Archives-May 2015

Agriculture is the most beautiful and easy profession in the world; yet marked by drudgery and exploitations. It is a beauty to behold nature: plants, animals, insects, air, water, soil, rock, food, medicine, drugs. It is prestigious and honourable to have food on the table: morning, afternoon and evening. It is very appetizing to have various food stuff and ingredients. Food is always delicious if not abused. A well fed man is a happy man. A hungry man is an angry and sad man. Food! Food! Food everywhere; yet they are unavailable and unaffordable. Something must be wrong: with ourselves or how we embrace agriculture. But nothing is wrong with agriculture; except where we checkmate and abuse nature, in the name of agricultural revolution and increased food production. This paper reviews agriculture in peril. Happy reading.

Synthesize of optically and high luminescence of ZnO quantum dots in this work. XRD pattern show pure ZnO QDs and are genuinely polycrystalline with a hexagonal wurtzite structure. A typical TEM image of the material showed that particles are spherical in shape and their average size is (4) nm. No quantum dots with a diameter less than 2 nm or larger than 6.5 nm are found. PL spectrum of ZnO QDs is composed of an ultraviolet (UV) emission centered at about 360 nm and a broad green emission centered at about 475 nm.

Chromium is the third most toxic heavy which can be removed from the environment by naturally occurring microbes. There is an increasing interest to enhance the bioremediation potential of microorganism; this study is focused on using UV radiation (258 nm) to increase the bioremediating efficiency of chromium tolerant Aperillus niger, isolated from peri-urban agricultural area of Kasur. UV light has a tendency to cause DNA mutations in microbes that may lead to point mutation which in turn can contribute towards tolerance against heavy metals. The conidia of K14 isolate of A.niger were exposed to UV light at the distance of 0.5m from the source and time duration of 1-6 hours. The behavior of A.niger with and without Petri plate cover under different doses of UV light was studied. Control strain was left unexposed to UV light. All the variants after exposure to UV light decreased the growth rate but the variant exposed for 5 hours showed contrasting effect as the growth significantly increased hence point mutations were caused when the Petri plate cover was removed. The mutant variant (irradiated for 5 hours) was taken for further analysis of heavy metal tolerance, biosorption and effect of different media conditions including pH, temperature, batch time and different Cr(NO3)3 concentrations. The rate of uptake of Cr(NO3)3 by the mutant variant was faster as compared to the control, whereas there was no significant difference in the biosorption potential of both the variants. Optimum biosorption conditions have been found for both the control and mutant variants at pH 6, temperature 30°C, and 2 hour as optimum retention time for control and 1 hour for the mutant variant. It was concluded that A.niger was differently affected by different time exposure of UV radiation (258nm) with reference to changes in its growth rate, uptake of metal and its tolerance potential and the rate of uptake of chromium was faster for the mutant variant.

The project named ‘RFID Based E-Document Verification Using Cloud’ proposes to make the E-Document Verification the new technology to reduce the human efforts for getting the documents from certain institutes and even from Government offices. It provides an easy access to the document generation even if the document is lost or misplaced. Radio Frequency Identification is the hardware concept to provide small RFID tags to the user with the electromagnetic waves and produce the signals to it and then access the data. In this project we have implemented the concept of Networking using java and the web application. The project aims at making the document verification and accessing very easy and saving a lot of time and energy and commotion among users.

Agriculture and technological gadgets rule the world. No agriculture, no food. No technological gadgets, no civilisation. Agriculture as the ancient of civilisation is on threshold competition with high-tech gadgets. Everywhere, Money! Money! Money, but none for 99% of world population of over 6 billion. Only 1% of world population control world wealth of over US$251 trillion. Of this wealth high-tech gadgets account for over 90%. Agricultural products remain the least priced, but remains the most essential. Yet, high tech gadgets take the whole earnings from agriculture and add to their own empire. In view of the fact that high tech money monguls, must also feed and be happy with agriculture, and not from gadgets; they need to invest in agriculture and feed a hungry world with just 1% of their fortune. Nevertheless, agriculture and high tech gadgets must live and let live for a better world.

The contact process preferably used vanadium pentaoxide as catalyst to increase the rate of reaction of producing sulphuric acid. Sulfuric acid plants regularly require catalyst replacement in order to cope with process improvements. The spent catalyst considered as hazardous solid waste and cannot be discarded untreated owing to presence of high amount of vanadium and other associated metal. Because of significant environment implications of spent catalyst wastes it is imperative to recover valuable metals present in them. The recovery of precious materials or metals from waste will not only help in mitigating environment problem due to metal pollution but also improve the economy of the country. The purpose of this research work is to develop method to recover vanadium from spent V2O5 catalyst. The detailed study of extraction, separation and recovery of vanadium from leached spent catalyst solution of composition; V, 3.6% ; Al,2.1%; Fe, 1.3 Ti, 0.8 and less than 1 % of Cr and Pb is reported in this paper. Cyanex 272 (bis (2, 4, 4-trimethylpentyl) phosphinic acid) has been explored for the recovery of vanadium from spent V2O5 catalyst. The effects of different parameters like, pH, solvent concentration, organic to aqueous ratio etc were optimised for the complete extraction and recovery of vanadium. The proposed procedure gives high purity vanadium with almost a quantitative yield (~99%) and of course free from closely associated metals. The extractants could be reused up to ten cycles with no significant change in the extraction capability.

This paper proposes cost effective method of monitoring of government schools which are functioning in rural area where no internet and other advanced technologies are available. The main objective of this paper is to monitor students / employee attendance and management of schools using biometric and mobile technology. Many rural schools may not have facilities such as computers, Laptops, or internet connection at the school. But most of the employees / teachers are well versed with usage of Mobile phone now a days and it is easy to carry and maintain. Many activities are happening at the school level such as construction of school building, construction of classrooms, providing drinking water facility, providing toilet facility and other incentives schemes such as mid-day meal, textbook distribution, uniform distribution etc. In this context, to manage rural school and to get accurate and correct data instantly from rural schools to the state level, mobile technology is proposed. The system allows the user’s to monitor students/employees by capturing attendance details and civil works progress details along with its GPS location with the help of mobile phone which is equipped with an internal GPS receiver and a GPRS transmitter. A mobile phone application has been developed and deployed on an Android phone whose responsibility is to capture attendance with the help of fingerprint scanner and civil work’s GPS location. Data captured through software will be sent to remote server by creating GPRS packet. Biometric technology involves the identification and verification of individuals by analyzing the human fingerprint. Commercially available android supported biometric device is used to capture students/employee attendance details. Smartphone with 5MP and above camera is used to capture image of civil works. Once the data is uploaded to the remote server, the data will be made available in the form of reports or dashboard through web portal. Instant data sharing across different levels in the organization is possible which leads to effective and efficient administration. This system ensures transparency, accuracy and accountability at all levels.

Healthy and comfortable indoor air climates are essential for any type of building environment. Particularly, classroom air environment and thermal comfort has an important role in the teaching and learning process as it could be engaging students in activities that promote their performances, such as understanding of concepts, abilities of problem solving, and attitudes towards learning, and etc. In order to achieve such better indoor air environment and thermal comfort in classrooms, school buildings usually have been required to HVAC system operate with design norms.

The story of agricultural revolution in developed world is incomplete without farm mechanisation. The giant of the world – the United States agricultural success story is also incomplete without farm mechanisation. Feeding a hungry world will be incomplete without farm mechanisation. Nevertheless, farm mechanisation, just like farm pesticides have challenged sustainable agriculture; especially in fragile tropical ecosystem. No matter the level United States has attained in agriculture, it is very difficult for them to fend solely for a world of over 6 billion people, targeted to hit 10 billion by 2050. It calls for collective action of all nations of the world. Farm mechanisation that is tailored to local, regional and national requirements are very crucial to solving world food problems. Farm mechanisation: ecological paradise or disaster ? Is a mind rubbing question that keeps us conscious of limitations and needs in our agricultural systems. An attempt have been made to answer the question in this review.

Presently a stability indicating RP-HPLC method was developed for the estimation of Sitagliptin Phosphate monohydrate in pharmaceutical dosage forms . A 0.1 M KH2 PO4 solution was used as the buffer solution .Buffer and acetonitrile were mixed in the ratio 50:50 ,the resulting solution was sonicated to dissolve and degassed by vacuum filtration through 0.4 µ membrane filter and the resulting solution was used as mobile phase and diluent. Chromatograms were recorded using Inertsil ODS, C18 ,150 mm x 4.6 mm , 5 µ column at a temperature of 300 C with isocratic elusion .The detection wave length was 268 nm at a flow rate of 1.0 mL per minute .Each injection volume was 20 µL. The retention times for Sitagliptin Phosphate standard and sample were 3.613 and 3.618 min respectively. Linear calibration curve was obtained over the concentration range of 2.5 -15.0 µg /mL with a slope, intercept, Standard deviation and correlation coefficient of respectively 35792,10262,669649.4 and 0.999 respecively. The present method was validated as per ICH guidelines for Specificity, Linearity, Accuracy ,Precision, Ruggedness and found suitable for the determination of Sitagliptin Phosphate .The stability indicating studies under different stress conditions revealed that the drug was stable and the % of degradation of the drug was in the range 4.75 -11.57 % .The limit of detection was 61.74 µg-mL and limit of quantification was187.09 µg – mL . The present method was rapid and sensitive for the determination of Sitagliptin Phosphate monohydrate.