Estrogen content of dairy and swine wastes

Naturally occurring estrogens in animal wastes may cause negative environmental impacts, yet their abundance in animal waste treatment and storage structures is poorly documented. To better quantify estrogen concentrations in animal wastes, multiple waste samples were collected from treatment and storage structures at dairy and swine facilities and analyzed for concentrations of 17beta-estradiol (E2), estrone (E1), and 17alpha-estradiol by gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy and by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (E2 only). Mass ratios of each estrogen to the macronutrients nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium were also determined. Because manure application rates are typically macronutrient-based, estrogen to macronutrient ratios are proportional to areal mass application rates of estrogen to fields. Swine farrowing waste (from farrowing sows and piglets) had the highest ratios of E2 to macronutrients. Mean ratios in swine farrowing waste were roughly twice those in swine finishing waste (from growing male and nonpregnant female animals) and more than four times higher than those in dairy waste (from lactating cows in various stages of their reproductive cycles); these differences were statistically significant (alpha = 0.05). Estrone followed a similar trend. In contrast, ratios of 17alpha-estradiol to macronutrients were highest in dairy operations. These results can be used to better predict estrogen loading rates on fields receiving swine and dairy wastes.     

Enhancing the design and performance of a gate-all-around (GAA) charge plasma nanowire field-effect transistor with the help of the negative-capacitance technique

A gate-all-around charge plasma nanowire field-effect transistor (GAA CP NW FET) device using the negative-capacitance technique is introduced, termed the GAA CP NW negative-capacitance (NC) FET. In the face of bottleneck issues in nanoscale devices such as rising power dissipation, new techniques must be introduced into FET structures to overcome their major limitations. Negative capacitance is an efficient effect that can be incorporated into a device to enhance its performance for low-power applications and help to reduce the operating voltage. The Landau–Khalatnikov equation can be applied in such cases to obtain the effective bias. To determine the effects of negative capacitance, lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ferroelectric material, a ceramic material with perovskite properties, is adopted as a gate insulator. This approach diminishes the supply voltage and reduces the power dissipation in the device. Excluding their polarization properties, ferroelectric materials are similar to dielectric materials, and PZT offers abundant polarization with improved reliability and a higher dielectric capacitance. Without proper tuning of the thickness of the PZT material, hysteresis behavior mat occur. Hence, the thickness of the PZT material (t_FE) is an essential parameter to optimize the device performance and achieve a reduced threshold voltage for the GAA CP NW NC-FET device proposed herein. Furthermore, varying the thickness of the PZT ferroelectric material can also enhance the performance. When using the highest values of t_FE, improved outcomes with an analogously lower operating voltage are observed. The effects of varying t_FE on the performance characteristics of the device including the drain current, transconductance, polarized charge, etc. are also interpreted herein.

     

The mitigation of signal integrity issues in coupled MWCNT bundles and a comparison with Cu interconnects

Journal of Computational Electronics - In the nanoscale regime, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are being considered as a future alternative interconnect material for traditional copper (Cu) wires in...     

Performance modeling of DTN routing with heterogeneous and selfish nodes

The performance modeling study of Delay-Tolerant Network routing, in general, assumes the nodes to be homogeneous (in terms of features such as the coverage range) and uncompromised (in terms of forwarding messages). However, in realistic settings this may not be the case. The routing performance modeling of such realistic scenarios that involve multifariously-featured and egotistic nodes would be interesting and insightful. To this end, in this paper, we analytically model the routing behavior of such nodes using Ordinary Differential Equations for two different routing protocols namely, Epidemic Routing and Two-Hop Routing. Furthermore, we also study the degradation in the routing performance caused by an increase in the fraction of selfish nodes present in the heterogeneous node population. The proposed analytical model is validated via extensive simulations.     

Mechanical property enhancement of non‐bonding electrospun mats via adhesive

In the present study, the effect of adhesive on the morphology of different electrospun polymeric mats was investigated. The modification of two polymers, poly(methyl methacrylate) and poly(vinyl chloride), was carried out by blending the polymers with different amounts of poly(butyl acrylate) (PBA) adhesive to investigate the effect of different amounts of adhesive with heat hardener in hybrid mats. The introduction of various concentrations of PBA into different polymer solutions led to the formation of point‐bonded electrospun fibrous mats. Scanning electron microscopy images indicated that point‐bonded polymer/adhesive fibers were uniformly distributed throughout the mats. Fourier transform infrared spectrometry, contact angle measurements and thermogravimetric analysis were used to study the different properties of the hybrid mats. The tensile strength of the blended fibrous electrospun mats was increased effectively. This enhancement of the mechanical properties of the mats due to the presence of adhesive increases the number of potential applications of the electrospun mats, especially for mechanically weak polymers. Copyright © 2012 Society of Chemical Industry     

Identification of Natural Products as Potential Pharmacological Chaperones for Protein Misfolding Diseases

Defective protein folding and accumulation of misfolded proteins is associated with neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, secretory, and metabolic disorders. Efforts are being made to identify small-molecule modulators or structural-correctors for conformationally destabilized proteins implicated in various protein aggregation diseases. Using a metastable-reporter-based primary screen, we evaluated pharmacological chaperone activity of a diverse class of natural products. We found that a flavonoid glycoside ( C-10 , chrysoeriol-7-O-β-D-glucopyranoside) stabilizes metastable proteins, prevents its aggregation, and remodels the oligomers into protease-sensitive species. Data was corroborated with additional secondary screen with disease-specific pathogenic protein. In vitro and cell-based experiments showed that C-10 inhibits α-synuclein aggregation which is implicated in synucleinopathies-related neurodegeneration. C-10 interferes in its structural transition into β-sheeted fibrils and mitigates α-synuclein aggregation-associated cytotoxic effects. Computational modeling suggests that C-10 binds to unique sites in α-synuclein which may interfere in its aggregation amplification. These findings open an avenue for comprehensive SAR development for flavonoid glycosides as pharmacological chaperones for metastable and aggregation-prone proteins implicated in protein conformational diseases.     

A PHRASE GRAMMAR-BASED CONCEPTUAL INDEXING PARADIGM

ABSTRACT

Present day information retrieval systems largely ignore the issues of lexical and compositional semantics, and rely mainly on some statistical measures for choosing or evolving an indexing scheme. This has been the reason for the decreasing precision in their responses, given an exponentially increasing number of Web pages. The work reported in this paper addresses this issue from a linguistic point of view. We show that the detection of domain-specific phrases can capture the task-specific semantics of documents. We introduce the notion of n*-gram formalism to characterize the domain-specific phrases and their variants, taking a few sample domains. A method to construct a phrase grammar from a small set of documents is proposed. A method of conceptual indexing based on the phrase grammar has also been proposed. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we have designed a versatile system that can perform concept-based retrieval, in addition to several document-processing tasks, such as text classification, extraction-based summarization, context tracking, and semantic tagging. Collectively, the system can address the semantic content of documents. Considering the fact that an average user prefers highly relevant results in the top-ranked subset to an exhaustively retrieved set, it is shown that the proposed system performs better in that it retrieves documents that are more conceptually relevant than those retrieved by Google, and at 95% confidence level.     

Strategic Shuffling of Clay Layers to Imbue Them with Responsiveness

Layers of naturally occurring clay minerals are rearranged to prepare highly sensitive multiresponsive clay–clay bilayer membrane (CCBM). The CCBM introduced here responds to the minuscule changes in the surrounding environments including temperature, humidity, and presence of solvent vapors by morphing in specific manners. Strips cut from CCBM exhibit up to 588 N kg^?1 force output when exposed to temperature fluctuations. Inheriting the natural stability of clay minerals, CCBM demonstrates extreme robustness, heating up to 500 °C, cooling with liquid N₂ and exposure to corrosive chemical vapors did not deteriorate its bending performance. Mechanistic studies suggest that shape transformations of CCBM are driven by the unequal response of its components to external stimuli.     

Efficient Jarratt-like methods for solving systems of nonlinear equations

We present the iterative methods of fourth and sixth order convergence for solving systems of nonlinear equations. Fourth order method is composed of two Jarratt-like steps and requires the evaluations of one function, two first derivatives and one matrix inversion in each iteration. Sixth order method is the composition of three Jarratt-like steps of which the first two steps are that of the proposed fourth order scheme and requires one extra function evaluation in addition to the evaluations of fourth order method. Computational efficiency in its general form is discussed. A comparison between the efficiencies of proposed techniques with existing methods of similar nature is made. The performance is tested through numerical examples. Moreover, theoretical results concerning order of convergence and computational efficiency are confirmed in the examples. It is shown that the present methods are more efficient than their existing counterparts, particularly when applied to the large systems of equations.