight disadvantage in challenging scenarios such as low-texture images, dynamic scenarios, etc. Meanwhile, use of deep neural networks to extract high level features is ubiquitous in computer vision. For VO, we can use these deep networks to extract depth and pose estimates using these high level features. The visual odometry task then can be modeled as an image generation task where the pose estimation is the by-product. This can also be achieved in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the data (supervised) intensive nature of training deep neural networks. Although some works tried the similar approach [1], the depth and pose estimation in the previous works are vague sometimes resulting in accumulation of error (drift) along the trajectory. The goal of this work is to tackle these limitations of past approaches and to develop a method that can provide better depths and pose estimates. To address this, a couple of approaches are explored: 1) Modeling: Using optical flow and recurrent neural networks (RNN) in order to exploit spatio-temporal correlations which can provide more information to estimate depth. 2) Loss function: Generative adversarial network (GAN) [2] is deployed to improve the depth estimation (and thereby pose too), as shown in Figure 1. This additional loss term improves the realism in generated images and reduces artifacts

WP 3: Sustainable farming systems intensification for climate resilient decomposition of yield gaps

From Fragility to Resilience in Central and West Asia and North Africa (F2R CWANA) WP 3: Sustainable farming systems intensification for climate resilient decomposition of yield gaps Inception Workshop Morocco May 17, 2022

Impact of GA3 encapsulated nanosilica on maize seed viability

The nanoparticles have the potential ability of the passing cell membrane because of their nano sizes. The SiO2 nanoparticles are one of the major and frequently used engineered oxide nanoparticles. In present investigation, the potential effect of SiO2 (10-20 nm) nanoparticles on maize seed viability were studied. We observed quick result of seed viability and also increase the seed viability percentage in presence of GA3 loaded silica nanoparticles. Three concentration of (0.5, 0.2 and 0.1%) tetrazolium salts were also used for staining of living tissue. In the present experiment seeds conditioned in 150 pp GA3 encapsulated nanosilica and tested in 0.5% TZ salt gave maximum viable seeds which was due to the increased availability of GA3 and showed quick staining over 0.2% and 0.1% concentration. Among the varieties, var. Navin imbibed in 150 ppm GA3 loaded nanosilica showed higher value of viable seed under 0.5% tetrazolium solution by better availability of GA3. Gibberellic acid enhances metabolic activity of seed by secretion of α-amylase enzyme which is important for quick staining of embryonic tissue

WP 4: Integrated food, land, water and energy systems for climate resilient landscapes

From Fragility to Resilience in Central and West Asia and North Africa (F2R CWANA) WP 4: Integrated food, land, water, and energy systems for climate-resilient landscapes Inception Workshop Morocco May 17, 2022

Productivity and profitability of drip fertigated wheat (Triticum aestivum) – mungbean (Vigna radiata) – maize (Zea mays) cropping system

An experiment was conducted at the research farm of ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi during 2019–20 and 2020–21 to study the productivity and economic viability of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.)– mungbean (Vigna radiata (L.) R. Wilczek)–maize (Zea mays L.) fertigated with 0, 60, 80, 100% recommended doses of NPK and irrigated at 0.6 and 0.8 crop evapotranspiration (ETc) through subsurface (SSDI) and surface drip irrigation (SDI). The results were compared with the conventional practice of surface irrigation and soil application of 100% recommended doses of NPK. Grain yields of wheat, mungbean, maize and system wheat equivalent yield (SWEY) improved by 22.9, 7.2, 21.9 and 19.4%, respectively with increase in NPK fertigation doses from 60 to 100% and by 15.6, 9.2, 4.9 and 9.7% with the increase in irrigation frequency from 0.6 to 0.8 ETc. However, SDI and SSDI had equal system productivity (12.48 and 12.85 Mg/ha). The SWEY at 0.8ETc fertigated either with NPK80 or NPK100 was statistically at par (14.2–15.9 Mg/ha) with the conventional practice (14.3–15.2 Mg/ha). The cash inflow, net income and benefit cost ratio (BCR) of the cropping system also increased successively with increase in fertigation doses and irrigation frequency. The net income and BCR followed the order maize>wheat>mungbean. The net income under SSDI at 0.8 ETc with NPK80 or NPK100 in wheat, mungbean, maize and system was 11–13, 88–105, 1-9 and 8–14% higher than the conventional practice. At 0.8 ETc and NPK100, BCR in SSDI (1.86) was higher than in SDI (1.71) and conventional system (1.67).

An Active Learning Approach for Rapid Characterization of Endothelial Cells in Human Tumors

Currently, no available pathological or molecular measures of tumor angiogenesis predict response to antiangiogenic therapies used in clinical practice. Recognizing that tumor endothelial cells (EC) and EC activation and survival signaling are the direct targets of these therapies, we sought to develop an automated platform for quantifying activity of critical signaling pathways and other biological events in EC of patient tumors by histopathology. Computer image analysis of EC in highly heterogeneous human tumors by a statistical classifier trained using examples selected by human experts performed poorly due to subjectivity and selection bias. We hypothesized that the analysis can be optimized by a more active process to aid experts in identifying informative training examples. To test this hypothesis, we incorporated a novel active learning (AL) algorithm into FARSIGHT image analysis software that aids the expert by seeking out informative examples for the operator to label. The resulting FARSIGHT-AL system identified EC with specificity and sensitivity consistently greater than 0.9 and outperformed traditional supervised classification algorithms. The system modeled individual operator preferences and generated reproducible results. Using the results of EC classification, we also quantified proliferation (Ki67) and activity in important signal transduction pathways (MAP kinase, STAT3) in immunostained human clear cell renal cell carcinoma and other tumors. FARSIGHT-AL enables characterization of EC in conventionally preserved human tumors in a more automated process suitable for testing and validating in clinical trials. The results of our study support a unique opportunity for quantifying angiogenesis in a manner that can now be tested for its ability to identify novel predictive and response biomarkers