Characteristics of tiger nut milk: effects of milling

A standard method for the extraction of tiger nut milk has been introduced. It has been shown that, although milling duration improves the yield of tiger nut milk solids and its nutrient composition, there is a quantifiable loss of nutrient in the pressing residue during milk extraction. Milling duration improved the colloidal stability of the milk against creaming during 16 h of storage. A higher milling intensity resulted in the aggregation of biological polymers which resulted in colloidal destabilisation. Milling improved the lightness and stability and reduced browning rate of the tiger nut milk during storage. This report is important for the production of tiger nut milk of consistent and comparable characteristics. Milling has been introduced as a processing method for the qualitative and quantitative modulation of the properties of tiger nut milk. It is recommended to develop further strategies to improve the colloidal stability of tiger nut milk as a beverage.     

Synthesis of amino-cosubstituted polyorganophosphazenes and fabrication of their nanoparticles for anticancer drug delivery

The development of safe drug carriers is cardinal in cancer therapy, which can target the cancer cells and release the loaded drug on-demand without damaging the healthy cells of the body. In our work, we synthesized three different biodegradable polymers, poly[(ethyl aminobezoate) (ethyl glycinato) phosphazenes] (PABGPs), in different mole ratio of side groups. The successful synthesis of these PABGPs was confirmed by ¹H NMR, ³¹P NMR, FT-IR, and gel permeation chromatography. These PABGPs were fabricated into drug (camptothecin, CPT, a hydrophobic anticancer drug) loaded nanoparticles. These drug-loaded nanoparticles showed good drug release behaviors under normal physiological conditions (pH 7.4 and temperature 37°C). These PABGPs-based nanoparticles may find their application as effective drug carriers for cancer therapy.     

Evaporated Thin Films of CdS and CdTe: Optimization for Photovoltaic Applications

Thin films of cadmium sulphide and cadmium telluride have been prepared by thermal evaporation under various conditions of deposition. These films have been characterized optically. electrically and for structure determination. The results of these characterizations along with the initial results of all thin film CdS/CdTe solar cells are presented in this paper     

Autoconfiguration of a dynamic nonoverlapping camera network.

In order to monitor sufficiently large areas of interest for surveillance or any event detection, we need to look beyond stationary cameras and employ an automatically configurable network of nonoverlapping cameras. These cameras need not have an overlapping field of view and should be allowed to move freely in space. Moreover, features like zooming in/out, readily available in security cameras these days, should be exploited in order to focus on any particular area of interest if needed. In this paper, a practical framework is proposed to self-calibrate dynamically moving and zooming cameras and determine their absolute and relative orientations, assuming that their relative position is known. A global linear solution is presented for self-calibrating each zooming/focusing camera in the network. After self-calibration, it is shown that only one automatically computed vanishing point and a line lying on any plane orthogonal to the vertical direction is sufficient to infer the dynamic network configuration. Our method generalizes previous work which considers restricted camera motions. Using minimal assumptions, we are able to successfully demonstrate promising results on synthetic, as well as on real data.     

Single mask fabrication process for movable MEMS devices

The current work reports on the realization of movable micromachining devices using self-aligned single-mask fabrication process. Only dry etching process utilizing inductively coupled plasma reactive ion etching was used to release 3D micro structures from single crystal silicon substrate. No wet etching process is required to release the structures as is the case with silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers. Also the developed process does not require an SOI substrate and accordingly dispensing with the application of a wet etching step, thus yielding uniform structures without stiction. The optimized process was applied to realize thermally actuated microgrippers. The article presents the development of the fabrication process and demonstrates the operation of the fabricated device. The optimized process provides an avenue for low cost fabrication of movable micromachining devices without the use of complicated wet etching steps typically associated with SOI substrates.     

Silhouette-based human action recognition using SAX-Shapes

Human action recognition is an important problem in Computer Vision. Although most of the existing solutions provide good accuracy results, the methods are often overly complex and computationally expensive, hindering practical applications. In this regard, we introduce the combination of time-series representation for the silhouette and Symbolic Aggregate approXimation (SAX), which we refer to as SAX-Shapes, to address the problem of human action recognition. Given an action sequence, the extracted silhouettes of an actor from every frame are transformed into time series. Each of these time series is then efficiently converted into the symbolic vector: SAX. The set of all these SAX vectors (SAX-Shape) represents the action. We propose a rotation invariant distance function to be used by a random forest algorithm to perform the human action recognition. Requiring only silhouettes of actors, the proposed method is validated on two public datasets. It has an accuracy comparable to the related works and it performs well even in varying rotation.     

A cross-layer approach for partition detection at overlay layer for structured P2P in MANETs

Due to limited radio range and mobility of nodes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the network partitioning and merging could occur frequently. When structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are running over MANETs, then network partition in the physical network can also cause network partition at the overlay layer. Existing approaches for structured P2P overlay over MANETs do not detect network partition at the overlay layer. This paper proposes a cross-layer approach to detect network partition at the overlay layer for structured P2P overlay over MANETs. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is highly effective and efficient in terms of routing overhead, success ratio and false-negative ratio.     

On the in-plane shear response of the high bond strength concrete masonry walls

Conventional unreinforced masonry walls subject to in-plane shear loading fail due to exceedance of shear and tensile bond strengths. This paper examines whether or not the in-plane shear capacity of masonry walls would increase with the increase in the bond strengths through experimental and numerical investigations. For these investigations, shear walls were built with high bond strength polymer cement mortar; they were applied in thin layers of 2 mm thickness each. Material tests were carried out to characterise the bond and the compressive strengths of the high bond strength thin layer mortared masonry; the bond strengths were found approximately double that of the conventional 10 mm thick cement mortars. The shear walls, however, exhibited significantly lower capacity (contrasting the expectation) and displayed base course sliding mode of failure. To ascertain the validity of the experimental results, a combined surface contact—interface element micro finite element (FE) modelling technique was formulated; the results adequately reproduced the experimental datasets. The validated FE model was then applied to examine the effect of the aspect ratios and pre-compression levels to the failure modes, deformation and strength of the high bond strength shear walls and is shown that once the pre-compression exceeds 15% of the masonry compressive strength, the base sliding failure mode changes to the diagonal cracking mode with corresponding increase in in-plane shear capacity. Therefore, it is concluded that the increase the bond strength without regard to pre-compression could adversely affect the safety of the high bond strength unreinforced masonry shear walls.     

Biofilm reduction,cell proliferation,anthelmintic and cytotoxicity effect of green synthesised silver nanoparticle using Artemisia vulgaris extract

Infectious diseases are caused by etiological agents. Nanotechnology has been used to minimise the effect of clinical pathogens which have resistance to antibiotics. In current research synthesis, characterisation and biological activities of green synthesised nanoparticles using Artemisia vulgaris extract have been done. The characterisation of AgNPs was carried out using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, UV‐Vis spectrophotometry, and scanning electron microscopy. Anti‐biofilm, cell viability, antibacterial, brine shrimp lethality, and deoxyribonucleic acid protection effects have been screened. UV‐Vis spectra showed the absorption peak of synthesised nanoparticles at 400 nm. FT‐IR indicated the involvement of the functional group in the preparation of AgNPs. SEM showed the spherical shape of AgNPs with 30 nm diameter. Biological screening results revealed the antibacterial effect against clinical bacterial pathogens. Biofilm reduction and cell viability assay also supported the antibacterial effect. Cytotoxicity effect was recorded as 100% at 200 μg/ml through brine shrimp lethality assay. Protein kinase inhibition zones recorded for AgNPs (16 mm bald) compared with A. vulgaris extract (11 mm bald). It has been concluded that green synthesised AgNPs are more effective against infectious pathogens and could be used as a potential source for therapeutic drugs.Inspec keywords: cellular biophysics, toxicology, silver, nanoparticles, nanomedicine, diseases, microorganisms, ultraviolet spectra, visible spectra, Fourier transform infrared spectra, enzymes, molecular biophysicsOther keywords: biofilm reduction, cell proliferation, anthelmintic effect, cytotoxicity effect, green synthesised silver nanoparticle, Artemisia vulgaris extract, infectious diseases, aetiological agents, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, UV‐Vis spectrophotometry, scanning electron microscopy, SEM, antibiofilm, cell viability, brine shrimp lethality, deoxyribonucleic acid protection effects, AgNP, cytotoxicity, protein kinase inhibition zones, therapeutic drugs     

Improvement of physical and mechanical properties of electrospun poly(lactic acid) nanofibrous structures

Iranian Polymer Journal - The electrospinning of stereocomplexed poly(lactic acid) (Sc-PLA) twisted yarns was our approach to produce PLA-based nanofibrous structures with improved physical and...