Halophytes and climate change: adaptive mechanisms and potential uses
The growth and ion-accumulating characteristics of different plant species native to saline-arid ... more The growth and ion-accumulating characteristics of different plant species native to saline-arid areas vis-à-vis the ionic status of their rhizospheric soils are important factors to consider when studying the survival of plant species under harsh conditions. A survey of saline areas in Haryana (CCS Haryana Agricultural University and Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes at Hisar) and Rajasthan (Lunkaransar in Bikaner, Sambhar Lake, Jaipur and Gangani-Kaparda at Jodhpur) was done to explore the variability in halophytic species in different arid and saline regions. It was observed that 44 species spread over 16 families of Angiosperms (i.e. Chenopodiaceae, Mimosaceae, Poaceae, Capparidaceae, Portulacaceae, Tamaricaceae, Fabaceae, Caesalpiniaceae, Aizoceae, Asteraceae, Salvadoraceae, Asclepiadaceae, Boraginaceae, Solanaceae, Amaranthaceae and Cyperaceae) were growing across these locations with most species from the Chenopodiaceae family. Among these highly flourishing species...
Halophytes and climate change: adaptive mechanisms and potential uses
Understanding the various mechanisms of salt-stress tolerance is important for crop improvement, ... more Understanding the various mechanisms of salt-stress tolerance is important for crop improvement, especially when approximately 20% of agricultural land and 50% of crop land in the world is under salt stress. Stomatal closure due to salt stress reduces the CO2:O2 ratio inside the leaf tissues and inhibits CO2 fixation. This inhibition leads to over-reduction of the photosynthetic electron transport chain and causes the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as singlet oxygen (1O2), superoxide anion (O2.-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and hydroxyl radical (OH.). These ROS are responsible for various stress-induced damages to macromolecules and ultimately to cellular structure. Hence, to avoid excessive ROS accumulation during stress and maintain the correct levels of ROS for signalling, plants possess a complex antioxidant defence system including non-enzymatic antioxidants such as ascorbic acid, glutathione, tocopherols and carotenoids; and enzymatic antioxidants such as super...
Poaceae (formerly known as Gramineae) is often considered to be the most important of all plant f... more Poaceae (formerly known as Gramineae) is often considered to be the most important of all plant families to human economies. From evolutionary point of view, wheat is a young polyploid and its genetic configuration is a classical example of cereals phylogenic relationship. The genetic diversity of the elite germplasm have been used by plant breeders for numerous reasons such as germplasm management, genetic relationships, parent selection, and protection. Hence, the knowledge of genetic diversity and relationship among a set of germplasm is of great importance in present scenario for crop improvement and genetic security of food grains. Similarity of wheat genome with rice and maize pave a way to develop more improved verities' of wheat. Many good stress-tolerant wheat verities have developed in the light of phylogenic study of these species. The focus of this review paper is to highlight phylogenic relation of elite wheat genome as well as laconically development of the new str...
We studied the effects of sodic irrigation on growth, physiological parameters and mineral partit... more We studied the effects of sodic irrigation on growth, physiological parameters and mineral partitioning in Zizyphus rotundifolia (ZR) and Z. spina-christi (ZS) seedlings used as rootstocks for Indian jujube scion cultivars. Plants grown in normal soils were irrigated with fresh (control) and three kinds of sodic waters having residual sodium carbonate (RSC) levels of 3, 6 and 9 meq/l. Both the species displayed appreciable decreases in fresh and dry weights of shoots and roots at RSCiw level of 9 meq/l. Leaf chlorophyll and chlorophyll fluorescence also decreased with increasing sodicity. While leaf proline content remained unchanged up to RSCiw 3 meq/l, plants treated with 9 meq/l sodic water had nearly twofold higher leaf proline than control indicating that it could play a major role in osmotic adjustment in salt stressed plants. Na+ and Clcontents increased while K+ and Ca2+ declined in different plant parts with increase in RSCiw. Na +: K+ ratio was higher at a given RSCiw in l...
In the framework of convolutional neural networks, downsampling is often performed with an averag... more In the framework of convolutional neural networks, downsampling is often performed with an average-pooling, where all the activations are treated equally, or with a max-pooling operation that only retains an element with maximum activation while discarding the others. Both of these operations are restrictive and have previously been shown to be sub-optimal. To address this issue, a novel pooling scheme, named ordinal pooling, is introduced in this work. Ordinal pooling rearranges all the elements of a pooling region in a sequence and assigns a different weight to each element based upon its order in the sequence. These weights are used to compute the pooling operation as a weighted sum of the rearranged elements of the pooling region. They are learned via a standard gradient-based training, allowing to learn a behavior anywhere in the spectrum of average-pooling to max-pooling in a differentiable manner. Our experiments suggest that it is advantageous for the networks to perform dif...
The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage... more The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage in wider research, urban and architectural visualisations as well as their ability to observe and visualise selected urban dynamics and energy distribution within the built environment yields new insight into various urban processes which are hardly possible to explore by traditional and conventional CAD or analytical software platforms. By means of computed physical simulation together with the interactive visualisation the observer is enabled to unveil characteristics of the environment which have been hidden up to now and obtain more precise information about various properties of the outdoor environmental quality in a visually understandable way. One of the investigated issues within the contemporary cities is the problem of traffic’s heat propagation with direct influence onto the quality and comfort of the liveability in the built environment. In order to visualise, explore and an...
In the framework of convolutional neural networks that lie at the heart of deep learning, downsam... more In the framework of convolutional neural networks that lie at the heart of deep learning, downsampling is often performed with a max-pooling operation that only retains the element with maximum activation, while completely discarding the information contained in other elements in a pooling region. To address this issue, a novel pooling scheme, Ordinal Pooling Network (OPN), is introduced in this work. OPN rearranges all the elements of a pooling region in a sequence and assigns different weights to these elements based upon their orders in the sequence, where the weights are learned via the gradient-based optimisation. The results of our small-scale experiments on image classification task demonstrate that this scheme leads to a consistent improvement in the accuracy over max-pooling operation. This improvement is expected to increase in deeper networks, where several layers of pooling become necessary.
The last few decades has seen a relentless increase in the various forms of land degradation . Di... more The last few decades has seen a relentless increase in the various forms of land degradation . Different forms of salinity, especially the irrigation-induced secondary salinity, pose formidable constraints to the management of agricultural lands across the world . Although several engineering, agronomic and biological solutions have been suggested for reviving the productivity of salt-impaired lands, of late there is increased emphasis on plant-based solutions for reducing the management costs in an environment-friendly manner. Plant adaptation to abiotic stresses is controlled by cascades of events at the biochemical and molecular level. Halophytes are the plants adapted to grow and reproduce in salt-rich environments, making them model species for studying the physiological and genetic bases of salt tolerance and potentially novel crops for generating revenue from deteriorated salty lands otherwise unsuitable for various agricultural uses. In this chapter, we have attempted to provide a brief overview of salt tolerance in halophytes. Different morphological, physiological and genetic traits underpinning high salinity tolerance in these economically important plants have been delineated. Prospects of further improvements in the salt tolerance capacity of halophytes through genomics and transgenic approaches have been explored.
To explore the comparative effects of field sodicity (soil pH) and irrigation water residual alka... more To explore the comparative effects of field sodicity (soil pH) and irrigation water residual alkalinity (RSCiw) on physiological and biochemical attributes of salt tolerance, and crop performance of two wheat varieties (KRL 210, HD 2967), a total of 308 on-farm trials were carried out in sodicity affected Ghaghar Basin of Haryana, India. Salt tolerant variety KRL 210 maintained relatively higher leaf relative water content (RWC; 1.9%), photosynthetic rate (Pn; 5.1%), stomatal conductance (gS; 6.6%), and transpiration (E; 4.1%) with lower membrane injury (MII; −8.5%), and better control on accumulation of free proline (P; −18.4%), Na+/K+ in shoot (NaK_S; −23.1%) and root (NaK_R; −18.7%) portion compared to traditional HD 2967. Altered physiological response suppressed important yield-related traits revealing repressive effects of sodicity stress on wheat yields; albeit to a lesser extent in KRL 210 with each gradual increase in soil pH (0.77–1.10 t ha−1) and RSCiw (0.29–0.33 t ha−1)....
Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the 2nd most common neurodegenerative disorder due to gradual loss of... more Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the 2nd most common neurodegenerative disorder due to gradual loss of dopaminergic nerves in the substantia nigra in the midbrain which leads to motor symptoms: For instance, gait dysfunction, involuntary tremor, rigidity, and progressive postural instability. PD has no cure and available current treatment is only symptomatic. At present, the main treatment of PD relies on Levodopa that slowing down the disease development to some level but can lead to several side effects. The literature confirms the available models of Parkinsonism that is chemical-induced, that is, by 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine and 6-hydroxydopamine-induced Parkinsonism furthermore transgenic models linked to monogenic alterations in SNCA, LRRK2, UCH-L1, PRKN, and PINK1 genes. In this review article, we conclude that the presently available neurotoxic models of PD that offer a platform for neuroprotective drug discovery.
Salinity in soil or water is a serious threat to global agriculture; the expected acreage affecte... more Salinity in soil or water is a serious threat to global agriculture; the expected acreage affected by salinity is about 20% of the global irrigated lands. Improving salt tolerance of plants through breeding is a complex undertaking due to the number of traits involved. Grafting, a surgical mean of joining a scion and rootstock of two different genotypes with the desired traits, offers an alternative to breeding and biotechnological approaches to salt tolerance. Grafting can also be used to circumvent other biotic and abiotic stresses. Increasing salinity tolerance in tomato (Solanum lycopresicum L.), a highly nutritious and economical vegetable, will have greater impact on the vegetable industry, especially in (semi) arid regions where salinity in soil and water are more prevalent. Besides, plants also experience salt stress when water in hydroponic system is recycled for tomato production. Grafting high yielding but salt-susceptible tomato cultivars onto salt-resistant/tolerant roo...
International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering
Financial inclusion is an excellent tool for empowerment of farmers. The current study examines t... more Financial inclusion is an excellent tool for empowerment of farmers. The current study examines the level of financial inclusion and study the association between various demographical variables and financial inclusion among the farmers. A survey of 360 farmers across Prayagraj district was conducted, this survey found that 71.4% of farmers had his bank accounts while 23.6% of farmers were actively using their bank accounts in past 3 months and only 10.6 % of farmers were taken loan from banks or other formal financial institutions. The survey shows that farmers were financially inclusion: as 72.8% have poor financial inclusion, 19.2% have fair financial inclusion, and only 8.1% have sound financial inclusion. The farmers had not sufficient financial literacy. Further analysis shows that gender is not associated with degree of financial inclusion while other demographic variables i.e. education qualification, family income, age group and size of landholding is closely associated wit...
Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) has become a major concern in India in recent years because women and ... more Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) has become a major concern in India in recent years because women and young children are highly exposed to smoke of various types of unclean fuels used for cooking and heating in the household result into risk of respiratory disorders among them. The paper aims to seek association between prevalence of acute respiratory infection (ARI) among children less than five years of age and use of cooking fuels in households of India. The analysis is based on 52,868 Children less than five years of age included in India's third National Family Health Survey conducted in 2005-2006. Effects of exposure to cooking smoke, determined by the type of fuel used for cooking such as biomass and solid fuels versus cleaner fuels, on the reported prevalence of ARI were estimated using multivariate logistic regression. Since the effects of cooking smoke are likely to be confounded with effects of tobacco smoking, age, and other such factors, the analysis was carried out afte...
Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy = Biomedecine & pharmacotherapie, Jan 20, 2017
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progre... more Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive functions. The pathological hallmarks are extracellular deposits of amyloid plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein. The cognitive deficits seen are thought to be due to synaptic dysfunction and neurochemical deficiencies. Various neurochemical abnormalities have been observed during progressive ageing, and are linked to cognitive abnormalities as seen with the sporadic form of AD. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors are one of the major therapeutic strategies used for the treatment of AD. During the last decade, various new therapeutic strategies have shown beneficial effects in preclinical studies and under clinical development for the treatment of AD. The present review is aimed at discussing the neurobiology of AD and association of neurochemical abnormalities associated with cognitive deterioration and new therapeutic strategies ...
Purpose The paper aims to monitor the condition of heavy Earth-moving machines (HEMMs) used in op... more Purpose The paper aims to monitor the condition of heavy Earth-moving machines (HEMMs) used in open cast mines by lube oil analysis. Design/methodology/approach Oil samples at periodic interval were collected from the HEMM engine (Model No: BEML BH50M). Ferrography and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy have been used for the wear particle analysis present in oil samples. Viscosity analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy have been done to investigate the degradation in quality and changes as compared to the initial structural properties of the lubricants. Findings The results obtained indicates wear in cylinder liner and piston ring. Copper, cast iron, alloy steel and ferrous oxide have been found as rubbing wear particles and cutting wear particles. Contamination level has also been found to be increasing in consecutive older oil samples. Chemical properties degraded with usage time and variations in oxidation and soot level have also been observed in every sa...
Halophytes and climate change: adaptive mechanisms and potential uses
The growth and ion-accumulating characteristics of different plant species native to saline-arid ... more The growth and ion-accumulating characteristics of different plant species native to saline-arid areas vis-à-vis the ionic status of their rhizospheric soils are important factors to consider when studying the survival of plant species under harsh conditions. A survey of saline areas in Haryana (CCS Haryana Agricultural University and Central Institute for Research on Buffaloes at Hisar) and Rajasthan (Lunkaransar in Bikaner, Sambhar Lake, Jaipur and Gangani-Kaparda at Jodhpur) was done to explore the variability in halophytic species in different arid and saline regions. It was observed that 44 species spread over 16 families of Angiosperms (i.e. Chenopodiaceae, Mimosaceae, Poaceae, Capparidaceae, Portulacaceae, Tamaricaceae, Fabaceae, Caesalpiniaceae, Aizoceae, Asteraceae, Salvadoraceae, Asclepiadaceae, Boraginaceae, Solanaceae, Amaranthaceae and Cyperaceae) were growing across these locations with most species from the Chenopodiaceae family. Among these highly flourishing species...
Halophytes and climate change: adaptive mechanisms and potential uses
Understanding the various mechanisms of salt-stress tolerance is important for crop improvement, ... more Understanding the various mechanisms of salt-stress tolerance is important for crop improvement, especially when approximately 20% of agricultural land and 50% of crop land in the world is under salt stress. Stomatal closure due to salt stress reduces the CO2:O2 ratio inside the leaf tissues and inhibits CO2 fixation. This inhibition leads to over-reduction of the photosynthetic electron transport chain and causes the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as singlet oxygen (1O2), superoxide anion (O2.-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and hydroxyl radical (OH.). These ROS are responsible for various stress-induced damages to macromolecules and ultimately to cellular structure. Hence, to avoid excessive ROS accumulation during stress and maintain the correct levels of ROS for signalling, plants possess a complex antioxidant defence system including non-enzymatic antioxidants such as ascorbic acid, glutathione, tocopherols and carotenoids; and enzymatic antioxidants such as super...
Poaceae (formerly known as Gramineae) is often considered to be the most important of all plant f... more Poaceae (formerly known as Gramineae) is often considered to be the most important of all plant families to human economies. From evolutionary point of view, wheat is a young polyploid and its genetic configuration is a classical example of cereals phylogenic relationship. The genetic diversity of the elite germplasm have been used by plant breeders for numerous reasons such as germplasm management, genetic relationships, parent selection, and protection. Hence, the knowledge of genetic diversity and relationship among a set of germplasm is of great importance in present scenario for crop improvement and genetic security of food grains. Similarity of wheat genome with rice and maize pave a way to develop more improved verities' of wheat. Many good stress-tolerant wheat verities have developed in the light of phylogenic study of these species. The focus of this review paper is to highlight phylogenic relation of elite wheat genome as well as laconically development of the new str...
We studied the effects of sodic irrigation on growth, physiological parameters and mineral partit... more We studied the effects of sodic irrigation on growth, physiological parameters and mineral partitioning in Zizyphus rotundifolia (ZR) and Z. spina-christi (ZS) seedlings used as rootstocks for Indian jujube scion cultivars. Plants grown in normal soils were irrigated with fresh (control) and three kinds of sodic waters having residual sodium carbonate (RSC) levels of 3, 6 and 9 meq/l. Both the species displayed appreciable decreases in fresh and dry weights of shoots and roots at RSCiw level of 9 meq/l. Leaf chlorophyll and chlorophyll fluorescence also decreased with increasing sodicity. While leaf proline content remained unchanged up to RSCiw 3 meq/l, plants treated with 9 meq/l sodic water had nearly twofold higher leaf proline than control indicating that it could play a major role in osmotic adjustment in salt stressed plants. Na+ and Clcontents increased while K+ and Ca2+ declined in different plant parts with increase in RSCiw. Na +: K+ ratio was higher at a given RSCiw in l...
In the framework of convolutional neural networks, downsampling is often performed with an averag... more In the framework of convolutional neural networks, downsampling is often performed with an average-pooling, where all the activations are treated equally, or with a max-pooling operation that only retains an element with maximum activation while discarding the others. Both of these operations are restrictive and have previously been shown to be sub-optimal. To address this issue, a novel pooling scheme, named ordinal pooling, is introduced in this work. Ordinal pooling rearranges all the elements of a pooling region in a sequence and assigns a different weight to each element based upon its order in the sequence. These weights are used to compute the pooling operation as a weighted sum of the rearranged elements of the pooling region. They are learned via a standard gradient-based training, allowing to learn a behavior anywhere in the spectrum of average-pooling to max-pooling in a differentiable manner. Our experiments suggest that it is advantageous for the networks to perform dif...
The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage... more The advent of new interactive game engine tools such as Unity3D, Unreal or Crysis and their usage in wider research, urban and architectural visualisations as well as their ability to observe and visualise selected urban dynamics and energy distribution within the built environment yields new insight into various urban processes which are hardly possible to explore by traditional and conventional CAD or analytical software platforms. By means of computed physical simulation together with the interactive visualisation the observer is enabled to unveil characteristics of the environment which have been hidden up to now and obtain more precise information about various properties of the outdoor environmental quality in a visually understandable way. One of the investigated issues within the contemporary cities is the problem of traffic’s heat propagation with direct influence onto the quality and comfort of the liveability in the built environment. In order to visualise, explore and an...
In the framework of convolutional neural networks that lie at the heart of deep learning, downsam... more In the framework of convolutional neural networks that lie at the heart of deep learning, downsampling is often performed with a max-pooling operation that only retains the element with maximum activation, while completely discarding the information contained in other elements in a pooling region. To address this issue, a novel pooling scheme, Ordinal Pooling Network (OPN), is introduced in this work. OPN rearranges all the elements of a pooling region in a sequence and assigns different weights to these elements based upon their orders in the sequence, where the weights are learned via the gradient-based optimisation. The results of our small-scale experiments on image classification task demonstrate that this scheme leads to a consistent improvement in the accuracy over max-pooling operation. This improvement is expected to increase in deeper networks, where several layers of pooling become necessary.
The last few decades has seen a relentless increase in the various forms of land degradation . Di... more The last few decades has seen a relentless increase in the various forms of land degradation . Different forms of salinity, especially the irrigation-induced secondary salinity, pose formidable constraints to the management of agricultural lands across the world . Although several engineering, agronomic and biological solutions have been suggested for reviving the productivity of salt-impaired lands, of late there is increased emphasis on plant-based solutions for reducing the management costs in an environment-friendly manner. Plant adaptation to abiotic stresses is controlled by cascades of events at the biochemical and molecular level. Halophytes are the plants adapted to grow and reproduce in salt-rich environments, making them model species for studying the physiological and genetic bases of salt tolerance and potentially novel crops for generating revenue from deteriorated salty lands otherwise unsuitable for various agricultural uses. In this chapter, we have attempted to provide a brief overview of salt tolerance in halophytes. Different morphological, physiological and genetic traits underpinning high salinity tolerance in these economically important plants have been delineated. Prospects of further improvements in the salt tolerance capacity of halophytes through genomics and transgenic approaches have been explored.
To explore the comparative effects of field sodicity (soil pH) and irrigation water residual alka... more To explore the comparative effects of field sodicity (soil pH) and irrigation water residual alkalinity (RSCiw) on physiological and biochemical attributes of salt tolerance, and crop performance of two wheat varieties (KRL 210, HD 2967), a total of 308 on-farm trials were carried out in sodicity affected Ghaghar Basin of Haryana, India. Salt tolerant variety KRL 210 maintained relatively higher leaf relative water content (RWC; 1.9%), photosynthetic rate (Pn; 5.1%), stomatal conductance (gS; 6.6%), and transpiration (E; 4.1%) with lower membrane injury (MII; −8.5%), and better control on accumulation of free proline (P; −18.4%), Na+/K+ in shoot (NaK_S; −23.1%) and root (NaK_R; −18.7%) portion compared to traditional HD 2967. Altered physiological response suppressed important yield-related traits revealing repressive effects of sodicity stress on wheat yields; albeit to a lesser extent in KRL 210 with each gradual increase in soil pH (0.77–1.10 t ha−1) and RSCiw (0.29–0.33 t ha−1)....
Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the 2nd most common neurodegenerative disorder due to gradual loss of... more Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the 2nd most common neurodegenerative disorder due to gradual loss of dopaminergic nerves in the substantia nigra in the midbrain which leads to motor symptoms: For instance, gait dysfunction, involuntary tremor, rigidity, and progressive postural instability. PD has no cure and available current treatment is only symptomatic. At present, the main treatment of PD relies on Levodopa that slowing down the disease development to some level but can lead to several side effects. The literature confirms the available models of Parkinsonism that is chemical-induced, that is, by 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine and 6-hydroxydopamine-induced Parkinsonism furthermore transgenic models linked to monogenic alterations in SNCA, LRRK2, UCH-L1, PRKN, and PINK1 genes. In this review article, we conclude that the presently available neurotoxic models of PD that offer a platform for neuroprotective drug discovery.
Salinity in soil or water is a serious threat to global agriculture; the expected acreage affecte... more Salinity in soil or water is a serious threat to global agriculture; the expected acreage affected by salinity is about 20% of the global irrigated lands. Improving salt tolerance of plants through breeding is a complex undertaking due to the number of traits involved. Grafting, a surgical mean of joining a scion and rootstock of two different genotypes with the desired traits, offers an alternative to breeding and biotechnological approaches to salt tolerance. Grafting can also be used to circumvent other biotic and abiotic stresses. Increasing salinity tolerance in tomato (Solanum lycopresicum L.), a highly nutritious and economical vegetable, will have greater impact on the vegetable industry, especially in (semi) arid regions where salinity in soil and water are more prevalent. Besides, plants also experience salt stress when water in hydroponic system is recycled for tomato production. Grafting high yielding but salt-susceptible tomato cultivars onto salt-resistant/tolerant roo...
International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering
Financial inclusion is an excellent tool for empowerment of farmers. The current study examines t... more Financial inclusion is an excellent tool for empowerment of farmers. The current study examines the level of financial inclusion and study the association between various demographical variables and financial inclusion among the farmers. A survey of 360 farmers across Prayagraj district was conducted, this survey found that 71.4% of farmers had his bank accounts while 23.6% of farmers were actively using their bank accounts in past 3 months and only 10.6 % of farmers were taken loan from banks or other formal financial institutions. The survey shows that farmers were financially inclusion: as 72.8% have poor financial inclusion, 19.2% have fair financial inclusion, and only 8.1% have sound financial inclusion. The farmers had not sufficient financial literacy. Further analysis shows that gender is not associated with degree of financial inclusion while other demographic variables i.e. education qualification, family income, age group and size of landholding is closely associated wit...
Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) has become a major concern in India in recent years because women and ... more Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) has become a major concern in India in recent years because women and young children are highly exposed to smoke of various types of unclean fuels used for cooking and heating in the household result into risk of respiratory disorders among them. The paper aims to seek association between prevalence of acute respiratory infection (ARI) among children less than five years of age and use of cooking fuels in households of India. The analysis is based on 52,868 Children less than five years of age included in India's third National Family Health Survey conducted in 2005-2006. Effects of exposure to cooking smoke, determined by the type of fuel used for cooking such as biomass and solid fuels versus cleaner fuels, on the reported prevalence of ARI were estimated using multivariate logistic regression. Since the effects of cooking smoke are likely to be confounded with effects of tobacco smoking, age, and other such factors, the analysis was carried out afte...
Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy = Biomedecine & pharmacotherapie, Jan 20, 2017
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progre... more Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an age-related neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive functions. The pathological hallmarks are extracellular deposits of amyloid plaques and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein. The cognitive deficits seen are thought to be due to synaptic dysfunction and neurochemical deficiencies. Various neurochemical abnormalities have been observed during progressive ageing, and are linked to cognitive abnormalities as seen with the sporadic form of AD. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors are one of the major therapeutic strategies used for the treatment of AD. During the last decade, various new therapeutic strategies have shown beneficial effects in preclinical studies and under clinical development for the treatment of AD. The present review is aimed at discussing the neurobiology of AD and association of neurochemical abnormalities associated with cognitive deterioration and new therapeutic strategies ...
Purpose The paper aims to monitor the condition of heavy Earth-moving machines (HEMMs) used in op... more Purpose The paper aims to monitor the condition of heavy Earth-moving machines (HEMMs) used in open cast mines by lube oil analysis. Design/methodology/approach Oil samples at periodic interval were collected from the HEMM engine (Model No: BEML BH50M). Ferrography and Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy have been used for the wear particle analysis present in oil samples. Viscosity analysis and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy have been done to investigate the degradation in quality and changes as compared to the initial structural properties of the lubricants. Findings The results obtained indicates wear in cylinder liner and piston ring. Copper, cast iron, alloy steel and ferrous oxide have been found as rubbing wear particles and cutting wear particles. Contamination level has also been found to be increasing in consecutive older oil samples. Chemical properties degraded with usage time and variations in oxidation and soot level have also been observed in every sa...
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