Ultrastructural changes in the cemento‐enamel junction caused by acidic beverages: An in vitro study

The present in vitro study was aimed at evaluating the morphological changes in the cemento‐enamel junction (CEJ) after exposure to acidic beverages using the scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The initial pH and titratable acidity (TA) was analyzed from follow groups: (I) Coca cola, (II) orange juice, (III) Cedevita, (IV) Red Bull, (V) Somersby cider, and (VI) white wine. The CEJ samples (n = 64), obtained from unerupted third molars, were allocated to one control (artificial saliva, n = 16) and six experimental groups (n = 8). The experimental samples were immersed in beverages (50 ml) for 15 min, three times daily, 10 days, and in artificial saliva between immersions. SEM analysis was performed in a blind manner, according to scoring scale. One‐way ANOVA and Tukey's post hoc tests, as well as Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney U test used for statistical analysis. The pH values of the acidic beverages ranged from 2.65 (Coca cola) to 3.73 (orange juice), and TA ranged from 1.90 ml (Coca cola) to 5.70 ml (orange juice) of NaOH to reach pH 7.0. The SEM analysis indicated statistically significant differences between the control samples and those immersed in acidic beverages. The Groups IV, I, and II, showed the highest CEJ damage grade while those of the Group VI were the lowest. All the tested acidic beverages caused morphological changes in the CEJ with a smaller or larger exposure of dentine surface, and were not always related to the pH or TA of acidic beverages.     

The stress stability of olanzapine: studies of interactions with excipients in solid state pharmaceutical formulations

Stress stability testing represents an important part of the drug development process. It is used as an important tool for the identification of degradation products and degradation pathways, as well as for the assessment of changes in physical form of drug molecules. The impact of excipients on the stability of olanzapine confirms that levels of impurities and degradants are limiting parameters and are therefore used for stability evaluation. The major degradation product of olanzapine was identified as 2-methyl-5,10-dihydro-4H-thieno[2,3-b][1,5]benzodiazepine-4-one (III). The structure of III was determined by using LC-MS, IR and NMR. Compatibility and stress stability results demonstrated that tablet formulations of olanzapine are sensitive to temperature and moisture. In samples protected from moisture, the increase in concentration of III was shown to be highly temperature dependent and the degradation followed zero-order kinetics. In addition, studies of olanzapine with excipients and in formulated tablets revealed polymorphic phase changes in some samples, influenced by a combination of stress temperature and humidity conditions. Polymorphic transitions were monitored using x-ray powder diffraction (XRPD) analysis and exhibited no correlation between the phase change (appearance of a new polymorph) and the degradation process.     

Cleaner production and environmental sustainability: Analysis of the Serbian petrochemical plant

The approach proposed in this paper emphasizes the methodology of examining the possibility of increasing energy efficiency in the case of industry, such as a petrochemical complex, which is at the same time marked as the major pollutant of the environment. The improved cleaner production methodology was used based on the conditions and needs of the major Serbian petrochemical company. This paper presents results obtained by steam system optimization and modifications. The implemented measures lead to a decrease in total energy consumption by 6% and a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions by 9 t CO₂e.     

Location of deuteron sites in the proton conducting perovskite BaZr0.50In0.50O3−y

High-resolution neutron powder diffraction data have been collected on deuterated and dried samples of the perovskite BaZr_0.5In_0.5O_2.75 at 5 K and room temperature, respectively. Inspection of Fourier nuclear density maps for the deuterated phase have allowed the deuteron position to be refined on a 12h (1/2, y, 0) crystallographic site, with y = 0.217(4) yielding a chemically reasonable OD distance of 0.92(2) Å. Evidence for anisotropy of the deuteron position is also found consistent with a 24k crystallographic site (0.56, 0.21, 0) indicative of displacements of the ion towards neighbouring oxygen ions. The presence of static oxygen disorder in both the dried and deuterated samples is apparent from the structural analyses. Raman spectra confirm short range deviations from cubic symmetry for both dried and hydrated samples.     

MINIMUM QUANTITY LUBRICATION (MQL) APPLICATIONS IN AUTOMOTIVE POWER-TRAIN MACHINING

Minimum Quantity Lubrication (MQL) is a near-dry machining method that may be applied to reduce coolant usage in operations such as drilling, which cannot be performed completely dry. Although significant research has been reported on MQL, relatively little information on production applications and experience has appeared in the technical literature. The most common high-volume production application for MQL is cross and oil hole drilling on steel crankshafts. This paper reviews MQL test results for deep hole drilling of forged steel and cast nodular iron under conditions similar to crankshaft oil hole drilling. The results show that MQL can yield tool life equivalent to gun drills at higher penetration rates under these conditions. This result is consistent with production experience with steel crankshafts, and shows that MQL may also be useful for cross and oil hole drilling of cast crankshafts. Limited test and production data for MQL machining of aluminum prismatics is also described. Significant areas for future research and development, including chip management, air quality, capability and robustness, and cost are also discussed.     

Subspace tracking with adaptive threshold rank estimation

In frequency and direction of arrival (DOA) tracking problems, singular value decomposition (SVD) can be used to track the signal subspace. Typically, for a problem sizen, only a few, sayr dominant eigencomponents need to be tracked, wherern. In this paper we show how to modify the Jacobi-type SVD to track only ther-dimensional signal subspace by forcing the (n-r)-dimensional noise subspace to be spherical. Therby, the computational complexity is brought down fromO(n²) toO(nr) per update. In addition to tracking the subspace itself, we demonstrate how to exploit the structure of the Jacobi-type SVD to estimate the signal subspace dimension via a simple adptive threshold comparison technique. Most available computationally efficient subspace tracking algorithms rely on off-line estimation of the signal subspace dimension, which acts as a bottleneck in real-time parallel implementations. The noise averaged Jacobi-type SVD updating algorithm presented in this paper is capable of simultaneously tracking the signal subspace and its dimension, while preserving both the low computational cost ofO(nr) and the parallel structure of the method, as demonstrated in a systolic implementation. Furthermore, the algorithm tracks all signal singular values. Their squares are estimates of the powers in the orthogonal modes of the signal. Thus, applications of the algorithm are not limited to only DOA and frequency tracking where information about the powers of signal components is not exploited.     

The number of spanning trees of a graph with given matching number

The number of spanning trees of a graph G is the total number of distinct spanning subgraphs of G that are trees. In this paper, we present sharp upper bounds for the number of spanning trees of a graph with given matching number.     

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.     

A novel neural network based approach to latent overlapped fingerprints separation

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Overlapped fingerprints are often found in latent fingerprints lifted from crime scenes and in live-scan fingerprint images when the surface of fingerprint...