Dietary lipid supply in Lebanon: Does it fit the Mediterranean diet profile?

Lipids supply between 30–40% of total energy intake of Lebanese people and about 40% of this is derived from imported vegetable oils (soybean, sunflower, and corn oils). In Lebanon, olive oil, mostly locally produced, contributed to a consistently low percentage of total energy intake (2.2% on average) for the past forty five years. Although Lebanon borders the Mediterranean Sea, the Lebanese diet is far from the traditional Mediterranean diet. Compared to other Mediterranean countries, Lebanon has one of the lowest fish and seafood consumption rates. This pattern of consumption favors an increased ratio of omega‐6:omega‐3 with a concomitant low intake of omega‐9. Efforts should focus on ways to increase fish and olive oil consumption.     

Nuclear and clean coal technology options for sustainable development in India

Due to the growing energy needs along with increasing concerns towards control of greenhouse gas emissions, most developing countries are under pressure to find alternative methods for energy conversion and policies to make these technologies economically viable. Most of the energy is produced from fossil fuel in India which is not a sustainable source of energy. In this paper Indian power sector has been examined by using MARKAL model for introduction of clean coal and advanced nuclear technologies with implementation of energy conservation potential. The result shows that application of clean technologies gives energy security but not significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. When clean technologies apply with energy conservation a huge amount of CO₂ can be reduced and also economically viable. Three scenarios including base case scenario have been developed to estimate the resource allocations and CO₂ mitigation. The clean technologies with maximum savings potential shows 70% CO₂ reduction in the year 2045.     

Diesterol: An environment-friendly IC engine fuel

Diesterol is a new specific term which denotes a mixture of fossil diesel fuel (D), vegetable oil methyl ester called biodiesel (B) and plant derived ethanol (E). In the context of the present paper, this term refers specifically to the combination of diesel fuel, bioethanol produced from potato waste, dehydrated in a vapor phase using 3A Zeolite, and sunflower methyl ester produced through transesterification. The mixture of DBE, i.e. diesterol, was patented under the Iranian patent No. 39407, dated 12-3-2007. The main purpose of this research work was to reduce engine exhaust NO_x, CO, HC and smoke emissions due to application of biofuel and the increase of fuel oxygen content. It was needed to prepare suitable low cost and renewable additives. The diesterol properties such as pour point, viscosity, flash point, copper strip corrosion, ash content, sulfur content and cetane number were determined experimentally. The optimum ratio of bioethanol and biodiesel was found to be 40/60 considering fuel oxygen content, fuel price and mixture properties. Bioethanol was added to enhance the oxygenated component in the fuel, while the sunflower methyl ester was added to maintain the fuel stability at low temperatures. The parameters considered for investigation are the engine power, torque, specific fuel consumption and exhaust emissions for various mixture proportions. The experimental results showed that bioethanol plays an important role in determining the flash point of the blends. By adding 3% bioethanol to diesel and sunflower methyl ester, the flash point was reduced by 16 °C. The viscosity of the blend was also reduced by increasing the amount of bioethanol. The sulfur content of bioethanol and sunflower methyl ester is very low compared to diesel fuel. The sulfur content of diesel is 500 ppm whereas that of bioethanol and sunflower methyl ester is 0 and 15 ppm, respectively. This lower sulfur content is another factor enhancing the use of fuel blends in diesel engines. The bioethanol and sunflower methyl ester combination has sulfur content less than 20 ppm. The maximum power and torque using diesel fuel were 17.75 kW and 64.2 Nm at 3600 and 2400 rpm, respectively. Adding oxygenated compounds to the new blend seems to slightly reduce the engine power and torque and increased the average sfc for various speeds. The experimental measurement and observation of smoke concentration, NO_x, CO and HC concentration indicated that both of these pollutants reduced by increasing the biofuel composition of diesterol throughout the engine operating range.     

Experimental investigation of the effects of various parameters on viscosity reduction of heavy crude by oil–water emulsion

The effects of water content, shear rate, temperature, and solid particle concentration on viscosity reduction(VR) caused by forming stable emulsions were investigated using Omani heavy crude oil. The viscosity of the crude oil was initially measured with respect to shear rates at different temperatures from 20 to 70 C. The crude oil exhibited a shear thinning behavior at all the temperatures. The strongest shear thinning was observed at 20 C. A non-ionic water soluble surfactant(Triton X-100) was used to form and stabilize crude oil emulsions. The emulsification process has significantly reduced the crude oil viscosity. The degree of VR was found to increase with an increase in water content and reach its maximum value at 50 % water content.The phase inversion from oil-in-water emulsion to water-inoil emulsion occurred at 30 % water content. The results indicated that the VR was inversely proportional to temperature and concentration of silica nanoparticles. For water-in-oil emulsions, VR increased with shear rate and eventually reached a plateau at a shear rate of around350 s-1. This was attributed to the thinning behavior of the continuous phase. The VR of oil-in-water emulsions remained almost constant as the shear rate increased due to the Newtonian behavior of water, the continuous phase.     

Inappropriate apoptosis of salivary and lacrimal gland epithelium of immunodeficient NOD-scid mice

Reactive gliosis, which occurs in response to any damage or disturbance to the central nervous system, has been recognized for many years, but is still not completely understood. The hallmark is the increased expression of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), yet studies in GFAP knockout mice suggest that GFAP may not be required for an astrocyte to become hypertrophic. In this review, we describe a series of tissue culture models that have been established in order to address: 1) the biochemical phenotype of reactive astrocytes; 2) the factor and/or cell responsible for induction of gliosis; 3) the mechanisms by which one might block the induction. These models range from cultures of astrocytes, both neonatal and adult, to co-cultures of astrocytes with either neurons or microglia, to organ cultures. None is ideal: each addresses a different set of questions, but taken together, they are beginning to provide useful information which should allow a better understanding of the plasticity response of astrocytes to brain injury.     

Velocity and pressure-based partitions of horizontal and vertical trajectories for on-line signature verification

In general, shape of an on-line signature is used as a single discriminating feature. Sometimes shape of signature is used alone for verification purposes and sometimes it is used in combination with some other dynamic features such as velocity, pressure and acceleration. The shape of an on-line signature is basically formed due to the wrist and fingers movements where the wrist movement is represented by the horizontal trajectory and the movement of the fingers is represented by vertical trajectory. As the on-line signature is formed due to the combination of two movements that are essentially independent of each other, it will be more effective to use them as two separate discriminating features. Based on this observation, we propose to use these trajectories in isolation by first decomposing the pressure and velocity profiles into two partitions and then extracting the underlying horizontal and vertical trajectories. So the overall process can be thought as the process which exploits the inter-feature dependencies by decomposing signature trajectories depending upon pressure and velocity information and performs verification on each partition separately. As a result, we are able to extract eight discriminating features and among them the most stable discriminating feature is used in verification process. Further Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to make the signatures rotation invariant. Experimental results demonstrate superiority of our approach in on-line signature verification in comparison with other techniques.     

Optimizing discrete stochastic systems using simulated annealing and simulation

The objective of this paper is to present an integrated approach of two models: simulation and optimization. This approach is used to determine the design parameters of stochastically constrained systems where the measure of performance is available only via simulation. The optimization model is solved using simulated annealing (SA) for parameter selection followed by the use of Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the measure of performance. Based on the expected simulation output, the parameter set is either accepted or rejected. A modified rejection/acceptance criterion is presented for the proposed SA algorithm taking into consideration the stochastic system constraints. Moreover, a control variate is employed as a variance reduction technique in order to obtain an efficient estimate of performance measure. The proposed approach is tested using three real cases of the multi-echelon repairable item inventory systems (MERIIS). The results show that the proposed method is efficient in determining an optimal choice of spares and repair channels in these systems.