Recent Advances in Poly (Amide-B-Ethylene) Based Membranes for Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Capture: A Review

Polyamide-b-ethylene (Pebax) is a promising material for membrane-based gas separation application with excellent CO₂ capturing potential. Pebax is a rubbery elastomer which offers good mechanical support with its hard crystalline phase and excellent gas transport through its amorphous polyether phase. This review article includes recent advances in Pebax based membrane synthesis, solvent selection for membrane synthesis, compatible fillers with Pebax matrix and the improved gas separation performance of the prepared membranes. The literature review shows that Pebax based membranes are a good candidate for separation of CO₂ from flue gases and can be used for commercial applications.     

Emerging Functions for snoRNAs and snoRNA-Derived Fragments

The widespread implementation of mass sequencing has revealed a diverse landscape of small RNAs derived from larger precursors. Whilst many of these are likely to be byproducts of degradation, there are nevertheless metabolically stable fragments derived from tRNAs, rRNAs, snoRNAs, and other non-coding RNA, with a number of examples of the production of such fragments being conserved across species. Coupled with specific interactions to RNA-binding proteins and a growing number of experimentally reported examples suggesting function, a case is emerging whereby the biological significance of small non-coding RNAs extends far beyond miRNAs and piRNAs. Related to this, a similarly complex picture is emerging of non-canonical roles for the non-coding precursors, such as for snoRNAs that are also implicated in such areas as the silencing of gene expression and the regulation of alternative splicing. This is in addition to a body of literature describing snoRNAs as an additional source of miRNA-like regulators. This review seeks to highlight emerging roles for such non-coding RNA, focusing specifically on “new” roles for snoRNAs and the small fragments derived from them.     

Grey is the new RGB: How good is GAN-based image colorization for image compression?

Multimedia Tools and Applications - GAN-based image colorization techniques are capable of producing highly realistic color in real-time. Subjective assessment of these approaches has demonstrated...     

Deep introspective SLAM: deep reinforcement learning based approach to avoid tracking failure in visual SLAM

Autonomous Robots - Reliable and consistent tracking is essential to realize the dream of power-on-and-go autonomy in mobile robots. Our investigation with state-of-the-art visual navigation and...     

A review on extrusion-based 3D-printed nanogenerators for energy harvesting

Journal of Materials Science - Energy harvesting technologies now play a significant role in the successful deployment of self-powered electronic devices. Researchers are working on small-scale...     

Assessing channel morphology and prediction of centerline channel migration of the Barak River using geospatial techniques

Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment - Barak River is highly meandering rivers flowing through the alluvial plains of Assam in India. However, due to dynamic system, it is found that...     

MAC for Networks with Multipacket Reception Capability and Spatially Distributed Nodes

The physical layer of future wireless networks will be based on novel radio technologies such as UWB and MIMO. One of the important capabilities of such technologies is the ability to capture a few packets simultaneously. This capability has the potential to improve the performance of the MAC layer. However, we show that in networks with spatially distributed nodes, reusing backoff mechanisms originally designed for narrow-band systems (e.g., CSMA/CA) is inefficient. It is well known that when networks with spatially distributed nodes operate with such MAC protocols, the channel may be captured by nodes that are near the destination, leading to unfairness. We show that when the physical layer enables multipacket reception, the negative implications of reusing the legacy protocols include not only such unfairness, but also a significant throughput reduction. We present alternative backoff mechanisms and evaluate their performance via Markovian analysis, approximations, and simulation. We show that our alternative backoff mechanisms can improve both overall throughput and fairness.     

Process interoperability in healthcare systems with dynamic semantic web services

Healthcare systems are very complex due to extreme heterogeneity in their data and processes. Researchers and practitioner need to make systems interoperable and integrate for the benefit of all the stakeholders including hospitals, clinicians, medical support staff, and patients. The broader goal of interoperability can only be achieved when standards are practiced.Two different healthcare systems can earn HL7 conformance and compliance but at the same time can be incompatible for interoperability because of varying implementation of HL7 interaction model. This is mainly because workflows in healthcare systems are very complex. Interoperability on one hand requires flexible mechanism for the mapping of business processes to a standard, HL7 in our example. On the other hand it requires deeper understanding of the standard interaction model and gaps created by their incompatible implementations. In this paper we propose a novel technique of dynamically creating semantic web services as overlay on top of the existing services. We used Web Service Modeling Framework as an underlying architecture for HL7 process artifacts implementation as semantic web services. These semantic services are mapped to our proposed interaction ontology. Integrated reasoning mechanism provides necessary execution semantics for more effective and seamless end-to-end communication.The prototype we tested on different processes from the laboratory domain at a local diagnostic laboratory with uninterrupted process flow. The scenario of Result Query Placer interaction flow and its associated process artifacts are executed for the proof of concept.The proposed solution complements the existing data interoperability in HL7 and leads to semantic process interoperability. The achievement of semantic interoperability results in timely delivery of healthcare services to patients saving precious lives.