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In order to examine the health of the coastal waters off Visakhapatnam in terms of prevalence and abundance of heterotrophic (H), indicator and pathogenic (P) bacterial counts (BC) and influence of physical processes on them, time-series observations were conducted during January (winter), March (spring), July (summer) and October (post-monsoon). We noticed the impact of physical forces on substantial variations in abundance and distribution of the HBC, total coliforms, Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa in the study region. Based on our results Escherichia coli and other PBC were not much influenced by the physical conditions. It has been noticed that the perennial existence of the high abundance of IBC and PBC above the standard limits during the entire study period leading to an alarming situation in the coastal waters off Visakhapatnam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rate coefficients for ionization and dissociation have been calculated for over 140 atomic, molecular, and ionic species in the radiation fields of (1) the quiet and the active Sun at 1 AU heliocentric distance and (2) blackbodies at four selected temperatures in the range from T =1000 K to 1,000,000 K without factors for radiation dilution with distance from the source. The rate coefficients in units of transitions per second ( s − 1 ) and associated excess energies of the photo products in eV are tabulated for about 265 ionization, dissociation, and dissociative ionization branches. Users can interactively access this information and plot and download cross sections and wavelength-binned results for various solar activities and blackbody temperatures on our website http://phidrates.space.swri.edu . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Liquid polycarbosilane (LPCS) derived hard coatings of silicon carbide (SiC) were deposited on Inconel alloy at three different moderately high temperatures by chemical vapour deposition. The deposited films were characterized by X-ray diffractometry and Field emission scanning electron microscopy. Liquid PCS yielded a mixture of α-SiC and β-SiC during decomposition having uniform round-shaped particles of dimension around 200–300nm without extensive cracking and few discrete shaped particles were also found to form at higher temperature (i.e. 1100°C and 1200°C) deposited films. The coated samples showed substantial increment in hardness and fracture toughness as compared to the uncoated sample. The fracture toughness (KIC) values of the deposited films were in the range of 6.7–10.7MPa(m)1/2. The tribological properties and hardness of the films were also found to vary with deposition temperature. The scratch tracks of the films revealed that brittle failures occurred in all SiC coated substrates. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Accessing medical information in mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones is becoming widespread. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities as of desktop computers, it is necessary for medical information to be fragmented for proper presentation on these types of devices. In this paper, we propose an architecture for displaying medical information in PDA. In the proposed system, a server extracts the information, categorizes the information in order of its relevance for diagnosis, and dynamically generates a hierarchical view of the relevant information based on certain medical domain knowledge. Displaying image and graphics data in PDA poses several challenges. The proposed system supports an image visualization tool, which interactively displays an image or a portion of an image in user''s PDA. This visualization tools increases the resource utilization of PDA by offloading a part of the computation to the server. A suitable caching scheme is incorporated for optimum utilization of communication channel bandwidth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

For the 21st century and beyond, scientists should expect more than archive tapes from a data center. The data center should be the focal point to which any scientist can go and not only be able to find out more about the data, retrieve the data (preferably via the World Wide Web), but also view quick looks into the data without ever retrieving the data locally. Finally, a data center should offer tools to easily manipulate and display the data. Other key factors of a data center should be reliability (is the server almost always up?), usability (is the web site easy to navigate?), and responsibility (is there a point of contact for questions and reporting problems).This document will discuss what we are doing at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), in collaboration with the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL), and the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) to achieve these goals and what more needs to be done. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Medial axis transform (MAT) is well known for object representation. It is interesting to explore its use in different kinds of computations. In this paper an algorithm has been proposed for computation of normals at the boundaries of two-dimensional objects based on their MATs. In this technique, there is no requirement of linking boundary points during the computation compared to other existing techniques. The added advantage in the computation is that the computation can be restricted purely in the integer domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Productivity is low in tropical waters outside the traditional upwelling regimes, making temperature fronts a potential marker of fish. To test the hypothesis that all temperature fronts harbour high concentrations of nutrients and phytoplankton biomass, several fronts were sampled during winter 2014 in the northeastern Arabian Sea (NEAS). The data suggest that all the sampled temperature fronts are active biological spots owing to injection of subsurface nutrients into the surface layer. The plankton response, however, varied, with enhanced zooplankton biomass (total bacterial counts) in the shelf (open-ocean) fronts, suggesting that classical (microbial) food webs are active. The plankton response depended on the age of the front, and, more importantly, the initial or background conditions under which a front forms. Determination of the initial conditions for a front is complicated owing to advection by the mean current and mesoscale eddies and this advection itself modulates the background conditions. An increase in integrated Chlorophyll- a (Chl- a ), but not surface Chl- a , was observed in both shelf and open-ocean fronts, suggesting that depth –integrated Chl- a is likely to be a better marker of potential fishery zones (PFZs). This study suggests that the PFZ advisories may be improved by including depth-integrated Chl- a , the age of the front, and background conditions in the procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) were successfully entrapped in lead silicate glass by the melt quench technique. Variation of micro hardness with load for lead silicate glass and the composites (having different wt% of SWCNTs) show Reverse Indentation Size Effect (RISE). Meyer's law, the proportional specimen resistance (PSR) model and the modified PSR model have been analyzed for the load dependent hardness of the glass and the composites. Incremented elastic recovery in the composites than that of the glass was explained by the appealing cushioning performance of entangled SWCNT bundles. In contrast, higher plastic deformation beneath the indenter in the composites was established by evaluating the recovery resistance of the materials. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A high power solid-state RF power amplifier of 3kW at 325MHz has been developed using only four RF power amplifier modules of 850W power output each. The design and characterization of RF power modules have been presented. A four way Wilkinson power combiner adds the output of four power amplifier modules with a total transmission loss of less than 6%. The combined power amplifier has a power gain of 20.2dB at 1-dB compression point, and the corresponding output power is 2.8kW at 325MHz. The drain efficiency of the power amplifier is 65.3% at 3kW. All the harmonics of this amplifier are below −40dBc. The amplifier has better characteristics like fewer numbers of active devices per kilo watt, high efficiency, high gain, and ruggedness etc for RF accelerator applications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents image and video analysis based schemes to automate the process of adductors angle measurement which is carried out on infants as a part of Hammersmith Infant Neurological Examination (HINE). Image segmentation, thinning and feature point based object tracking are used for automating the analysis. Segmentation outputs are processed with a novel region merging algorithm. It is found that the refined segmentation outputs can successfully be used to extract features in the context of the application under consideration. Next, a heuristic based filtering algorithm is applied on the thinned structures for locating necessary points to measure adductors angle. A semi-automatic scheme based on the object tracking of a video has been proposed to minimize errors of the image based analysis. It is observed that the video-based analysis outperforms the image-based method. A fully automatic method has also been proposed and compared with the semi-automatic algorithm. The proposed methods have been tested with several videos recorded from hospitals and the results have been found to be satisfactory in the present context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The seeding effect of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a pathogenic bacterium on ice nucleation in an aqueous environment is of interest because ice formation is always damaging to freeze sensitive plants by the presence of ice nucleating bacteria. An experiment was conducted at cloud temperature varying from -20°C to 0°C in a walk-in cold room where lowest attainable temperature is -35°C. For a specific total water content seeding was done in three different ways: (i) as a cultured bacterial medium, (ii) by UV-radiation of the cultured bacterial medium for 15 min, and (iii) after boiling the cultured bacteria for 20 min. It was observed that highest amount of nucleation occurred at -3.8°C, for cases (i) and (ii). However, when seeding was done by cultured bacteria irradiated by UV-radiation, nucleation reduced remarkably because UV-radiation killed the bacteria leaving aside the residual protein already present. No ice nucleation was noted in the case of seeding by boiled cultured bacteria. Thus we conclude that the residual protein in the outer membrane of the bacterium is mainly responsible for the ice nucleation and hence for crystal formation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study examined the striatal dopamine system integrity and associated behavior in 5- to 7-year-old rhesus monkeys born from mothers that experienced stress and/or consumed moderate levels of alcohol during pregnancy. Thirty-one young adult rhesus monkeys were derived from females randomly assigned to one of four groups: (1) control group that consumed isocaloric sucrose solution throughout gestation; (2) stress group that experienced prenatal stress (10-min removal from home cage and exposure to three random loud noise bursts, gestational days 90 through 145); (3) alcohol group that consumed alcohol (0.6 g/kg/day) throughout gestation; or (4) combined alcohol plus stress group that received both treatments. The subjects were assessed for striatal dopamine system function using positron emission tomography (PET), in which the dopamine (DA)-rich striatum was evaluated in separate scans for the trapping of [18F]-Fallypride (FAL) and 6-[18F]fluoro-m-tyrosine (FMT) to assess dopamine D2 receptor binding potential (BP) and DA synthesis via dopa decarboxylase activity, respectively. Subjects were previously assessed for non-matching-to-sample (NMS) task acquisition, with ratings of behavioral inhibition, stereotypies, and activity made after each NMS testing session. Subjects from prenatal stress conditions (Groups 2 and 4) showed an increase in the ratio of striatal dopamine D2 receptor BP and DA synthesis compared to controls (Group 1). An increase in the radiotracer distribution volume ratios (DVRs), which is used to evaluate the balance between striatal DA synthesis and receptor availability, respectively, was significantly correlated with less behavioral inhibition. The latter supports a hypothesis linking striatal function to behavioral inhibitory control. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

BACKGROUND: Cytochrome P450-related drug interactions can lead to adverse effects that may affect health care resource utilization. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to quantify the impact of drug interactions involving hydroxymethylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase inhibitors (statins) on health care resource utilization. METHODS: Using the Manitoba Health Research database, we identified patients who had used statins between January 1, 1995, and March 31, 1998. New statin users (NSUs) were those who received a first prescription for a statin after April 30, 1995; old statin users (OSUs) were those who had a statin prescription before January 1, 1995. The number of hospitalizations, physician visits, and prescriptions, and their associated costs to the Manitoba health care system were calculated. Statin interacters were defined as users with >1 prescription for an interacting drug while receiving a statin. Interacting drugs were classified into 2 groups: group A included drugs whose levels increased as a result of the statin prescription; drugs in group B increased statin levels. The Wilcoxon rank-sum test was used to analyze differences by statin on health care resource use. RESULTS: A total of 28,705 statin users (18, 181 NSUs and 10,524 OSUs) were identified. During the study period, 24,496 (85.3%) individuals took 1 statin, 3751 (13.1%) took 2 statins, and 458 (1.6%) took 3 to 5 statins. The most common coadministered group A interacting drugs were diclofenac (5.8%), amitriptyline (4.9%), warfarin (4.5%), and ibuprofen (1.8%). The most common group B interacting drugs were erythromycin (8.2%), omeprazole (5.5%), cimetidine (3.6%), and clarithromycin (3.5%). Statin interacters consumed significantly more health care resources than did noninteracters for both incident and prevalent analyses (P < 0.001). In the prevalent analysis (NSUs + OSUs), pravastatin users taking interacting drugs had significantly fewer hospitalizations (mean, 1.3), fewer physician visits (mean, 24.2), and lower health care costs (mean, 5,526 dollars) compared with prevalent users of lovastatin (1.7, 28.0, and 6,925 dollars, respectively) and fewer physician visits than simvastatin users (25.6, P < 0.001). In the incident analysis, pravastatin users had significantly less physician visits (20.8 vs 23.5, P < 0.001) and lower health care costs (4,739 dollars vs 6,323 dollars, P < 0.001) than lovastatin users. CONCLUSION: Pravastatin was associated with fewer hospitalizations, physician visits, and overall health care resource utilization in prevalent users than lovastatin, possibly due to a lack of drug interaction effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]