The influence of micronised particulates on the aerosolisation properties of pressurised metered dose inhalers

A fundamental study of the interactions between binary particulate formulations in HFA-based pressurised metered dose inhaler (pMDI) systems was undertaken. Differences in the surface energetics of lactose, mannitol and sibenadet hydrochloride were observed, which could be related to the degree of particle adhesion/cohesion, the sedimentation rate and the aerosolisation performance of formulations containing different mixtures of these components. In general, lactose was shown to be the most cohesive material and readily formed coarse aggregates with sibenadet hydrochloride which sedimented rapidly. This had the greatest effect on aerosolisation performance at high-lactose concentrations (and low-sibenadet hydrochloride concentrations), where heavily agglomerated particles were observed in collected samples of the emitted aerosol. A model, relating the adhesive and cohesive forces between the components in these systems has been proposed, which satisfactorily describes these phenomena. Furthermore, although the more energetic systems were shown to result in significantly decreased aerosol performance, the through-life performance was enhanced.     

Right ventricular strain and volume analyses through deep learning-based fully automatic segmentation based on radial long-axis reconstruction of short-axis cine magnetic resonance images

Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine - We propose a deep learning-based fully automatic right ventricle (RV) segmentation technique that targets radially reconstructed...     

A Data Classification Method for Inconsistency and Incompleteness Detection in Access Control Policy Sets

Access control policies may contain anomalies such as incompleteness and inconsistency, which can result in security vulnerabilities. Detecting such anomalies in large sets of complex policies automatically is a difficult and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel method for detecting inconsistency and incompleteness in access control policies with the help of data classification tools well known in data mining. Our proposed method consists of three phases: firstly, we perform parsing on the policy data set; this includes ordering of attributes and normalization of Boolean expressions. Secondly, we generate decision trees with the help of our proposed algorithm, which is a modification of the well-known C4.5 algorithm. Thirdly, we execute our proposed anomaly detection algorithm on the resulting decision trees. The results of the anomaly detection algorithm are presented to the policy administrator who will take remediation measures. In contrast to other known policy validation methods, our method provides means for handling incompleteness, continuous values and complex Boolean expressions. In order to demonstrate the efficiency of our method in discovering inconsistencies, incompleteness and redundancies in access control policies, we also provide a proof-of-concept implementation.     

Synthesis of short-channeled amino-functionalized SBA-15 and its beneficial applications in base-catalyzed reactions

Amino-functionalized-SBA-15 catalysts with nanostructured hexagonal platelet morphologies were synthesized directly by using microwave synthesis from the hydrolysis and co-condensation of aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) and sodium metasilicate under a strong acidic condition with the Pluronic P123 triblock copolymer as a structure-directing agent. The amino-functionalized-SBA-15 catalysts were proven by SEM and TEM techniques to have very short channels in the range of 200–300 nm perpendicular to the hexagonal platelet morphologies. These short-channeled catalysts were proven to be effective heterogeneous catalysts in liquid-phase reactions such as Knoevenagel and Claisen-Schmidt condensations as well as in Henry reaction. They exhibited greatly improved catalytic activities over the typical fibrous type SBA-15 catalyst having long channels. Obviously, the easy diffusion and rapid mass transfer of substrate into the short channel mesopores played important roles in the significant improvement in the catalytic activities.     

A simple and highly sensitive spectrophotometric determination of Cr(VI) in food samples by using 3,4-dihydroxybenzaldehydeisonicotinoylhydrazone (3,4-DHBINH)

A simple, rapid, sensitive and inexpensive method has been developed for the determination of trace amounts of chromium(VI) using 3,4-dihydroxybenzaldehydeisonicotinoylhydrazone (3,4-DHBINH). The metal ion gives a yellow coloured complex with 3,4-DHBINH in acetate buffer of pH 5.5 with 1:1 (metal:ligand) composition. The complex shows a maximum absorption at 400 nm. Beer’s law is obeyed in the range 0.5–7.7 ppm of Cr(VI). The molar absorptivity, Sandell’s sensitivity and detection limit were found to be 1.35 × 10⁴ L mol⁻¹ cm⁻¹, 0.0075 μg cm⁻² and 0.0045 μg mL⁻¹, respectively. The correlation co-efficient and regression co-efficient of the Cr(VI)–3,4-DHBINH complex were 0.99 and 0.12, respectively. Major cations and anions did not show any interference. The developed method has been successfully applied for the analysis of Cr(VI) in food samples (leafy vegetables), comparing the results simultaneously with those obtained using an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, whereby the validity of the method has been tested.     

How important is the interfacial chemical bond for electron transport through alkyl chain monolayers?

We show that the electrode/molecule chemical bond does not change the tunneling barrier for charge transport through alkyl chain monolayers sandwiched between Si and Hg electrodes. This observation can be understood if the interfacial bond mainly governs the monolayer's structure, while the electronic states due to molecule-electrode bonding do not contribute significantly to tunneling. Yet, the nature of the bond affects the Schottky barrier inside the semiconductor due to changes in the interface dipole.     

Thermodynamic factors in partitioning and rejection of organic compounds by polyamide composite membranes

The paper analyzes the mechanism of partitioning and rejection of organic solutes by polyamide membranes for reverse osmosis and nanofiltration. The partitioning of homologous series of alcohols and polyols, in which polarity changes with size in opposite ways, was measured using attenuated total reflection IR spectroscopy. The results show that the partitioning of polyols monotonously decreases with size, whereas for alcohols it is not monotonous and slightly decreases for small C1-C3 alcohols followed by a sharp increase for larger alcohols. These results may be explained by assuming a heterogeneous structure of polyamide comprising a hydrophobic polyamide matrix and a polar internal aqueous phase. The partitioning data could consistently explain the results of rejection in standard filtration experiments. They clearly demonstrate that high/low partitioning may play a significant role in achieving a low/high rejection of organics. In particular, this points to the need to account for the partitioning effect while using molecular probes such as polyols or sugars for estimating the effective "pore" size or molecular weight cutoff of a membrane and for choosing/developing organic-rejecting membranes.     

Efficient Cache Attacks on AES, and Countermeasures

We describe several software side-channel attacks based on inter-process leakage through the state of the CPU’s memory cache. This leakage reveals memory access patterns, which can be used for cryptanalysis of cryptographic primitives that employ data-dependent table lookups. The attacks allow an unprivileged process to attack other processes running in parallel on the same processor, despite partitioning methods such as memory protection, sandboxing, and virtualization. Some of our methods require only the ability to trigger services that perform encryption or MAC using the unknown key, such as encrypted disk partitions or secure network links. Moreover, we demonstrate an extremely strong type of attack, which requires knowledge of neither the specific plaintexts nor ciphertexts and works by merely monitoring the effect of the cryptographic process on the cache. We discuss in detail several attacks on AES and experimentally demonstrate their applicability to real systems, such as OpenSSL and Linux’s dm-crypt encrypted partitions (in the latter case, the full key was recovered after just 800 writes to the partition, taking 65 milliseconds). Finally, we discuss a variety of countermeasures which can be used to mitigate such attacks.