Isotype-specific antibody responses to foot-and-mouth disease virus in sera and secretions of "carrier' and "non-carrier' cattle

Isotype-specific antibody responses to foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) were measured in the sera and upper respiratory tract secretions of vaccinated and susceptible cattle challenged with FMDV by direct contact or by intranasal inoculation. A comparison was made between cattle that eliminated FMDV and those that developed and maintained a persistent infection. Serological and mucosal antibody responses were detected in all animals after challenge. IgA and IgM were detected before the development of IgG1 and IgG2 responses. IgM was not detected in vaccinated cattle. Challenge with FMDV elicited a prolonged biphasic secretory antibody response in FMDV "carrier' animals only. The response was detected as FMDV-specific IgA in both mucosal secretions and serum samples, which gained statistical significance (P < 0.05) by 5 weeks after challenge. This observation could represent the basis of a test to differentiate vaccinated and/or recovered convalescent cattle from FMDV "carriers'.     

Selective isolation of reversible cold sensitive variants from Chinese hamster ovary cell cultures

The fine structure and cellular associations of the large pigment cells (LPC's) of the compound eye of the house fly were studied with high voltage and conventional electron microscopy. Depending on the sector of the compound eye, the facets are either rectangular or hexagonal. The underside of each facet has indentations exactly aligned with those on top into which inserts an angulated sleeve of LPC's. Under the rectangular lens facet 6 or 8 small compact (in cross section) LPC's join four elongate LPC's. Clusters of compact cells alternate in this ring with elongate ones. Compact cells compress together and become quadrangular (in cross section) several microns below their insertion into the lens and form "building block" corners while elongate cells form "side rails" for the rectangular type of distal pseudocone enclosure. Beneath hexagonal facets all LPC's are rather elongate with out corner cells. In both facet types LPC's enclose the pseudocone for a longitudinal distance of 4 mum and then are displaced as bordering cells by a sleeve of two corneal pigment cells (CPC's), each of which encloses half of the proximal pseudocone. For the following 6 mum of longitudinal distance these concentric sleeves of CPC's and LPC's form a double layer around the pseudocone. At about 10 mum below lens base the two sleeves separate; LPC's become attenuated and extend cable-like to the basement membrane and CPC's enclose the proximal pseudocone, Semper cells and distal retinula. The junction between lens and LPC's has critical structural value in that (1) this is the sole anchorage to the lens by the lengthy remainder of the ommatidium, and (2) LPC's enclose the semiliquid pseudocone in the most distal portion of the pseudocone. In addition to vertical support, the LPC's send out numerous lateral processes that make structural contact among themselves, with the corneal pigment cells and the photoreceptor cells. The structural features of this array are discussed relative to possible physiological roles.     

Compressing Two-Dimensional Routing Tables

We consider an algorithmic problem that arises in the context of routing tables used by Internet routers. The Internet addressing scheme is hierarchical, where a group of hosts are identified by a prefix that is common to all the hosts in that group. Each host machine has a unique 32-bit address. Thus, all traffic between a source group s and a destination group d can be routed along a particular route c by maintaining a routing entry (s, d, c) at all intermediate routers, where s and d are binary bit strings. Many different routing tables can achieve the same routing behavior. In this paper we show how to compute the most compact routing table. In particular, we consider the following optimization problem: given a routing table D with N entries of the form (s, d, c) , determine a conflict-free routing table with fewest entries that has the same routing behavior as D. If the source and destination fields have up to w bits, and there are at most K different route values, then our algorithm runs in worst-case time O( NK w2) .     

Magnetic resonance image denoising using nonlocal maximum likelihood paradigm in DCT‐framework

The data acquired by magnetic resonance (MR) imaging system are inherently degraded by noise that has its origin in the thermal Brownian motion of electrons. Denoising can enhance the quality (by improving the SNR) of the acquired MR image, which is important for both visual analysis and other post processing operations. Recent works on maximum likelihood (ML) based denoising shows that ML methods are very effective in denoising MR images and has an edge over the other state‐of‐the‐art methods for MRI denoising. Among the ML based approaches, the Nonlocal maximum likelihood (NLML) method is commonly used. In the conventional NLML method, the samples for the ML estimation of the unknown true pixel are chosen in a nonlocal fashion based on the intensity similarity of the pixel neighborhoods. Euclidean distance is generally used to measure this similarity. It has been recently shown that computing similarity measure is more robust in discrete cosine transform (DCT) subspace, compared with Euclidean image subspace. Motivated by this observation, we integrated DCT into NLML to produce an improved MRI filtration process. Other than improving the SNR, the time complexity of the conventional NLML can also be significantly reduced through the proposed approach. On synthetic MR brain image, an average improvement of 5% in PSNR and 86%reduction in execution time is achieved with a search window size of 91 × 91 after incorporating the improvements in the existing NLML method. On an experimental kiwi fruit image an improvement of 10% in PSNR is achieved. We did experiments on both simulated and real data sets to validate and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 25, 256–264, 2015     

Convective heat transfer enhancement techniques of heat exchanger tubes: a review

Heat exchangers are widely used in almost all industrial activities. Turbulent promoters used in heat exchanger tubes are an effective way of enhancing the performance. This paper summarises various investigations using twisted tapes, wire coil ribs, baffles, and swirl flow generators. The main objective of this paper is to review various studies, in which different obstacle roughness elements are used to enhance the rate of heat transfer in the heat exchanger tubes. It has been found that a lot of experimental and analytical studies reported in the literature. On the basis of correlations developed by various investigators an attempt has been made to compare the thermal hydraulic performance of obstacles in heat exchanger tubes. In this work, a comparative study is also carried out to select the best obstacle roughness shapes for higher heat transfer rate and low pressure drop losses.     

Studies on synthesis and microstructure evolution of multiphase in-situ composites based on Mo-Cr-Si system

This paper presents the results on in-situ synthesis of refractory metal-intermetallic composites (RMICs), Mo-16Cr-4Si and Mo-11Cr-9Si (wt.%) multiphase alloys and their characterization. The alloys were prepared from the oxides of molybdenum and chromium by their coreduction with Si as reductant. Exothermic nature of the synthesis reactions resulted in the formation of consolidated composite as a product in a single step. As-reduced alloys were remelted by arc melting and heat treatment was given. The evolution of phases and the microstructure were studied by XRD, SEM, and EDS analysis. The multiphase microstructure consist of the silicide phases (Mo,Cr)₃Si + (Mo,Cr)₅Si₃ for hypereutectic and (Mo,Cr)₃Si phase distributed in bcc matrix comprising essentially a solid solution of (Mo,Cr) for hypo-peritectic composition. Comparative studies of the synthesized alloys were also carried out to the composition, phases, microstructure, hardness and their oxidation behavior.     

Application of Work-of-sintering concepts in powder metals

One of the current challenges facing the particulate materials industry is developing simple, accurate models to predict sintered properties. Work-of-sintering concepts, where time-temperature integrals are used in such models, offer a solution to this problem. In this study, the master sintering curve concept is applied to several powder metal systems: 17 to 4PH stainless steel, 316L stainless steel, nickel, niobium, tungsten heavy alloys with two different compositions, and molybdenum. A detailed explanation of the construction of these curves is given, including methods used to calculate the apparent activation energy for sintering and to curve-fit experimental data to a sigmoid function describing the master sintering curve. Discussion of the results shows that the master sintering curve can be applied to powder metal systems, even those that use liquid phase during sintering.