Bee Bread Ameliorates Vascular Inflammation and Impaired Vasorelaxation in Obesity-Induced Vascular Damage Rat Model: The Role of eNOS/NO/cGMP-Signaling Pathway

Obesity and hyperlipidemia are major risk factors for developing vascular diseases. Bee bread (BB) has been reported to exhibit some biological actions, including anti-obesity and anti-hyperlipidemic. This study aims to investigate whether bee bread can ameliorate vascular inflammation and impaired vasorelaxation activity through eNOS/NO/cGMP pathway in obese rats. Forty male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups (n = 10/group), namely: control (normal group), obese rats (OB group), obese rats treated with bee bread (0.5 g/kg/day, OB/BB group) and obese rats treated with orlistat (10 mg/kg/day, OB/OR group). The latter three groups were given a high-fat diet (HFD) for 6 weeks to induced obesity before being administered with their respective treatments for another 6 weeks. After 12 weeks of the total experimental period, rats in the OB group demonstrated significantly higher Lee obesity index, lipid profile (total cholesterol, triglyceride, low-density lipoprotein), aortic proinflammatory markers (tumor necrosis factor-α, nuclear factor-κβ), aortic structural damage and impairment in vasorelaxation response to acetylcholine (ACh). Bee bread significantly ameliorated the obesity-induced vascular damage manifested by improvements in the lipid profile, aortic inflammatory markers, and the impaired vasorelaxation activity by significantly enhancing nitric oxide release, promoting endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) and cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) immunoexpression. These findings suggest that the administration of bee bread ameliorates the impaired vasorelaxation response to ACh by improving eNOS/NO/cGMP-signaling pathway in obese rats, suggesting its vascular therapeutic role.     

Metal-insulator-semiconductor solar cell under gamma irradiation

The performance of a home made MIS–p-Si solar cell was experimentally studied under various gamma irradiation doses (up to 500 Mrad). The effect of radiation dose on the I−V and C−V characteristics was investigated in this work. The obtained results showed that all the output parameters of the cells under investigation were degraded with gamma radiation exposure. In addition, the effects of fabrication conditions (metal thickness and adding of antireflection coating) on the cell output parameters were also investigated.     

Efficient manipulator collision avoidance by dynamic programming

This paper describes a research effort in the area of collision avoidance path planning for robotic manipulators. A robotic arm with known geometry is to perform a spatial manipulation in the presence of known obstacles in its workspace. The task is to generate a series of waypoints for its path to pass through which will guarantee a safe, collision-free trajectory from its predefined starting point to its predefined goal position.This is an important topic in the area of automated manufacturing. Automated factories are becoming increasingly important for the goals of greater manufacturing efficiency, better equipment utilization, and lower overall manufacturing costs. Robotic devices, including manipulator arms and assembly devices, are finding more uses in these factories.The approach is to discretize the robot's workspace into a transition network. The optimal path through this network, in terms of angular displacement of the manipulator's joints, is generated by dynamic programming. While this approach has been used previously, this paper adds the innovation of variable-node spacing, with the node density in various parts of the network reflecting the need for precise position control in each local area of the workspace. In this way, precise motion control is possible without an undue computational burden.     

A novel double-circuit-rotor balanced induction motor for improvedslip-energy recovery drive performance. I. Modeling and simulation

A new construction for the rotor windings of balanced wound-rotor induction motors employed in the slip energy recovery drives is proposed, in this paper, to reduce the time harmonics which are commonly generated in the machine. The proposed machine has a double-circuit in the rotor. One circuit is star connected while the other is delta connected. Each of these two circuits is connected to a diode-bridge rectifier to achieve a twelve-pulse operation characteristics. The main objective of this paper is to develop a new model which is capable of simulating the proposed machine, neglecting nonlinearities due to magnetic saturation, and its associated converters. Such a model is further complicated due to the presence of the two rotor circuits and their mutual interaction     

Nitrogen dioxide effect in the reduction of nitric oxide by propane in oxidizing atmosphere

The role of nitrogen dioxide in the selective reduction of NO by propane over a Cu-MFI zeolite is investigated. NO₂ and NO reductions were carried out under similar conditions of reaction. In the presence of oxygen, the reduction of NO by C₃H₈ does not differ significantly from that of NO₂. In the absence of oxygen, the reduction of NO₂ by propane occurs with a partial decomposition of the nitric dioxide molecule. Such a decomposition leads to the formation of oxygen, which is responsible for the increase in catalytic activity by comparison with the same reaction performed with NO. NO₂ formed and released in the gas phase during the reduction of NO by propane in the presence of oxygen does not play a predominant role in the catalytic process.     

Privacy issues in a psychiatric context: applying the ISD privacy framework to a psychiatric behavioural monitoring system

Privacy issues are frequently discussed amongst researchers, practitioners and patients in healthcare. However, psychiatric patients’ privacy issues get less attention in information system development (ISD), whereby they are one of the most important stakeholders. This paper applies Carew and Stapleton’s ISD privacy framework to psychiatric monitoring systems to understand the issues that are related to monitoring psychiatric patients’ behaviour. By understanding the privacy issues amongst patients, the research will be able to provide guidance to system developers to produce a privacy-sensitive system that can contribute to the system engineering for international stability. We will elaborate each factor in the framework (physical, social, psychological and informational) and then explain the relationship to the privacy of psychiatric patient.     

Indoor positioning: “an image-based crowdsource machine learning approach”

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Various technologies have been utilized today for recognizing client or user in the indoor areas. These technologies incorporate RSSI, Bluetooth Low Energy...     

Data Security Model for Cloud Computing

From the perspective of data security, which has always been an important aspect of quality of service, cloud computing focuses a new challenging security threats. Therefore, a data security model must solve the most challenges of cloud computing security. The proposed data security model provides a single default gateway as a platform. It used to secure sensitive user data across multiple public and private cloud applications, including Salesforce, Chatter, Gmail, and Amazon Web Services, without influencing functionality or performance. Default gateway platform encrypts sensitive data automatically in a real time before sending to the cloud storage without breaking cloud application. It did not effect on user functionality and visibility. If an unauthorized person gets data from cloud storage, he only sees encrypted data. If authorized person accesses successfully in his cloud, the data is decrypted in real time for your use. The default gateway platform must contain strong and fast encryption algorithm, file integrity, malware detection, firewall, tokenization and more. This paper interested about authentication, stronger and faster encryption algorithm, and file integrity.     

Fuzzy-based hunger games search algorithm for global optimization and feature selection using medical data

Neural Computing and Applications - Feature selection (FS) is one of the basic data preprocessing steps in data mining and machine learning. It is used to reduce feature size and increase model...