Synthesis of Benzophenones and in vitro Evaluation of Their Anticancer Potential in Breast and Prostate Cancer Cells

Breast and prostate cancers are frequently treated with chemotherapy. Several novel chemicals are being reported for this purpose, particularly synthetic and natural benzophenones. This work reports the synthesis of substituted 2-hydroxybenzophenones through 1,4-conjugate addition/intramolecular cycloaddition/dehydration of nitromethane on key intermediate chromones. Structures were extensively studied by means of 2D NMR spectroscopy and single-crystal XRD. Their cytotoxicity was evaluated in vitro in two breast cancer cell lines (MDA-MB-231 and T47-D) and one prostate cancer cell line (PC3). The most potent compound exhibited good cytotoxic effects against the three cancer cell lines (IC₅₀ values ranging from 12.09 to 26.49 μm ) and induced cell-cycle retardation only on prostate cancer cells, which suggested that it might exert cell-type-specific effects.     

Residents’ evaluation of advantages and disadvantages of golf community living in Alicante,Spain

The growing numbers of golf communities are attracting a diverse group of homebuyers who experience varying levels of neighborhood satisfaction. A multinomial logistic regression analysis with follow-up ANOVA reveals that homeowners in one region of Spain who believe there are more advantages than disadvantages to living in a golf community are more likely to be older, Spanish, and evaluate the natural environment, sports facilities, and water supply of their community as better. Meanwhile, those who perceive more disadvantages cite the limitations on using the golf course for non-golf activities, high housing costs, automobile dependence, and lack of services and shops. Thus, satisfaction with the golf community varies depending on the residents’ personal characteristics as well as their evaluation of the neighborhood’s characteristics, but is not directly attributable to whether they play golf or whether the course was a decisive factor in choosing the house.     

Adaptive Boolean Logic Using Ferroelectrics Capacitors as Basic Units of Artificial Neurons and Its Implementation in FPGA

In this work we propose the implementation of boolean logic through artificial neurons with Ferroelectric Capacitor (FeCapacitor) as its basic unit on a reconfigurable hardware platform. Two neurons were implemented: the Perceptron and the Spiking Neuron model. Both neurons use the phenomenon of the hysteresis loop as an activation function and were embedded on a Field Gate Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware platform. The implementations were carried out by Simulink models and hardware synthesizable blocks from DSP Builder software and the results are shown in the form of the models and the boolean functions implemented by them.     

Compressive system identification: Sequential methods and entropy bounds

In the first part of this work, a novel Kalman filtering-based method is introduced for estimating the coefficients of sparse, or more broadly, compressible autoregressive models using fewer observations than normally required. By virtue of its (unscented) Kalman filter mechanism, the derived method essentially addresses the main difficulties attributed to the underlying estimation problem. In particular, it facilitates sequential processing of observations and is shown to attain a good recovery performance, particularly under substantial deviations from ideal conditions, those which are assumed to hold true by the theory of compressive sensing. In the remaining part of this paper we derive a few information-theoretic bounds pertaining to the problem at hand. The obtained bounds establish the relation between the complexity of the autoregressive process and the attainable estimation accuracy through the use of a novel measure of complexity. This measure is used in this work as a substitute to the generally incomputable restricted isometric property.     

Extraction and microencapsulation of bioactive compounds from pomegranate (Punica granatum var. Wonderful) residues

Pomegranate peels and seeds are industrial residues considered interesting sources of punicalagin (PU) and punicic acid (PA), respectively. To optimise their extraction process and protect them against environmental factors, pomegranate residues were extracted with supercritical CO₂ (SC‐CO₂) using a Box–Behnken design and then optimal extracts encapsulated by spray‐drying applying a 2² central composite design. Peel extracts showed a PU content of 0.4–9.5% with optimal extraction conditions of 400 bar, 43 °C and 20% ethanol. On the other hand, SC‐CO₂ seed extracts showed a PA content of 65.1–78.4% with 450 bar, 48 °C and 10% ethanol as optimal extraction parameters. Otherwise, the encapsulation efficiency of SC‐CO₂ extracts was significantly affected by core/wall material ratio and its quadratic effect. This parameter ranged from 35.1% to 72.4% for peel extracts and from 68.2% to 92.7% for seed extracts. Results showed that the proposed technologies are a feasible approach to the integral utilisation of residues from the pomegranate industry.     

Setting a common due date in a constrained flowshop: A variable neighbourhood search approach

In this paper we study a due date setting problem in a flowshop layout. The problem consists of scheduling a set of jobs arriving to the system together with jobs already present (denoted as old jobs), in order to set a common due date for the new jobs. Since the old jobs have a common due date that must not be violated, our problem is a rescheduling problem with the objective of minimising the makespan of the new jobs (thus obtaining the tightest possible due date for the new jobs) and a constraint since the maximum tardiness of the old jobs must be equal to zero. This approach leads to an interesting scheduling problem in which two different objectives are considered, each one for a subset of the jobs that must be scheduled. To the best of our knowledge, this type of problems have been scarcely considered in the literature, and only for very specific purposes. Since our problem is clearly NP-hard, a new heuristic based on variable neighbourhood search (VNS) has been designed. The computational results show that our proposed heuristic outperforms two existing heuristic methods for similar problems in the literature.     

Active contours: Generalization of the snake mode

Abstract— Segmentation is one of the fundamental issues in the field of image processing and computer vision. Various approaches include differentiating an object in the image as a final goal or for further processing (medical diagnosis, surveillance, 3‐D reconstruction and more). Snakes, a model proposed by Kass, Witkin, and Terzopoulos in 1987, provides an efficient method for segmenting an object through the minimization of its energy. The advantage of snakes is in its ability to use high‐level data given by the algorithm operator, as opposed to other methods such as the Laplace technique. The snakes model inherently imposes strong constraints on a given image in order to successfully segment an object. In this paper, the use of adjustment methods is described, which allow us to generalize the snake model to a wider range of applications. Through the use of pre‐processing techniques, the model's constraints were softened. The main theoretical model and its use in facing a real life image is presented.