Nutrition education for student community volunteers: a comparative study of two different communication methods

BACKGROUND: Nutrition education for student volunteers can enhance their skills, and they can act as change agents in the community. There is a dearth of data from India on the effectiveness of different communication tools in providing nutrition education to student volunteers. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to examine the comparative effectiveness of two different methods of communication--lectures in the classroom aided by print material, and a televised version of a local folk-dance form--for providing nutrition education to student community volunteers in a South Indian state. METHODS: Interventions were conducted during two mega-camps of student volunteers (camps 1 and 2) with 70 and 137 participants, respectively. Their knowledge levels were tested at baseline. Camp 1 received the lecture intervention and camp 2 the televised folk-dance intervention. Knowledge scores were measured before and after the intervention in each camp, and the two camps were compared for significant improvements in knowledge. RESULTS: At baseline, the knowledge levels of students in both camps were comparable. Significant improvement in knowledge was observed in both camps after intervention (p < .05). Although there was no significant difference between the camps in improvement in knowledge, a significant difference was observed when only the positive increments (improvement over baseline) were compared. CONCLUSIONS: The televised version of the folk-dance form was better in bringing about positive increment.     

Comparison of Corrosion Resistance Properties of Electrophoretically Deposited MoS2 and WS2 Nanosheets Coatings on Mild Steel

Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A - The present work compares the corrosion resistance properties of electrophoretically deposited MoS2 and WS2 nanosheets coatings on mild steel....     

Evaluating rock mass disturbance within open-pit excavations using seismic methods: A case study from the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station

Understanding rock strength is essential when undertaking major excavation projects,as accurate assessments ensure both safe and cost-effective engineered slopes.Balancing the cost-safety trade-off becomes more imperative during the construction of critical infrastructure such as nuclear power stations,where key components are built within relatively deep excavations.Designing these engineered slopes is reliant on rock strength models,which are generally parameterised using estimates of rock properties(e.g.unconfined compressive strength,rock disturbance) measured prior to the commencement of works.However,the physical process of excavation weakens the remaining rock mass.Therefore,the model also requires an adjustment for the anticipated rock disturbance.In practice,this parameter is difficult to quantify and as a result it is often poorly constrained.This can have a significant impact on the final design and cost of excavation.We present results from passive and active seismic surveys,which image the extent and degree of disturbance within recently excavated slopes at the construction site of Hinkley Point C nuclear power station.Results from active seismic surveys indicate that the disturbance is primarily confined to 0.5 m from the excavated face.In conjunction,passive monitoring is used to detected seismic events corresponding to fracturing on the cm-scale and event locations are in agreement with 0.5 m of disturbance into the rock face.This suggests rock disturbance at this site is relatively low and occurred during and immediately after the excavation.A ratio of seismic velocities recorded before and after excavations are used to determine the disturbance parameter required for the Hoek-Brown rock failure criterion,and we assess that rock disturbance is low with the magnitude of the disturbance diminishing more quickly than expected into the excavated slope.Seismic methods provide a low-cost and quick method to assess excavation related rock mass disturbance,which can lead to cost reductions in large excavation projects.     

Electron beam-induced thickening of the protective oxide layer around Fe nanoparticles

There are many circumstances in science where the process of measuring the properties of a system alters the system. An imaging process can exert an inadvertent effect on the object being observed. Consequently, what we observe does not necessarily represent what had been present before the observation. Normally, this effect can be ignored if the consequence of such a change is believed not to be significant. The expansion of nanostructured materials has made high-resolution transmission electron microscopy one of the indispensable tools for probing the characteristics of nanomaterials. Modification of nanoparticles by the electron beam during their imaging has been widely noticed and this is generally believed to be due to electron beam-induced heating effect, defect formation in the particles, charging of the particle, or excitation of surrounding gases. However, an explicit experimental identification of which process dominates is often very hard to establish. We report the thickening of native oxide layer on iron nanoparticle under electron beam irradiation. Based on atomic level imaging, electron diffraction, and computer simulation, we have direct evidence that the protecting oxide layer formed on Fe nanoparticle at room temperature in air or oxygen continues to grow during an electron beam bombardment in the vacuum system typical of most TEM systems. Typically, the oxide layer increases from approximately 3 to approximately 6 nm following approximately 1h electron beam exposure typically with an electron flux of 7 x 10(5)nm(-2)s(-1) and an vacuum of approximately 3 x 10(-5)Pa. Partial illumination of a nanoparticle and observation of the shell thickening conclusively demonstrates that many of the mechanisms postulated to explain such processes are not occurring to a significant extent. The observed growth is not related to the electron beam-induced heating of the nanoparticle, or residual oxygen ionization, or establishment of an electrical field, rather it is related to electron beam-facilitated mass transport across the oxide layer (a defect-related process). The growth follows a parabolic growth law.     

A Photoclick Hydrogel for Enhanced Single‐Cell Immunoblotting

Advances in single‐cell immunoblotting assays, which facilitate the exploration of cell‐to‐cell variation that affects biological systems from cancer development to stem cell biology, have attracted much attention. A tetrazole‐functionalized photoclick hydrogel is reported for single‐cell proteomic analysis. The gel serves as a molecular sieving matrix for sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and a protein immobilization scaffold for in‐gel immunoblotting. Upon a very short time (60 s) of long‐wavelength ultraviolet irradiation, it can effectively capture the electrophoretically separated proteins in the gel for the subsequent in situ antibody incubation. As a proof of concept, its performance is demonstrated in profiling cell‐to‐cell variations of P‐glycoprotein expression in GES‐1/MGC803 cell lines treated with different drugs. Combined with single‐cell immunoblotting method, employing this photoactive gel enables the monitoring simultaneously in ≈2000 individual cells of subtle protein expression level changes that may be concealed using conventional techniques. The proposed gel has the advantages of excellent electrophoretic separation ability, high protein photoimmobilization efficiency, low autofluorescence, and it can be used as a promising photoactive polyacrylamide gel for in‐gel/in situ capillary and microfluidic immunoblotting assays, especially for developing novel single cell immunoblotting methods.     

Analyzing the efficiency of nanostructured Sm3+- and Gd3+-doped TiO2 and constructing DSSCs using efficacious photoanodes

The rare earth elements, gadolinium and samarium, are doped with TiO₂ by hydrothermal synthesis technique to study the photoconversion performance of a photoanode in a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC). The obtained materials are subjected to the characterizations XRD, HR-TEM, UV–Vis spectroscopy, and XPS. DSSCs are fabricated using N719 dye, redox electrolyte, and platinum counter electrode. Charge-transfer ability was investigated using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) on DSSCs. The efficiencies of DSSCs are influenced by the electron transport within the TiO₂–dye–electrolyte system. After the fabrication and simulation, among the two, Gd³⁺-doped TiO₂ gives the desired outcomes and higher efficiency (5.542%) than the pure and Sm³⁺-doped TiO₂ and thus it proves to be a superior solar cell anode material.

     

A pilot level approach to remove anionic species from industrial effluents using a novel carbonate-steam pyrolysed activated charcoal system

In our laboratory, we synthesized a novel surface tailored activated charcoal in removing nitrite species from fertilizer industrial effluents. A customized high temperature carbonate-steam activation technique was adopted to develop the sodium carbonate impregnated activated charcoal (SCIAC). The surface properties of the material were determined using SEM, TG and X-RD techniques. Batch adsorption experiments were performed for optimizing various conditions such as solution pH, contact time, temperature and adsorbent dose for maximizing the nitrite adsorption onto SCIAC. Considerably, a very high nitrite adsorption percentage of 83.8 was obtained for an initial nitrite concentration of 5.0?mg/L at pH 3.0. Among the various equilibrium and kinetic models, Freundlich and pseudo-second-order expressions, respectively, were well enough to explain the adsorption processes. In general, it may conclude that the change in surface characteristics of the adsorbent material after the pyrolysis process is highly favorable for effective removal of nitrite ions from aqueous systems. Adsorption capacity of SCIAC was 27.03?mg/g and studies revealed that the material was feasible in removing nitrite from industrial effluents.     

Improvement of battery lifetime in software-defined network using particle swarm optimization based cluster-head gateway switch routing protocol with fuzzy rules

The software-defined network (SDN) is one of the network architectures, in which the data plane and control plane is divided from each other, and the network can be handled using a sensibly centralized controller and this method is adopted to reconfigure the wireless sensor network automatically. In this article, to implement the SDN in MANET, in which control nodes can be chosen in SDN dynamically for the activation of MANET function to allocate the works to other mobile nodes to the base station. However, in the field of mobile ad hoc networks, the network lifetime, and battery lifetime is one of the major problems and the energy consumption can play a significant rule for the transmission of data in the SDN. Therefore, in this article, particle swarm optimization (PSO) based CGSR (cluster-head gateway switch routing protocol) algorithm with fuzzy rules is proposed to increase the network lifetime of battery powered mobile nodes by reducing the energy consumptions of each node in software-defined MANET. In this proposed method, a routing method that can permit various mobile nodes with low battery power to transmits the data from source node to base station. We design a PSO based CGSR routing protocol by selecting the routing mobile nodes using fuzzy rules for packet transmission. In CGSR process, the formation of cluster and selection of cluster head is executed depending on the particle swarm optimization method. This proposed routing protocol can be used to enhance the battery lifetime by extension of the network lifetime with numerical analysis for efficient route node selection.     

2D van der Waals Heterojunction of Organic and Inorganic Monolayers for High Responsivity Phototransistors

Van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures composing of organic molecules with inorganic 2D crystals open the door to fabricate various promising hybrid devices. Here, a fully ordered organic self-assembled monolayer (SAM) to construct hybrid organic–inorganic vdW heterojunction phototransistors for highly sensitive light detection is used. The heterojunctions, formed by layering MoS₂ monolayer crystals onto organic [12-(benzo[b]benzo[4,5]thieno[2,3-d]thiophen-2-yl)dodecyl)]phosphonic acid SAM, are characterized by Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy as well as Kelvin probe force microscopy. Remarkably, this vdW heterojunction transistor exhibits a superior photoresponsivity of 475 A W⁻¹ and enhanced external quantum efficiency of 1.45 × 10⁵%, as well as an extremely low dark photocurrent in the pA range. This work demonstrates that hybridizing SAM with 2D materials can be a promising strategy for fabricating diversified optoelectronic devices with unique properties.