Opportunities for plant-derived enhancers for iron,zinc, and calcium bioavailability: A review

Understanding of the mechanism of interactions between dietary elements, their salts, and complexing/binding ligands is vital to manage both deficiency and toxicity associated with essential element bioavailability. Numerous mineral ligands are found in both animal and plant foods and are known to exert bioactivity via element chelation resulting in modulation of antioxidant capacity or micobiome metabolism among other physiological outcomes. However, little is explored in the context of dietary mineral ligands and element bioavailability enhancement, particularly with respect to ligands from plant-derived food sources. This review highlights a novel perspective to consider various plant macro/micronutrients as prospective bioavailability enhancing ligands of three essential elements (Fe, Zn, and Ca). We also delineate the molecular mechanisms of the ligand-binding interactions underlying mineral bioaccessibility at the luminal level. We conclude that despite current understandings of some of the structure–activity relationships associated with strong mineral–ligand binding, the physiological links between ligands as element carriers and uptake at targeted sites throughout the gastrointestinal (GI) tract still require more research. The binding behavior of potential ligands in the human diet should be further elucidated and validated using pharmacokinetic approaches and GI models.     

Treated municipal wastewater as option to the use of fresh water for the cultivation of valuable pastoral species Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris L.)

The increasing aridity exacerbated by climatic changes is leading to loss of perennial herbaceous plants Cenchrus ciliaris, an apomictic, polyploid grass used as forage in hot and dry areas, and is currently under threat for the increased scarcity of water. In this study, treated municipal wastewater (TWW) was used to irrigate two ploidy levels of C. ciliaris for two consecutive years. The objectives were (1) to assess the possibility of using unconventional water for watering C. ciliaris and (2) to identify at what extent TWW irrigation affected growth and nutritive properties of C. ciliaris that differed for polyploidy level. TWW irrigation positively affected growth and physiological plant parameters. In leaves of TWW watered C. ciliaris, the concentration of N_t, P and K significantly increased. The tetraploid C. ciliaris showed a better growth and quality than the hexaploid ones, appearing the most suitable cultivar to be irrigated with TWW for feed uses. In short, TWW can be strategically used for irrigating forage species with the double output of ameliorating soil properties, recovering degraded area and improving the nutritive values of fodder species contributing to the promotion of a green and sustainable circular economy, more in climatically under pressure developing countries.     

Progressive collapse of 2D reinforced concrete structures under sudden column removal

Once a column in building is removed due to gas explosion, vehicle impact, terrorist attack, earthquake or any natural disaster, the loading supported by removed column transfers to neighboring structural elements. If these elements are unable to resist the supplementary loading, they continue to fail, which leads to progressive collapse of building. In this paper, an efficient strategy to model and simulate the progressive collapse of multi-story reinforced concrete structure under sudden column removal is presented. The strategy is subdivided into several connected steps including failure mechanism creation, MBS dynamic analysis and dynamic contact simulation, the latter is solved by using conserving/decaying scheme to handle the stiff nonlinear dynamic equations. The effect of gravity loads, structure-ground contact, and structure-structure contact are accounted for as well. The main novelty in this study consists in the introduction of failure function, and the proper manner to control the mechanism creation of a frame until its total failure. Moreover, this contribution pertains to a very thorough investigation of progressive collapse of the structure under sudden column removal. The proposed methodology is applied to a six-story frame, and many different progressive collapse scenarios are investigated. The results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed strategy.     

Physical properties of electron beam irradiated poly(vinyl butyral) composites with carbamate,imidazole, and tetrazolium dye

Films of poly(vinyl butyral) composites with triphenyl tetrazolium chloride dye (TTC) and the antioxidant nickel dibutyl dithiocarbamate (NBC) or 2‐mercaptobenzimidazole (MBI) were prepared by the solution casting method using butyl alcohol as a solvent. The effect of various doses of electron beam irradiation (50–200 kGy) on color response, thermal, and mechanical properties were investigated. The color measurements showed that the films of the different composites possessed a high sensitivity to electron beam irradiation, in which the nearly colorless films were changed to deep red color, which can be easily detected by visual observations. In addition, the change in color depends on irradiation dose and the contents of the TTC dye. Moreover, the presence of the antioxidants NBC or MBI has no effect on the development of color. However, PVB/TTC and PVB/TTC/MBI composites showed high regular change in color as a function of irradiation dose. The thermogravimetric analysis used to study the thermal stability indicated that PVB/TTC composites either before or after electron beam irradiation are thermally more stable than neat PVB polymer. The presence of the antioxidants NBC or MBI offered protection to PVB/TTC composites against decomposition or oxidative degradation resulted from irradiation. Blending unirradiated PVB with TTC dye, mixture of TTC and NBC, and mixture of TTC and MBI reduced the tensile strength by 4, 20, and 17% upon blending, respectively. However, the reduction in tensile strength of the entire composite films (～7% based on the initial value) upon exposure to a dose of 50 kGy is acceptable for practical applications. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 101: 4358–4365, 2006     

KP-Rank: a semantic-based unsupervised approach for keyphrase extraction from text data

Automatic key concept identification from text is the main challenging task in information extraction, information retrieval, digital libraries, ontology learning, and text analysis. The main difficulty lies in the issues with the text data itself, such as noise in text, diversity, scale of data, context dependency and word sense ambiguity. To cope with this challenge, numerous supervised and unsupervised approaches have been devised. The existing topical clustering-based approaches for keyphrase extraction are domain dependent and overlooks semantic similarity between candidate features while extracting the topical phrases. In this paper, a semantic based unsupervised approach (KP-Rank) is proposed for keyphrase extraction. In the proposed approach, we exploited Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and clustering techniques and a novel frequency-based algorithm for candidate ranking is introduced which considers locality-based sentence, paragraph and section frequencies. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, three benchmark datasets (i.e. Inspec, 500N-KPCrowed and SemEval-2010) from different domains are used. The experimental results show that overall, the KP-Rank achieved significant improvements over the existing approaches on the selected performance measures.

     

Spatial distribution and habitat characterization of schistosomiasis host snails in lake and land habitats of western Kenya

Intermediate host snails of schistosomiasis were surveyed in this study to determine their abundance and distribution in the lake and land aquatic habitats of Lake Victoria basin of Kenya. Several sites were sampled at eight locations, both in the lake and on the land. The habitat and/or vegetation type (i.e. open water, hippo grass, hyacinth, ambatch trees, other vegetation, stream, swamp, pond, dam) of the sampled aquatic sites within the locations were also differentiated, water physicochemical parameters were determined, and the abundance of different species or taxa of phytoplankton and zooplankton were enumerated and correlated with the abundance of schistosomiasis snails in the sites. The results indicated significantly more Biomphalaria sudanica snails than Bulinus africanus snails in different physical habitats on land (Student's t‐test, P < 0.05), as well as in different locations on land (Student's t‐test, P = 0.026). Regression analyses revealed that several physicochemical parameters, including dissolved oxygen (R² = ?0.659; n = 8; P = 0.014), pH (R² = 0.728; n = 8; P = 0.007) and turbulence (R² = ?0.616; n = 8; P = 0.02), were predictive of Biomphalaria spp. abundance, while pH (R² = 0.610; n = 8; P = 0.02) and turbulence (R² = ?0.578; n = 8; P = 0.028) were predictive of Bulinus spp. abundance in different locations in the lake. Cyanobacteria (R² = 0.638; n = 8; P = 0.02) and chlorophyceae (R² = ?0.50; n = 8; P = 0.05) were shown to be predictive of both Biomphalaria spp. and Bulinus spp. abundance in different locations in the lake. Zooplankton abundance varied significantly between different locations in the lake (One‐way anova , P < 0.001). Bosmina spp. were found to be predictive of both Biomphalaria spp. (R² = ?0.627; n = 8; P = 0.01) and Bulinus spp. (R² = ?0.50; n = 8; P = 0.05) in different locations in the lake. The results from this study will help inform policy regarding control measures for schistosomias and intermediate snail hosts in Lake Victoria waters, as well as in adjacent terrestrial aquatic habitats and even beyond.     

Fully Automated Inductance Measuring System Using New Fabricated Inductance Box

Decade inductance boxes are widely used in electrical laboratories for calibration of instruments that measure inductance. The main aim of this paper is to construct a new inductance box providing a huge number of automated inductance steps, which are used in the laboratories to perform full automatic calibration of inductance meters. Therefore, a new inductance box has been introduced that mainly consists of three decades. The three inductance decades have the same design, but each has its four different internal inductive elements. Each decade can generate 15 different inductance values, so it is more economical and practical compared to the other ordinary decades, which produce only 10 values by using 10 internal inductive elements. 1666 different inductance values can be obtained from this inductance box, while 4096 inductance values can be obtained by the possible combinations of its three decades steps. Practical design, fabrication and specifications of this new inductance box are demonstrated in detail. It is designed to achieve relative accuracy in the range from 5 × 10^?4 to 5 × 10^?3. It could be used to perform full automatic inductance measurements at the National Institute of Standards, Egypt, for the first time. Comparison between an ordinary inductance box and the new introduced one has been made to validate its performance.