Modulation of nanotube formation in apatite single crystal via organic molecule incorporation

Hydroxyapatite materials are potentially useful for biomedical application, especially as vehicles for functional molecules. Structural control of bulk apatite materials, such as in the fabrication of hollow microspheres or porous structures, has been studied for this purpose. However, control of the internal structure of the source apatite crystal itself is still a challenge. Here, we show that small organic molecules incorporated in apatite crystals act as porogens which control the porous structure of apatite single crystal. The presence of amino acid under apatite synthesis conditions leads to firm bindings and encapsulation of the amino acid in apatite single crystals. Amino acid elimination by heating or electron beam irradiation enhances the pore formation in apatite single crystal. Moreover, incorporation of an acidic amino acid in apatite induces peapod like nanotubes in apatite single crystals. This study suggests the potential of using small organics for nano-structural control of apatite single crystals which would be valuable for enhancing drug loadings or modulating material digestion in vivo.     

Experimental Study of RF-excited Diffusion Cooled Off-axis Unstable Resonator with High Frequency Modulation in a Waveguide CO2 Laser

The experimental study of the laser beam parameters of the pulse repetitive RF-excited diffusion cooled waveguide CO2 laser are presented. The measurements are carried out for the pumping pulse duration of 100 μs and pulse repetitive rates 5 - 14 kHz. The average power density delivered to the active medium is 76 W/cm^3. Three types of the pulses, namely the square, the sine and the triangular ones have been applied at the input as pumping pulses and their effects on the output power and the delay time have been studied. The output power of the radiation versus input power, pressure of the laser gas mixture and modulation frequency has been investigated. The results indicate that the output peak power for the three types of pulses increases with increase of the pressure of the laser gas mixture and with the input power where as it decreases with the repetition frequency. The delay time of the output pulse decreases with the increase of the repetition frequency and input power, where as it increases with the increase of the pressure of the laser gas mixture. The behavior of the output power and the delay time with duty cycle for square pulse has also been investigated.     

红曲霉对白霉干酪理化及流变特性的影响

对自分离筛选红曲霉在软质白霉干酪中的应用进行研究,采用色差仪、质构仪、流变仪、高效液相色谱等对软质白霉干酪及添加红曲霉的白霉干酪的成分、质构及流变等特性进行测定,并分析添加红曲霉对干酪成熟的影响。结果表明：额外添加红曲霉的白霉干酪颜色发生改变,产生红曲色素,a*值为7.81～19.05。相对于白霉干酪,红曲霉-白霉干酪的蛋白和膳食纤维都有所增加,脂肪并无明显增加。此外,通过流变和质构的分析发现,添加红曲霉后,软质白霉干酪更富有弹性,弹性为90.35～92.15,储能模量G′更高,tanδ值变小。通过测定干酪的功能及有害成分,在红曲霉-白霉干酪中检测到0.05～2.21?mg/kg洛伐他汀和0.54～0.70?mg/kg?γ-氨基丁酸,伴有少量橘青霉素产生,其含量低于国际限量。本研究为红曲霉在乳制品中的应用提供理论支持。     

The influence of gender on cough reflex sensitivity

BACKGROUND: The more common occurrence in women of cough due to angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors raises the possibility of gender-related differences in the sensitivity of the cough reflex. Of two recent studies that evaluated cough response to inhaled capsaicin in normal subjects, one demonstrated heightened sensitivity of the cough reflex in women compared with men, while the other revealed no gender-related differences. To further investigate this question, we reviewed our experience with cough challenge testing in normal volunteers. STUDY OBJECTIVE: To compare cough reflex sensitivity in healthy adult female and male subjects. DESIGN: Retrospective data analysis. SETTING: Academic medical center. PARTICIPANTS: One hundred healthy volunteers (50 male, 50 female). Interventions: Subjects inhaled capsaicin in ascending, doubling concentrations until the concentration inducing five or more coughs (C5) was reached. In addition, the concentration inducing two or more coughs (C2; cough threshold) was measured. Results: Mean log C5 was significantly lower in women than in men: 1.02+/-0.09 (SEM) microM vs 1.41+/-0.08 microM, respectively (p=0.002). Log C2 (cough threshold) was also significantly lower in female subjects: 0.534+/-0.068 microM vs 0.870+/-0.065 microM in male subjects (p=0.00058). CONCLUSION: Healthy women have a more sensitive cough reflex than do healthy men. The reasons for this significant gender difference remain to be elucidated, but may involve a heightened sensitivity, in women, of the sensory receptors within the respiratory tract that mediate cough.     

Simulation of Image Fusion of Dual Modality (Electrical Capacitance and Optical Tomography) in Solid/Gas Flow

This paper presents a novel method of combining dual modality electrical capacitance and optical tomography for applications in monitoring and investigating solid/gas flow. The objective of this method is to obtain a good quality image of the full-scale concentration distribution of solid/gas flow. A new image reconstruction algorithm fused the dual modality images is developed and evaluated.     

Prediction of postpartum depression using machine learning techniques from social media text

Early screening of mental disorders plays a crucial role in diagnosis and treatment. This study explores how data‐driven methods can leverage the information available on social media platforms to predict postpartum depression (PPD). A generalized approach is proposed where linguistic features are extracted from user‐generated textual posts on social media and categorized as general, depressive, and PPD representative using multiple machine learning techniques. We find that techniques used in our study exhibit strong predictive capabilities for PPD content. Holdout validation showed that multilayer perceptron outperformed other techniques such as support vector machine and logistic regression used in this study with 91.7% accuracy for depressive content identification and up to 86.9% accuracy for PPD content prediction. This work adopts a hierarchical approach to predict PPD. Therefore, the reported PPD accuracy represents the performance of the model to correctly classify PPD content from non‐PPD depressive content.     

Ground plane impact on quadrifilar helix antenna performance with respect to deployment heights

Quadrifilar helix antenna (QHA) has its applications in satellite communications. This paper presents the performance optimisation of input and radiation characteristics of QHA in the presence of infinite and finite metallic ground planes. For the infinite ground plane, it has been observed that input parameters such as impedance and voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) are stable, and the antenna has broader half power beamwidth (HPBW). Smaller metallic platforms that act as finite ground planes produce better 3‐dB axial ratio beamwidth and boresight axial ratio. Deployment of QHA on smaller metallic platforms such as nanosatellites and CubeSats enhances the circularly polarised beamwidth of the antenna with improved boresight axial ratio. However, on large low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, stable input characteristics and broader HPBW have been achieved at the cost of narrow circularly polarised beamwidth and degraded boresight axial ratio.     

Behavioral Intrusion Prediction Model on Bayesian Network over Healthcare Infrastructure

Due to polymorphic nature of malware attack, a signature-based analysis is no longer sufficient to solve polymorphic and stealth nature of malware attacks. On the other hand, state-of-the-art methods like deep learning require labelled dataset as a target to train a supervised model. This is unlikely to be the case in production network as the dataset is unstructured and has no label. Hence an unsupervised learning is recommended. Behavioral study is one of the techniques to elicit traffic pattern. However, studies have shown that existing behavioral intrusion detection model had a few issues which had been parameterized into its common characteristics, namely lack of prior information (p (θ)), and reduced parameters (θ). Therefore, this study aims to utilize the previously built Feature Selection Model subsequently to design a Predictive Analytics Model based on Bayesian Network used to improve the analysis prediction. Feature Selection Model is used to learn significant label as a target and Bayesian Network is a sophisticated probabilistic approach to predict intrusion. Finally, the results are extended to evaluate detection, accuracy and false alarm rate of the model against the subject matter expert model, Support Vector Machine (SVM), k nearest neighbor (k-NN) using simulated and ground-truth dataset. The ground-truth dataset from the production traffic of one of the largest healthcare provider in Malaysia is used to promote realism on the real use case scenario. Results have shown that the proposed model consistently outperformed other models.     

On increasing the sensitivity of moving average control chart using auxiliary variable

In the statistical process control, the most useful tool to monitor the manufacturing processes in the industries is the control chart. Quality practitioners always desire the charting structure that identifies sustainable changes in the monitoring processes. The sensitivity of the control chart is improved when additional correlated auxiliary information about the study variable is introduced. The regression estimate in the form of auxiliary and supporting variables presents an unbiased and efficient statistic of the mean of the process variable. In this study, auxiliary information-based moving average (AB-MA) control chart is designed for efficient monitoring of shifts in the process location parameter. The performance of the AB-MA control chart is evaluated and compared with existing charts using average run length and other run length characteristics. The comparison reveals that the AB-MA control chart outperforms the competitors in detecting the small and medium changes in the process location parameter. The application of the proposal is also provided to implement it in real situation.