Electronically tunable floating inductance simulator

In this letter, a new floating inductance simulator circuit is presented. The proposed structure consists of only one grounded capacitor without any external resistors and two different active elements. The active elements are dual-output current-controlled current conveyor (DO-CCCII) and operational transconductance amplifier (OTA). The proposed inductance simulator can be tuned electronically by changing the biasing current of the DO-CCCIIs or by changing the current of the OTA. Moreover, the circuit does not require any conditions of component matching. It has a good sensitivity performance with respect to tracking errors. As an application, the proposed inductance simulator is used to construct a fourth-order resistively terminated LC band-pass filter. The theoretical analysis is verified by the SPICE simulation results.     

All‐pass sections with rich cascadability and IC realization suitability

In this paper, two new circuit configurations for realizing voltage‐mode (VM) all‐pass sections (APSs) are presented. The proposed circuits employ only two differential voltage current conveyors (DVCCs) and are cascadable with other VM circuits due to their high‐input and low‐output impedances. The first configuration uses a grounded resistor and a grounded capacitor without requiring matching constraints, whereas the second employs two grounded resistors and a grounded capacitor with a single matching condition. While the first configuration can realize only one all‐pass response, the second can provide inverting and non‐inverting all‐pass responses with selection of appropriate input port. Adding two grounded resistors to the proposed filters, variable gain APSs can also be obtained. As applications, two quadrature oscillators, each of which using one of the proposed all‐pass circuits, one grounded resistor and one grounded capacitor are presented. SPICE simulation results are included to verify the theory. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recombinant Baculovirus: A Flexible Drug Screening Platform for Chikungunya Virus

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a mosquito-transmitted infectious agent that causes an endemic or epidemic outbreak(s) of Chikungunya fever that is reported in almost all countries. This virus is an intense global threat, due to its high rate of contagion and the lack of effective remedies. In this study, we developed two baculovirus expression vector system (BEVS)-based approaches for the screening of anti-CHIKV drugs in Spodoptera frugiperda insect (Sf21) cells and U-2OS cells. First, structural protein of CHIKV was co-expressed through BEVS and thereby induced cell fusion in Sf21 cells. We used an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) to co-express the green fluorescent protein (EGFP) for identifying these fusion events. The EGFP-positive Sf21 cells fused with each other and with uninfected cells to form syncytia. We identified that ursolic acid has potential anti-CHIKV activity in vitro, by using this approach. Second, BacMam virus-based gene delivery has been successfully applied for the transient expression of non-structural proteins with a subgenomic promoter-EGFP (SP-EGFP) cassette in U-2OS cells to act as an in vitro CHIKV replicon system. Our BacMam-based screening system has identified that the potential effects of baicalin and baicalein phytocompounds can inhibit the replicon activity of CHIKV in U-2OS cells. In conclusion, our results suggested that BEVS can be a potential tool for screening drugs against CHIKV.     

The effects of ozone,ultrasound and coating with shellac and lysozyme–chitosan on fresh egg during storage at ambient temperature – part 1: interior quality changes

The objective of this research was to investigate and compare the effect of different treatments including gaseous ozone (6-ppm/4-min), ultrasound (450 W/4 min) and coating of shellac, lysozyme–chitosan (L-C) on fresh eggs internal quality during storage for six weeks at ambient temperature. The internal quality attributes such as weight loss (WL), albumen viscosity, Haugh unit (HU), yolk index, total soluble solids, albumen and yolk's pH were monitored. Control groups had the worst HU (50.04), WL (8.35%), albumen pH (9.27) and viscosity (7.72 mPa·s) values after storage. The best interior qualities were obtained by shellac coating [HU (72.37), WL (1.37) and viscosity (30.10 mPa·s)] and sonication (albumen pH: 8.22). Thus, the shellac-coated eggs maintained all the internal quality parameters at the highest values, while the ozone and ultrasound only helped to keep the internal quality and enhance the shelf life of eggs.     

The fuzzy logic-based modeling of a micro-scale sloped solar chimney power plant

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - The energy demand of world is increasing worldwide because of increasing population and developing technology. The use of environmentally friendly...     

Effect of lysine incorporation,annealing and heat moisture treatment alone and in combination on the physico-chemical,retrogradation, rheological properties and in vitro digestibility of kithul (Caryota urens L.) starch

Physico-chemical, retrogradation, rheological properties and in vitro digestibility of lysine incorporated kithul starch modified by annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combinations were studied. LS-AHMT (annealed-heat moisture treated lysine incorporated kithul starch) exhibited lowest amylose leaching. LS-AHMT showed significantly (P ≤ 0.05) higher relative crystallinity. LS-ANS (annealed lysine incorporated kithul starch), LS-HMT (heat moisture treated lysine incorporated kithul starch) and LS-AHMT formed more weak gel by the effect of annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combination. LS-AHMT showed lowest pasting viscosities, G′ and G″ values among the modified kithul starch, which indicates its lower retrogradation properties. In vitro digestibility of kithul starch decreased after modifications and LS-ANS, LS-HMT and LS-AHMT showed significantly higher resistant starch content. The current study showed that annealing, heat moisture treatment and its combination on NS-LS (lysine incorporated kithul starch) effectively modified kithul starch properties.     

Face Recognition Based on Gabor Feature Extraction Followed by FastICA and LDA

Over the past few decades, face recognition has become the most effective biometric technique in recognizing people’s identity, as it is widely used in many areas of our daily lives. However, it is a challenging technique since facial images vary in rotations, expressions, and illuminations. To minimize the impact of these challenges, exploiting information from various feature extraction methods is recommended since one of the most critical tasks in face recognition system is the extraction of facial features. Therefore, this paper presents a new approach to face recognition based on the fusion of Gabor-based feature extraction, Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). In the presented method, first, face images are transformed to grayscale and resized to have a uniform size. After that, facial features are extracted from the aligned face image using Gabor, FastICA, and LDA methods. Finally, the nearest distance classifier is utilized to recognize the identity of the individuals. Here, the performance of six distance classifiers, namely Euclidean, Cosine, Bray-Curtis, Mahalanobis, Correlation, and Manhattan, are investigated. Experimental results revealed that the presented method attains a higher rank-one recognition rate compared to the recent approaches in the literature on four benchmarked face datasets: ORL, GT, FEI, and Yale. Moreover, it showed that the proposed method not only helps in better extracting the features but also in improving the overall efficiency of the facial recognition system.     

Dynamics of a family of continued fraction maps

We explore the dynamics of a 1-parameter family of continued fraction maps of the unit interval. The family contains as special instances the Gauss continued fraction map and the Fibonacci map. We determine the transfer operators of these dynamical maps and prove that the Denjoy–Minkowski measure is a common invariant measure of the family. We show that their analytic invariant measures obey a common functional equation generalizing Lewis’ functional equation and we find a.c. invariant measures for some members of the family. We also discuss a certain involution of this family which sends the Gauss map to the Fibonacci map relating Riemann's zeta function to the so-called Fibonacci zeta function.