Gestational Exposure to Bisphenol A Affects Testicular Morphology,Germ Cell Associations,and Functions of Spermatogonial Stem Cells in Male Offspring

Exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) in the gestational period damages the reproductive health of offspring; detailed evidence regarding BPA-induced damage in testicular germ cells of offspring is still limited. In this study, pregnant mice (F0) were gavaged with three BPA doses (50 μg, 5 mg, and 50 mg/kg body weight (bw)/day; tolerable daily intake (TDI), no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL), and lowest-observed-adverse-effect level (LOAEL), respectively) on embryonic days 7 to 14, followed by investigation of the transgenerational effects of such exposure in male offspring. We observed that the NOAEL- and LOAEL-exposed F1 offspring had abnormalities in anogenital distance, nipple retention, and pubertal onset (days), together with differences in seminiferous epithelial stages and testis morphology. These effects were eradicated in the next F2 and F3 generations. Moreover, there was an alteration in the ratio of germ cell population and the apoptosis rate in germ cells increased in F1 offspring at the LOAEL dose. However, the total number of spermatogonia remained unchanged. Finally, a reduction in the stemness properties of spermatogonial stem cells in F1 offspring was observed upon LOAEL exposure. Therefore, we provide evidence of BPA-induced disruption of physiology and functions in male germ cells during the gestational period. This may lead to several reproductive health issues and infertility in offspring.     

Recent epidemiological status of malaria in Calcutta Municipal Corporation area, West Bengal

In Calcutta, Plasmodium falciparum cases and death due to malaria show remarkably increasing trend since 1990. The incidence of P. falciparum malaria has increased more than eleven folds in 1996 in comparison to 1990, with 0, 0, 0, 3, 7, 52 and 17 deaths in 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996 respectively. Situation is more serious than what it is projected in official records as annual blood examination rate (ABER) in Calcutta Municipal area is poor, varying from 1.5 to 3.9 in 1993 and 1996 respectively. This is further evident from the fact that in a study area in 19 months (January 1995 to July 1996) the slide positivity rate (SPR) was 47.94% on an average 28.72% suffer from P. falciparum infection (as low as 0.5% in June 1996 and as high as 71.5% in November 1996). For the first time resistance of P. falciparum to chloroquine has been noted at RII and RIII level. The response of the same parasite strain to sulfa-pyrimethamine combination drug is very much promising. Fresh infection is occurring in all the months of the year and the favourable period is from July to November 1995 that is corroborating with Container index and Breteau index related to the vector mosquito Anopheles. Susceptibility status of An. stephensi indicates that the mosquito species has acquired resistance to DDT, BHC, propoxure and malathion but is still susceptible to fenthion and deltamethrin.     

Multifunctional greener additives for lubricating oil

In an anticipation to produce biodegradable additives with multifunctional performance for a cost‐effective lubricant composition, copolymers are synthesized by incorporating rice bran oil, peanut oil, β‐pinene in the backbone of isodecyl acrylate through microwave irradiation method using AIBN (azobisisobutyronitrile) as radical initiator. The prepared polymers are characterized by spectral techniques (IR, NMR) and SEC‐GPC analysis, thermal stability was determined by thermogravimetric analysis. Performance of the polymers as antiwear (AW), pour point depressant (PPD), viscosity modifier/viscosity index improver (VII) in different mineral base oils (SN1 and SN2) were done by standard ASTM methods. Biodegradability test of the polymers was carried out by disk diffusion (DD) and soil burial test methods. The copolymers of rice bran oil showed better viscosity index values and AW property, whereas the copolymers of peanut oil found to be most effective as PPD. Copolymers with higher concentration of green units showed better performance as viscosity modifier, pour point depressant and AW performance along with excellent biodegradability. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2017. © 2017 Society of Plastics Engineers     

Design and Implementation of Routing Algorithm to Enhance Network Lifetime in WBAN

Today’s era is the era of smart and remote applications exploiting advancement in sensors, cloud, Internet of things etc. Major application is in healthcare monitoring and support using wireless body area network (WBAN) in which sensor nodes sense vital physiological parameters and send to server through sink i.e. smart phone nowadays for seamless monitoring. The most significant issue in such applications is energy efficiency which leads to enhanced network life time that ensures uninterrupted seamless services. From source to sink data transmission may occur considering three different scenarios: source to sink single hop direct data transmission irrespective of in-between node distance, source to sink multi hop data transmission in which transmission range of source node is fixed at a threshold to find next forwarder node and transmission range of source node is incremented by affixed value until data gets transmitted to sink. In this work WBAN having different network configurations based on fixed or random positions of nodes have been simulated. Different scenarios with fixed and varying number of nodes are framed and simulated using MATLAB 2020a for performance evaluation of proposed algorithm in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, path loss etc. due to data transmission from source to sink. Experimental results show that incremental approach is better than direct one in terms of energy consumption, path loss and network lifetime. While selecting transmission range of a source node, it is considered to keep Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) lower to reduce impact on human tissue.

     

In Vitro Structural and Functional Evaluation of Gold Nanoparticles Conjugated Antibiotics

Bactericidal efficacy of gold nanoparticles conjugated with ampicillin, streptomycin and kanamycin were evaluated. Gold nanoparticles (Gnps) were conjugated with the antibiotics during the synthesis of nanoparticles utilizing the combined reducing property of antibiotics and sodium borohydride. The conjugation of nanoparticles was confirmed by dynamic light scattering (DLS) and electron microscopic (EM) studies. Such Gnps conjugated antibiotics showed greater bactericidal activity in standard agar well diffusion assay. The minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of all the three antibiotics along with their Gnps conjugated forms were determined in three bacterial strains, Escherichia coli DH5α, Micrococcus luteus and Staphylococcus aureus. Among them, streptomycin and kanamycin showed significant reduction in MIC values in their Gnps conjugated form whereas; Gnps conjugated ampicillin showed slight decrement in the MIC value compared to its free form. On the other hand, all of them showed more heat stability in their Gnps conjugated forms. Thus, our findings indicated that Gnps conjugated antibiotics are more efficient and might have significant therapeutic implications. Biswarup Saha and Jaydeep Bhattacharya authors contributed equally.     

A perceptually motivated stationary wavelet packet filterbank using improved spectral over-subtraction for enhancement of speech in various noise environments

In this paper, we propose a speech enhancement method where the front-end decomposition of the input speech is performed by temporally processing using a filterbank. The proposed method incorporates a perceptually motivated stationary wavelet packet filterbank (PM-SWPFB) and an improved spectral over-subtraction (I-SOS) algorithm for the enhancement of speech in various noise environments. The stationary wavelet packet transform (SWPT) is a shift invariant transform. The PM-SWPFB is obtained by selecting the stationary wavelet packet tree in such a manner that it matches closely the non-linear resolution of the critical band structure of the psychoacoustic model. After the decomposition of the input speech, the I-SOS algorithm is applied in each subband, separately for the estimation of speech. The I-SOS uses a continuous noise estimation approach and estimate noise power from each subband without the need of explicit speech silence detection. The subband noise power is estimated and updated by adaptively smoothing the noisy signal power. The smoothing parameter in each subband is controlled by a function of the estimated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The performance of the proposed speech enhancement method is tested on speech signals degraded by various real-world noises. Using objective speech quality measures (SNR, segmental SNR (SegSNR), perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) score), and spectrograms with informal listening tests, we show that the proposed speech enhancement method outperforms than the spectral subtractive-type algorithms and improves quality and intelligibility of the enhanced speech.     

Unsupervised image thresholding: hardware architecture and its usage for FPGA-SoC platform

ABSTRACT

Otsu’s global automatic image thresholding operation is used in various image processing applications. It needs computation of normalized cumulative histogram, mean and cumulative moments that are compute-intensive operations. In this paper, a custom architecture is presented for an efficient computation of Otsu’s algorithm along with its utilization as an intellectual property (IP) core in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based system-on-chip (SoC) environment for the application of connected component analysis (CCA). A self-normalization technique is employed, where single-cycle, read–modify–write operations are performed with block random access memories (BRAMs) and digital signal processing (DSP)slices. The architecture is designed for 640 × 480 size of images that are captured by a high-resolution analouge camera and buffered in a DDR2 SDRAM of Xilinx ML-507 platform at 25.175 MHz clock frequency. The embedded PowerPC processor core is used to control the frame acquisition process. Experimental results on Virtex-5 xc5vfx70t FPGA device show that the architecture utilizes 1.4% slices, 2.7% BRAMs and 3.9% DSP48E slices. The total power consumption of the design is 1440.59 mW. The proposed architecture as an IP core is able to work in real-time with standard VGA resolution video and requires low computational resources.     

Modelling majority and expert influences on opinion formation in online social networks

Two most important social influences that shape the opinion formation process are: (i) the majority influence caused by the existence of a large group of people sharing similar opinions and (ii) the expert influence originated from the presence of experts in a social group. When these two effects contradict each other in real life, they may pull the public opinions towards their respective directions. Existing models on opinion formation utilised the idea of expertise levels in conjunction with the expressed opinions of the agents to encapsulate the expert effect. However, they have disregarded the explicit consideration of the majority effect, and thereby failed to capture the concurrent and combined impact of these two influences on opinion evolution. To represent the majority and expert impacts, we explicitly use the concept of opinion consistency and expertise level consistency respectively in an innovative way by capitalizing the notion of entropy in measuring the homogeneity of a group. Consequently, our model successfully captures the opinion dynamics under the concomitant influence of majority and expert. We validate the efficacy of our model in capturing opinion dynamics in a real world scenario using the opinion evolution traces collected from a widely used online social network (OSN) platform. Moreover, simulation results reveal the impact of the aforementioned effects, and confirm that our model can properly capture the consensus, polarization and fragmentation properties of public opinion. Our model is also compared with some recent models to evaluate its performance in both real world and simulated environments.