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Metal pollution in sediment from construction areas raises ecological and health concerns, yet source-based sediment pollution in Bangladesh remains understudied. Our investigation focused on fifteen locations in the Kohelia River and the coastal regions near the Matarbari projects (Matarbari Power Plant, Matarbari Deep Seaport), assessing metal concentrations' sources and impacts on ecology and human well-being. Sediment quality indices indicated high Cd and Cr contamination, with sites near Matarbari projects being the most polluted. The positive matrix factorization model identified three anthropogenic sources and mixed sources. Matarbari projects contributed significantly to As (67.9 %), Mn (50.25 %), Cd (48.35 %), and Cr (41.0 %), while ship-breaking yards contributed Fe (58.0 %), Zn (55.5 %), Pb (53.8 %), and Cu (36.1 %). Ecological indices showed different impacts on aquatic life from metal pollution, but cancer risk levels stayed below the threshold set by the US Environmental Protection Agency. These findings underscore the need for targeted measures to address metal pollution. [Display omitted] • Sediment quality indices were used to compare metal contents. • PMF model was applied for metal source apportionment. • Matarbari Projects and ship breaking yards were identified as potential sources of metals. • The pollution had serious negative impacts on ecosystem and human well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ononin is a naturally occurring isoflavone glycoside generally found in various plants like soybeans, legumes, Chinese licorice, Mongolian milkvetch, kudzu, broccoli, and lupine. The compound has exhibited various therapeutic benefits in different laboratory tests. This study aims to evaluate pharmacological effects and biopharmaceutical features based on different clinical and preclinical studies and to assess the underlying mechanisms behind the effects against various deleterious diseases. For this, searching and collection of data were done (up to date as of October 07, 2023) in various reliable electronic databases, including PubMed/Medline, Scopus, Springer Link, ScienceDirect, Wiley Online, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The findings exhibited beneficial effects against inflammation and a variety of diseases, such as neurodegenerative illnesses (Alzheimer's disease and cerebral I/R), viral and fungal infections (Influenza A and Candida albicans), diabetic nephropathy, osteoarthritis, obesity, and acute myocardial infraction (AMI). These beneficial effects are due to the antioxidant properties of the compound, which are capable of reducing ROS generation and the level of pro-inflammatory markers. The phytochemicals also demonstrated anticancer effects against various cancers, including breast, lung, orthotopic bone tumor, and laryngeal cancers. The compound exerted anticancer effects via cytotoxicity, an apoptotic effect by regulating the Bax/Bcl2 ratio, induction of oxidative stress, inhibition of proliferation, and metastasis through downregulating different cellular pathways such as the EGFR-Erk1/2, PI3K/Akt/mTOR, MEK/ERK, and JNK/ERK/p38 pathways. But the compound has poor oral bioavailability, resulting in low oral efficacy. Therefore, we suggest developing an alternative route and conducting extensive studies to understand the exact molecular mechanism, which will be more reliable for performing the next clinical trials to establish the lead as an efficacious therapeutic agent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Batch assays were performed under a stressed condition during the anaerobic digestion process to assess the effect of component proportions on the quantity and pattern of biochemical methane yield of two sets of mixtures, consisting of poultry droppings (PD) with sugarcane bagasse (SB) and press mud (PM) for set A and PD with sugar beet roots and tops (SBRT) and PM for set B. Augmented simplex centroid design was used to design the mixture composition for the anaerobic co digestion. The reactor performances were assessed under identical conditions using cumulative methane yield (CMY) and percentage volatile solids destruction (PVSD) as the criteria. The maximum volume of methane were obtained 48.5 NL CH 4 kg−1 VS at mixture proportion of 66.67% of PM, 16.665% of PD and 16.665% of SB for set A and 44 NL CH 4 kg−1 VS at mixture proportion of 50% of PM and 50% of PD for set B. Synergistic effect were observed by adding a greater proportion of PM for both the sets of A and B. Antagonistic effect were obtained by adding a greater proportion of SB for set A and a higher proportion of SBRT for set B. Response surface methods and modeling were used to find out optimum mixture combinations for maximizing the methane production. From the optimization plots, the use of PD having the antagonistic effect was found for both the sets of A and set B. Graphical abstract Image 1 Highlights • Batch assays using mixture design were conducted under stressed conditions. • Study was performed to assess the effect of component proportions on methane yield. • The highest (48.5 NL) CH 4 kg−1 VS was found at 67% (PM) + 17% (PD) + 16% (SB) -(set A). • The highest (44 NL) CH 4 kg−1 VS was found at 50% (PM) and 50% (PD) -(set B). • Synergistic effect was observed by adding a greater portion of PM for both the sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper presents the computational study of convective heat transfer enhancement and entropy generation performance by using bluff cylinder. A two-dimensional numerical simulation is executed successfully on thermo-hydraulic transport characteristics for a square extruded bluff cylinder placed inside duct. The test fluid, air (Pr 0.707), is used for the experiment. The turbulent SST scheme is engaged for the simulation. The simulation is accomplished with the aim to achieve an understanding of physical performance and activities of the thermo-fluidic flow inside the channel fitted with bluff body at 15D spacing from the inlet under constant temperature conditions at wall. The simulation is done to cover cross flow encompassing both laminar as well as turbulent flow regime in the range of Reynolds number (Re) up to 1×105 and inlet intensities from 5% to 40%. The effects of outlet temperature and Nusselt number is esteemed and considered. No ideal Re has been detected which could reduce the total entropy generation. It is highly promising to be executed in the practical relevance like power and energy industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poultry industry is a progressive and prospective agro-based sector in Bangladesh. Poultry droppings (PD) make an excellent and abundant raw material for anaerobic co-digestion (AD) because of its high nitrogen content. Two sets of comparative assays were conducted on the anaerobic co-digestion of PD with two lignocellulosic co-substrates (LCSs), namely wheat straw (WS) and meadow grass (MG), under five different mixing ratios to optimize substrate composition and C:N ratio for enhanced biogas production. All digesters were run simultaneously under a mesophilic temperature of 35 ± 1 °C with an identical volatile solids (VS) concentration. The results showed that the co-digestion of PD with LCSs was significantly higher in terms of biogas yield and bio-methane potential (BMP) than those obtained by mono-digestion of PD and LCSs. Co-digestion of PD and MG produced a higher cumulative biogas production, biogas yield and BMP than from respectively PD and WS. The highest methane contents found were 330.1 and 340.1 Nl kg − 1 VS after digestion for 90 days at a mixing ratio of, respectively, 70:30 (PD:WS) with a C:N ratio of 32.02 and a mixing ratio of 50:50 (PD:MG) with a C:N ratio of 31.52. The increases were 1.14 and 1.13 times those of the LCSs alone, respectively. Predicted optimum ratio for PD:LCSs and C:N ratios, maximum BMP and percentage volatile solids destruction (PVSD) were calculated by using software MINITAB-17 according to the best fit regression models for co-digestion of PD with LCSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present two clustering techniques called ModEx and Seed-Detective. ModEx is a modified version of an existing clustering technique called Ex-Detective. It addresses some limitations of Ex-Detective. Seed-Detective is a combination of ModEx and Simple K-Means. Seed-Detective uses ModEx to produce a set of high quality initial seeds that are then given as input to K-Means for producing the final clusters. The high quality initial seeds are expected to produce high quality clusters through K-Means. The performances of Seed-Detective and ModEx are compared with the performances of Ex-Detective, PAM, Simple K-Means (SK), Basic Farthest Point Heuristic (BFPH) and New Farthest Point Heuristic (NFPH). We use three cluster evaluation criteria namely F -measure, Entropy and Purity and four natural datasets that we obtain from the UCI Machine learning repository. In the datasets our proposed techniques perform better than the existing techniques in terms of F -measure, Entropy and Purity. The sign test results suggest a statistical significance of the superiority of Seed-Detective (and ModEx) over the existing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Bacillus anthracis is a gram positive, spore forming, rod shaped bacteria which is the etiologic agent of anthrax – cutaneous, pulmonary and gastrointestinal. A recent outbreak of anthrax in a tropical region uncovered natural and in vitro resistance against penicillin, ciprofloxacin, quinolone due to over exposure of the pathogen to these antibiotics. This fact combined with the ongoing threat of using B. anthracis as a biological weapon proves that the identification of new therapeutic targets is urgently needed. Methods In this computational approach various databases and online based servers were used to detect essential proteins of B. anthracis A0248. Protein sequences of B. anthracis A0248 strain were retrieved from the NCBI database which was then run in CD-hit suite for clustering. NCBI BlastP against the human proteome and similarity search against DEG were done to find out essential human non-homologous proteins. Proteins involved in unique pathways were analyzed using KEGG genome database and PSORTb, CELLO v.2.5, ngLOC – these three tools were used to deduce putative cell surface proteins. Results Successive analysis revealed 116 proteins to be essential human non-homologs among which 17 were involved in unique metabolic pathways and 28 were predicted as membrane associated proteins. Both types of proteins can be exploited as they are unlikely to have homologous counterparts in the human host. Conclusion Being human non-homologous, these proteins can be targeted for potential therapeutic drug development in future. Targets on unique metabolic and membrane-bound proteins can block cell wall synthesis, bacterial replication and signal transduction respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) films were studied with and without applying fixed pulse bias and frequency at variable pulse widths in double bent Filtered Cathodic Vacuum Arc (FCVA) system. Both from Raman and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses it has been observed that the ratio of sp3/sp2 is maximal at pulse width of 15 µs with fixed pulse bias 3 kV and frequency 200 Hz. Increasing or decreasing pulse width from this threshold value accompanies the decreasing sp3 content in the film. It is also observed that with applying pulse bias width at said frequency and bias voltage G peak position was shifted to lower values and after reaching a minimum at 15 µs G peak position shifted to higher wave numbers. At the 15 µs pulse width, 3 kV bias voltage and 200 Hz frequency we have formed ta-C films with maximum sp3 content. This study clearly suggests that it is possible to tune the ta-C film''s most important properties such as percentage of sp3 content, internal stress, and hardness by applying pulse width at particular frequency and bias voltage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

It is a crucial need for a clustering technique to produce high-quality clusters from biomedical and gene expression datasets without requiring any user inputs. Therefore, in this paper we present a clustering technique called KUVClust that produces high-quality clusters when applied on biomedical and gene expression datasets without requiring any user inputs. The KUVClust algorithm uses three concepts namely multivariate kernel density estimation, unique closest neighborhood set and vein-based clustering. Although these concepts are known in the literature, KUVClust combines the concepts in a novel manner to achieve high-quality clustering results. The performance of KUVClust is compared with established clustering techniques on real-world biomedical and gene expression datasets. The comparisons were evaluated in terms of three criteria (purity, entropy, and sum of squared error (SSE)). Experimental results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed technique over the existing techniques for clustering both the low dimensional biomedical and high dimensional gene expressions datasets used in the experiments. • KUVClust does not require any user input to produce high quality clusters. • KUVClust produces high quality clusters from biomedical & gene expression datasets. • KUVClust is combination of three concepts namely Vein-based clustering, KDE and UNS. • KUVClust works well on both high dimensional and low dimensional datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sclareol (SCL), a labdane diterpene compound found in Salvia sclarea L., exhibited therapeutic effects. This study investigated the potential interaction between SCL and diazepam (DZP) in modulating sedation in the thiopental sodium-induced sleeping animal model, supported by in-silico molecular docking analysis. The control, sclareol (5, 10 and 20 mg/kg), and the reference drugs [diazepam: 3 mg/kg and Caffeine (CAF): 10 mg/kg] were used in male albino mice. Then, sodium thiopental (40 mg/kg , i.p.) was administrated to induce sleep. The latent period, percentage of sleep incidence and modulation of latency were measured. Further, homology modeling of human γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) was conducted examine the binding mode of GABA interaction with SCL, DZP, and CAF compounds SCL (low dose) slightly increased the sleep latency, while the higher dose significantly prolonged sleep latency. DZP, a GABA A receptor agonist, exhibited strong sleep-inducing properties, reducing sleep latency, and increasing sleeping time. Caffeine (CAF) administration prolonged sleep latency and reduced sleeping time, consistent with its stimulant effects. The combination treatments involving SCL, DZP, and CAF showed mixed effects on sleep parameters. The molecular docking revealed good binding affinities of SCL, DZP, and CAF for GABA A receptor subunits A2 and A5. Our findings highlighted the complex interplay between SCL, DZP, and CAF in regulating sleep behaviors and provided insights into potential combination therapies for sleep disorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anaerobic co-digestion of poultry droppings (PD) and briquetted wheat straw (BWS) with alkali additive in the form of KOH (BWS add ) or without any additive (BWS raw ) was conducted using continuously stirred tank reactors (CSTRs) under both mesophilic (35 °C) and thermophilic (53 °C) conditions. The aims of the study were to compare 1) co-digestion of PD and BWS versus mono-digestion of PD; 2) co-digestion of PD and BWS with or without additives; and 3) mesophilic and thermophilic anaerobic digestion (AD). Co-digestion of PD and BWS was superior to mono-digestion of PD in terms of gas production. Co-digestion of PD with BWS add at thermophilic temperatures resulted in a higher methane volumetric yield per kg substrate compared to mesophilic conditions. With and without additive, co-digestion with BWS produced 8% and 11% higher yields at thermophilic conditions than at mesophilic conditions. Co-digestion of PD with BWS add resulted in, respectively, 14% and 27% more methane produced at mesophilic and thermophilic conditions over mono-digestion of PD. When mono-digesting PD, the mesophilic temperature was superior to the thermophilic since methane yield was higher in the mesophilic temperature regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge discovery from data can be broadly categorized into two types: supervised and unsupervised. A supervised knowledge discovery process such as classification by decision trees typically requires class labels which are sometimes unavailable in datasets. Unsupervised knowledge discovery techniques such as an unsupervised clustering technique can handle datasets without class labels. They aim to let data reveal the groups (i.e. the data elements in each group) and the number of groups. For the ubiquitous task of clustering, K-Means is the most used algorithm applied in a broad range of areas to identify groups where intra-group distances are much smaller than inter-group distances. As a representative-based clustering approach, K-Means offers an extremely efficient gradient descent approach to the total squared error of representation; however, it not only demands the parameter k , but it also makes assumptions about the similarity of density among the clusters. Therefore, it is profoundly affected by noise. Perhaps more seriously, it can often be attracted to local optima despite its immersion in a multi-start scheme. We present an effective genetic algorithm that combines the capacity of genetic operators to conglomerate different solutions of the search space with the exploitation of the hill-climber. We advance a previous genetic-searching approach called GenClust , with the intervention of fast hill-climbing cycles of K-Means and obtain an algorithm that is faster than its predecessor and achieves clustering results of higher quality. We demonstrate this across a series of 18 commonly researched datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 80% of plasticizers used in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) materials are toxic o-phenyl plasticizers. In order to replace o-phenyl plasticizers in PVC materials, a series of highly branched and nontoxic plasticizers (CHE-4,CHE-8 and CHE-12) based on natural cashew shell oil (CNSL), an agricultural and forestry residue, were synthesized via facile one-pot solvent-free synthesis. The chemical structure, relative molecular mass and thermal stability of the obtained highly branched and nontoxic plasticizers were characterized. The toxicity of CHE-12 was investigated in the low (1000 mg/kg), middle (2000 mg/kg and 3000 mg/kg) and high dose (5000 mg/kg), the results suggested that CHE-12 has toxic doses of 5000 mg/kg and is a non-toxic plasticizer. PVC materials plasticized with CHE-12 showed more excellent thermal stability, plasticizing property and migration stability than dioctyl phthalate (DOP). Microstructure of PVC materials was investigated and the results showed that compatibility of PVC with CHE-12 is better than DOP. The microscopic plasticizing mechanism was also investigated. CHEs were proved to be promising candidates for the chemical conversion of CNSL derivatives into environmentally friendly and non-toxic plasticizers. • Cardanol-based plasticizer was prepared via one pot solvent-free method. • Cardanol-based plasticizer has toxic doses of 5000 mg/kg. • Cardanol-based plasticizer shows excellent migration resistance. • Dioctyl phthalate can be completely replace by cardanol-based plasticizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]