Archives-December  

The use of molecular and genomic techniques namely: nucleic acid, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE); terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP), polymerase chain reaction (PCR) have revolutionized ways of assaying biodiversity. This paper reviews their contributions to knowledge of soil microbial diversity.

Left ventricular (LV) aneurysm or pseudoaneurysm are most often secondary to myocardial infarction. They predispose to heart failure, rhythm disorders and thrombus formation. Their diagnosis can be difficult, requiring a high performance imaging. The purpose of our study is to demonstrate the important role of cardiac MRI in the study of the left ventricular aneurysms. We performed a retrospective study, which collected 68 patients referred for cardiac MRI, between 2007 and 2021, and for whom the final diagnosis of left ventricular aneurysms or pseudoaneurysms was retained. We evaluated the incidence of this pathology, the underlying heart disease, the myocardial morphology, perfusion and viability, as well as those of aneurysms with search for thrombus. The mean age was 64.4 years, with a male predominance. Cardiac MRI was performed mostly to search for myocardial viability (61.8 %). The underlying heart disease was exclusively ischemic heart disease. In 58.8% of the cases, the diagnosis was that of a true aneurysm without thrombus and in 38.2% of cases with thrombus. LV pseudoaneurysm was present in only 2 patients. These aneurysms were mainly located apically (84.8%). Perfusion defect perfusion was noted in the necrotic coronary territories, with the presence of viability in 11.8% of cases. The mean of the LV end-diastolic diameter was at 66.3+/- 8.2 mm (i.e. 39 mm/m2) and the mean volumes were at 264.1± 101.5 ml (155.3 ml/m2). The mean LV ejection fraction was at 29.8 ±10%. Thus, cardiac MRI is the "gold standard" in post-infarction studies for an exhaustive study, not only for the diagnosis of LV aneurysms, but also on the complete myocardial study.

Globalization has brought about a new perspective and fresh challenges and vast opportunities in its train. Indian agriculture is undergoing a fundamental change wherein the technology and inputs are moving out of the hands of farmers to external suppliers. It is agriculture is confronted by a number of challenges as domestic prices of several commodities have gone up and are much higher than international price. This has made imports attractive adversely affecting exports. The price distortion due to long supply chain in farm produce marketing and the resultant low share of farmers in the final price is an important issue in the development of agriculture. Therefore, there is a need to integrate agriculture sector with commercial and industrial sector on the same business principle. The importance of commodity market, in this respect, needs no emphasis.

In present year ad-hoc parallel data processing has emerged to be one of the killer applications for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) clouds. Major Cloud computing companies have started to integrate frameworks for parallel data and making it easy for customers to access these. However, the processing frameworks which are currently used have been designed for static, homogeneous cluster setups and disregard the particular nature of a cloud. Consequently, the allocated compute resources may be inadequate for big parts of the submitted job and unnecessarily increase processing time and cost. In this project the data processing framework to explicitly exploit the dynamic resource allocation offered by today’s IAAS clouds for both, task scheduling and execution is constructed. Particular tasks of a processing job can be assigned to different types of virtual machines which are automatically instantiated and terminated during the job execution.

In the present manuscript, a new class of estimators of population mean has been proposed. This estimator makes use of the information on the population median of the study variable. The expressions for the bias and the mean squared error of the proposed class of estimators have been derived up to the first order of approximation. The optimum value of the characterizing scalar which minimizes the mean squared error of the proposed class has been obtained. The minimum mean squared error for this optimum value of the characterizing scalar is also obtained. The proposed estimator has been compared with the competing estimators of population mean which make use of auxiliary information. A numerical study is also carried out to judge the performances of the proposed and the competing estimators.

We report the case of a 49-year-old patient admitted to our emergency department at the Kintambo Reference General Hospital for spontaneous rupture of the spleen. At the admission of the patient, we found a pallor of the conjunctiva, the abdomen was distended, slightly contracted with splenomegaly on palpation. The biological assessment was normal. Abdominal ultrasound showed splenomegaly of homogeneous echostructure and peritoneal effusion in the form of a dense hypoechoic plaque. Abdominal CT revealed heterogeneous splenomegaly complicated by spontaneous rupture of the spleen with capsular hematoma and peritoneal effusion of average abundance. Splenectomywasrecommended in our patient.

The ultimate goal of the deployment of any voice-centric application is to provide a natural way of human-machine interaction in end-to-end communication and majority of the voice-centric applications in today’s world are promising the same. In this scenario, it is essential to investigate the performance of Speech-Enabled IVR (SEIVR) under the effect of different narrowband codecs. In this paper, the performance of SEIVR has been analyzed by utilizing an ASR engine and speech codecs. SPHNIX-3 has been used as the ASR engine which is CMU’s ASR toolkit for speech recognition and executable files of various narrowband codec are generated with the help of source code and it is taken from standard organizations such as ITU-T, ETSI and ISO/IEC. The results of this paper are completely based on the speech data from TIMIT speech database. The major work done in this paper is to prove that the recognition accuracy of SEIVR increases when there is an increase in Gaussian mixture from Context-Independent (CI) to Context-Dependent (CD) under the influence of various narrow band codecs.

This paper involves the synthesis of photoadduct of Potassium hexacyanoferrate and phenanthroline via photochemical route .The photoadduct has been synthesized by photoirradiation followed by substitution with phenanthroline ligand. The photoaquation, substitution and successful synthesis has been proved by recording pH, colour change, UV visible spectra before and after irradiation. The as synthesized photoadduct has been subjected to various spectroscopic and surface characterization techniques like elemental analysis, UV-visible spectra, XRD, and SEM. XRD of photoadduct shows crystalline structure. Moreover parameters like crystallite size (L), interplanar distance (d), micro strain (?), dislocation density (?) and distortion parameters (g) were evaluated from XRD data using Schrerrer and other equations for the photoadduct.

This study investigated the impact of dredging on the physicochemical, and microbial properties of Oyibo River in Ehime Mbano, Imo State, Nigeria. This study was carried out during the raining season (August) and dry season (January). Samples of water were collected using standard methods (collection from downstream to upstream). pH, temperature, flow rate, depth, width, conductivity, total dissolved solids (TDS), Dissolved Oxygen (DO) were analyzed in–situ using digital pH meter, thermometer, current meter, calibrated meter stick, measuring tape, Conductivity/ TDS meter and Dissolved Oxygen meter respectively. Other parameters (microbial, and some physicochemical parameters) were carried out ex-situ using existing standard methods. The river in the raining season had an average depth range of 1.60±0.00-2.00±0.00m; width range of 6.20±0.00-15.00±0.00m, pH, 5.60±0.00-7.15±0.05; temperature, 27.20±0.00 - 29.30±0.000C and flow rate range of 0.00±0.00 - 0.40±0.00 m/s. In the dry season the depth ranged from 0.08 - 0.50m; width, 6.20 - 11.40; pH, 2.8±0.00 - 5.50±0.00; temperature, 25.80±0.00 - 27.90±0.00?C; and flow rate 6.20 - 11.40m. The water samples during the rainy season were found to be turbid (17.00±.0.00-48.44±0.00 NTU) while Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), dissolved oxygen (DO), conductivity, total hardness and total alkalinity were within the Federal Ministry of Environment permissible limits. Statistically, there was no significant difference between the results in the raining season and dry season (p?0.05). Microbial values exceeded their permissible limits with Bacillus spp, Staphylococci spp, Enterococcus spp, Psendomonas spp, Micrococcus spp, Salmonella spp and Enterobacter spp present in the water samples across the river points. Asperigillus fumigatus, Asperigillus niger, Penicillum spp, Drechslera spp, Candida spp, Penicillum spp, Asperigillus niger, Asperigillus fumigatus and Paecilomyces spp were among the fungi isolates from water and sediments samples. During the dry season, COD, BOD, DO, Total Hardness & Total chloride were observed to be within the permissible limits. No growth was observed for the Total Fecal Coliform Count while Total Bacteria count, Total Coliform count and Total Fungi Count were observed to be above permissible limits. Organisms observed in the surface water include, Streptococcus spp, Klebsiella spp, Yersinia spp, Vibrio spp, Bacillus spp, Yersinia spp, Pseudomonas spp, Vibrio spp and Citrobacter spp. Values of the sediment parameters were higher in the dry season. Asperigillus niger, Candida spp, Asperigillus fumigatus, Penicillum spp, Asperigillus fumigatus and Paecilomyces spp were the fungi that were observed in the surface water while Candida spp, Penicillum spp, Dreschela spp, Penicillum spp and Asperigillus fumigatus were observed in the sediment samples during the dry season. Some of the parameters are not within the federal Ministry of Environment (FMEnv.) acceptable limits, hence, the River in this study is not portable for drinking

Sulphate-rich acid mine drainage (AMD) generated by some mining industries is a serious issue to water treatment industry operators and the South African government. The aim of carrying this study is to reduce if not completely remove the high concentration of sulphate in the AMD by using reagent grade chemical barium chloride. Precipitation technique was used to synthesize barium sulphate from sulphate-rich acid mine water with the addition of barium chloride solution to form a white precipitate. The precipitate formed was characterized using analytical techniques such as X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HTREM), Fourier transform infra-red (FTIR) spectroscopy and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET). Synthesized barium sulphate was compared with reagent grade synthesized BaSO4 was characterize with XRD to identify the mineral phase, while SEM and HRTEM revealed similar morphology and the BET surface area for both synthesized and reagent grade barium sulphate crystals were determined to be 7.7 m2/g and 68 m2/g. The results from this study shows that sulphate in the acid mine water can be used to synthesize barium sulphate.