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Hand gesture recognition has attracted huge interest in the areas of autonomous driving, human computer systems, gaming and many others. Skeleton based techniques along with graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are being popularly used in this field due to the easy estimation of joint coordinates and better representation capability of graphs. Simple hand skeleton graphs are unable to capture the finer details and complex spatial features of hand gestures. To address these challenges, this work proposes an "angle‐based hand gesture graph convolutional network" (AHG‐GCN). This model introduces two additional types of novel edges in the graph to connect the wrist with each fingertip and finger's base, explicitly capturing their relationship, which plays an important role in differentiating gestures. Besides, novel features for each skeleton joint are designed using the angles formed with fingertip/finger‐base joints and the distance among them to extract semantic correlation and tackle the overfitting problem. Thus, an enhanced set of 25 features for each joint is obtained using these novel techniques. The proposed model achieves 90% and 88% accuracy for 14 and 28 gesture configurations for the DHG 14/28 dataset and, 94.05% and 89.4% accuracy for 14 and 28 gesture configurations for the SHREC 2017 dataset, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lead (Pb) is a pervasive contaminant and poses a serious threat to living beings. The present study aims at batch and fixed bed column scale potential of commercial compost (CCB) and peanut shells biosorbents (PSB) for the sequestration of Pb from contaminated aqueous systems. The PSB and CCB were characterized with FTIR, SEM and Brunauer Emmett-Teller (BET) to get insight of the adsorption behavior of both materials. Fixed bed column scale experiments were performed at steady state flow (2.5 and 5.0 mL/min), initial Pb concentrations (25 and 50 mg/L) and dosage of each adsorbent (3.0 and 6.0 g/column). Columns packed (15.9 cm2) with PSB and CCB have revealed excellent adsorption of Pb with PSB as compared with CCB. The total volume of injected contaminated water was 1,500 mL and 3,000 mL at 2.5 and 5.0 mL/min, respectively while total bed volume number was 157. A series of batch experiments with CCB and PSB was conducted at adsorbent dosage (1.25-5.0 g/L), initial Pb level (25-100 mg/L), interaction time (0-180 min) and solution pH (4-10) at room temperature. Batch scale results revealed that PSB removed 92% Pb from water at 25 mg Pb/L concentration as compared with CCB (79%). The presence of competing ions in groundwater showed less Pb removal as compared with synthetic water. The experimental data were simulated with equilibrium isothermal models: Langmuir, Freundlich, and kinetic models: pseudo first order, pseudo second order and intra-particle diffusion. The Freundlich and pseudo second order models better described the equilibrium and kinetic experimental data, respectively with maximum sorption of 42.5 mg/g by PSB which is also evident from FTIR functional groups and SEM results. While equilibrium sorption of Pb onto CCB was equally explained by Freundlich and Langmuir models. These findings indicate that PSB could be an active and ecofriendly biosorbent for the sequestration of metals from contaminated aqueous systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Umme. Aiman, Syed. Rahman Objective: The objective of present study was to survey and determine the reporting standards of animal studies published during three years from 2012 to 2014 [...]

Algae growing in the thermal power plant environment are considered as waste for the power industry. But the algal biomass could act as efficient CO2-bio-sequester as they are adapted to grow under high CO2 concentration and the algal oil extracted from those algae is a cheap source of bio-diesel or green energy, thus mitigating the environmental pollution and conversion of 'waste-to-wealth'. The present study aims at the production of bio-oil from a macro-alga, Pithophora varia collected and identified from water bodies of a thermal-power-plant in India. The oil productivity of the alga can be correlated with the biomass growth. The alga was cultivated in Erlenmeyer-flasks with external CO2 supplementation of 0.15 mole fraction in air. The light intensity 10,897 lux was incident on the flask's wall when placed under sunlight for 8 h. Simultaneously, oil yield of 18.7% has been measured before subjecting the alga to the growth and starvation phase. An increase in oil-yield was measured on day 9 for both growth (26.2%) and starvation phases (29.3%). During growth phase, initiation of conversion of reserve food materials to lipid granules advocates for the oil yield. But the increment in lipid productivity during the starvation phase might have resulted due to nutrient deficiency and initiation of the stimulation of lipid-synthetic pathways towards the formation of triacylglceride. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Monika. Misra, Umme. Aiman Sir, We read with interest the article titled 'Anomalies in alloxan-induced diabetic model: It is better to standardize it first' by Jain et al. , [...]

Byline: Umme. Aiman, M. Haseeen, S. Rahman Gynecomastia results from conditions that cause an imbalance of estrogenic and androgenic effects on the breast, resulting in an increased or unopposed estrogen [...]