Unilateral abdominal muscle herniation with pain: a distinctive variant of diabetic radiculopathy

Thoracic diabetic radiculopathy causing truncal pain and abdominal muscle bulging is a recognized though extremely rare complication of diabetes. We report here six cases, describing their clinical features and natural history in detail: the condition affects predominantly middle-aged men, usually on the right side of the abdominal wall, involving three to five adjacent nerve roots between T6 and T12. It may be accompanied by profound weight loss which is not normally due to poorly controlled diabetes. Complete resolution of this syndrome occurs after 3 to 12 months.     

Enhancement of over expression and chaperone assisted yield of folded recombinant aconitase in Escherichia coli in bioreactor cultures

A major portion of the over expressed yeast mitochondrial aconitase, a large 82 kDa monomeric TCA cycle enzyme, in Escherichia coli led to the formation of inclusion bodies. Bacterial chaperonin GroEL mediated the correct folding of aconitase with the assistance of its co-chaperonin GroES in an ATP dependent manner. Till date the chaperonin assisted folding of aconitase was limited to the shake flask studies with relatively low yields of folded aconitase. No attempt had yet been made to enhance the yield of chaperone mediated folding of aconitase using a bioreactor. The current report deals with the effect of co-expression of GroEL/GroES in the production of soluble, biologically active recombinant aconitase in E. coli by cultivation in a bioreactor at different temperatures under optimized conditions. It revealed that the yield of functional aconitase was enhanced, either in presence of co-expressed GroEL/ES or at low temperature cultivation. However, the outcome from the chaperone assisted folding of aconitase was more pronounced at lower temperature. A 3-fold enhancement in the yield of functional aconitase from the bioreactor based chaperone assisted folding was obtained as compared to the shake flask study. Hence, the present study provides optimized conditions for increasing the yield of functional aconitase by batch cultivation in a bioreactor.     

Space-Variant Approaches to Recovery of Depth from Defocused Images

The recovery of depth from defocused images involves calculating the depth of various points in a scene by modeling the effect that the focal parameters of the camera have on images acquired with a small depth of field. In the approach to depth from defocus (DFD), previous methods assume the depth to be constant over fairly large local regions and estimate the depth through inverse filtering by considering the system to be shift-invariant over those local regions. But a subimage when analyzed in isolation introduces errors in the estimate of the depth. In this paper, we propose two new approaches for estimating the depth from defocused images. The first approach proposed here models the DFD system as a block shift-variant one and incorporates the interaction of blur among neighboring subimages in an attempt to improve the estimate of the depth. The second approach looks at the depth from defocus problem in the space-frequency representation framework. In particular, the complex spectrogram and the Wigner distribution are shown to be likely candidates for recovering the depth from defocused images. The performances of the proposed methods are tested on both synthetic and real images. The proposed methods yield good results and the quality of the estimates obtained using these methods is compared with the existing method.     

Heat conduction in bismuth-antimony alloy single crystals between 4.2 and 300 K

Thermal conductivity measurements in the temperature range 4.2–300 K on three single crystals of bismuth containing 1.77, 3.2, and 9.33 at % antimony, respectively, are reported. In the low-temperature region, a change from purely phonon-phonon scattering process to a predominantly impurity scattering process was observed with the increase of antimony concentration. In the high-temperature region, the analysis of the results shows the dominance of the electronic contribution over the phonon contribution to the total thermal conductivity, though the latter is not negligible. Individual contributions to total electronic thermal conductivity were calculated, using the equation formulated by Price, for the sample containing 9.33 at % antimony. The agreement between (K _E)_calc and (K _E)_exp = K ? K_L seems to be quite satisfactory up to about 200 K.     

Photogeneration and recombination of carriers in hydrogenated amorphous silicon germanium alloys

The spectral dependence of carrier generation and recombination loss in a-SiGe:H samples having band gaps between 1.74 eV and 1.35 eV was studied in the Schottky barrier solar cell device structure. The active a-SiGe:H layers were of identical thickness (1 μm). The effect of hydrogen dilution of the source gases (silane and germane) on the generation and recombination characteristics was also studied. It has been observed that the net optical generation of carriers increases almost linearly with the lowering of the band gap but is independent of the localised states. Net recombination loss, on the other hand, increases with defect states but cannot be fully explained by taking into account the neutral defect centers alone. Within the above mentioned band gap range, it has been observed that the competing processes of generation and recombination resulted in a maximum short circuit current for a-SiGe:H samples of 1.44 eV band gap.     

Recursive Estimation of Motion Parameters

A robust algroithm that estimates the motion parameters recursively from a sequence of noisy images is presented here. We propose the use of the least median of squares method in conjunction with a computationally efficient recursive scheme. The method works well even when nearly half of the features have been matched very poorly. A recursive constrained least squares method is developed while dealing with a range or stereo data sequence and a recursive total least squares method is proposed for the monocular data sequence.     

Wave propagation through a hollow rectangular anisotropic dielectric guide

Wave propagation through a hollow rectangular dielectric guide with anisotropic surrounding is studied here. It has been shown that anisotropy can be utilized to reduce the loss in resonating structure of the gas laser system.     

Microstructural study of the titanium alloy Ti-15Mo-2.7Nb-3Al-0.2Si (TIMETAL 21S)

A relatively new titanium alloy, TIMETAL 21S (Ti-15Mo-2.7Nb-3Al-0.2Si-0.15O (in wt pct)), is a potential matrix material for advanced titanium matrix composites for elevated temperature use. In order to develop a perspective on the microstructural stability of this alloy, the influence of several commonly used heat treatments on the microstructure of TIMETAL 21S was studied using optical and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Depending on the specific thermal treatment, a number of phases, includingα,ω- type, and silicide, can form in this alloy. It was found that both recrystallized and nonrecrystallized areas could be present in the microstructure of an annealed bulk alloy, but the microstructure of annealed sheet alloy was fully recrystallized. The mixed structure of the bulk alloy, developed as a result of inhomogeneous deformation, could not be removed by heat treatment alone at 900 °C. Athermalω-type phase formed in this alloy upon quenching from the solution treatment temperature (900 °C). Silicide precipitates were also found in the quenched sample. Thermal analysis was used to determine theβ transus and silicide solvus as close to 815 °C and 1025 °C, respectively. In solution-treated and quenched samples, a high-temperature aging at 600 °C resulted in the precipitation ofα phase. The precipitation reaction was slower in the recrystallized regions compared to the nonrecrystallized regions. During low-temperature aging (350 °C), the ellipsoidalω-type phase persisted in the recrystallized areas even after 100 hours, whereas a high density ofα precipitates developed in the nonrecrystallized areas within only 3 hours. The observed behavior in precipitation may be related to the influence of substructure in the nonrecrystallized areas, providing for an enhanced kinetics during aging. Theα precipitates (formed during continuous cooling from the solution treatment temperature, low-temperature aging, and high-temperature aging) always obeyed the Burgers orientation relationship. With respect to the microstructure, TIMETAL 21S is similar to other solute-lean, metastableβ titanium alloys.     

Lack of evidence for inhibition of ovulation by aspirin in women

Prostaglandin synthetase inhibitors such as aspirin and indomethacin inhibit ovulation in experimental animals. The effect of therapeutic doses of aspirin on ovulation has been studied in 5 women. Ovulation, as assessed by measurements of urinary LH and plasma progesterone levels, basal body temperature and cervical mucus changes occured in all the control and treatment cycles. Serial sections of the corpora lutea failed to show any entrapped ova. The significance of finding a prostaglandin synthetase inhibitor which acts specifically at the ovarian level is discussed.     

Dislocation resonance in superconducting tin

Ultrasonic attenuation in the superconducting state of strained samples of single crystals of tin shows a strong dependence on the dislocation density. The dislocation density is estimated with the help of a suitable etch pit method. The etch pits are square in shape and exhibit symmetric dislocation lines normal to the (100) planes. The number of etch pits reveals a direct dependence on the physical state of the specimen. The dislocation density estimated by this etch pit method can be related to the extra attenuation Δα_s shows a resonant behaviour and the resonance frequency is dependent on the dislocation density. It is also observed that the functional relationship between the resonance frequency and the dislocation density is different in different regions of the dislocation density.