Archives-January 2025

Stress has become a pervasive issue in modern life, significantly affecting both mental and physical health. Behavioural, hormonal, immunological, and physiological responses to stressors lead to physical expressions of fatigue and psychological expressions of tension or irritation. If not treated, it can lead to chronic problems like despair, therefore requiring effective evidence-based treatments. Current medications mainly target psychological or physical symptoms, and they often have side effects, including overuse risks. An emerging approach includes the use of functional foods, nutraceuticals, or products that are a combination of nutrition and therapy. These include dietary fiber, prebiotics, probiotics, antioxidants, and natural foods, which significantly affect stress management. This review explores the impact of nutrients and diets on managing stress. The release of cortisol during stress serves a purpose but can become harmful when elevated over time. Although practices like meditation and exercise are often recommended for stress relief, the role of functional foods is frequently overlooked. These foods offer more than basic nutrition; they contain bioactive compounds that support brain function, regulate hormones, and enhance overall well-being. By nourishing the body and mind with essential nutrients, functional foods serve as natural allies in managing stress. This literature review examines various types of functional foods and their health implications, particularly in stress management. Understanding their mechanisms and benefits can provide a path to optimal use in promoting health and resilience in our increasingly stressful world. Although the present body of research is promising in showing the potential of functional foods in managing stress, there is a need for holistic studies that consider both psychological and physiological outcomes. Future human trials to study the efficacy of nutritional interventions to reduce acute responses to stress need to pay attention to several critical aspects of study design.

The present research work was carried out in Talwara Block, District Hoshiarpur, Punjab, India to identify and to understand the uses of medicinal plants for the treatment of various ailments. The study was undertaken with the help of questionnaire and discussion method. About 100 medicinal plant species belonging to 52 families were documented. Out of 100 medicinal plants, 40 species were herbs, 13 species were shrubs, 40 species were trees, 5 species were climbers and 2 species were grasses. Leaves were the most useful part as compared to other plant parts for the treatment of various ailments. Different parts of plants such as roots, bark, leaves, seeds, flowers etc. were used in various forms like paste, decoction, powder, oil etc. to treat various ailments. 15 key informants were selected to collect the information. During research, it has been observed that the villagers were chiefly dependent on the plants as they were familiar with their use for different ailments.

Feeding piglets in the maternity ward is essential for late weaning at 45 days. The objective of this study was to verify the hypothesis according to which the ration and the breed can improve the zootechnical performances on the increase of the breeds of piglets at weaning. A sample of 45 piglets (15 piglets of the local breed, 15 crossbreeds and 15 Large white) were distributed between three batches: piglets fed only the local ration (lot 1, control), piglets having consumed an unbalanced local ration (lot 2), piglets receiving a balanced ration (lot 3). Individual weighings were carried out upon entry to the piglets to know the live weights and finally to find their growth weights. Piglets receiving the types of food gave better performances (p < 0.05) on live weight at 45 days of age (±8 kg to select a piglet) the daily feed consumption was (1.5 kg/d) and the average weight gain was (2.592 kg). In conclusion, the distribution of solid foods significantly (p < 0.05) improves feed intake and growth rate of piglets on the 45th day at 9 weeks. This study showed the need to distribute 1st and 2nd age foods in farms practicing late weaning. This practice opens up prospects for improving zootechnical performance on increasing weight in pig farming in the City of Kindu.

In this study, the effect of paddy dehusking rate in rubber the roll sheller at four levels of 60, 70, 80 and 90% were investigated on some milling properties as head brown rice yield (HBY), head rice yield (HRY) and whiteness of three Iranian rice varieties namely Binam, Khazar and Sepidroud was examined. The results revealed that the HBY decreased from 92.58 to 89.72%, 90.83 to 86.61% and 84.83 to 78.18% for Binam, Khazar and Sepidroud varieties, respectively as the paddy dehusking rate increased from 60 to 90%. However, the highest HRY of 82.17% was observed for Binam variety at the dehusking rate of 80% and the lowest value of 65.97% was recorded for Sepidroud variety at the husking rate of 60%. There was an increasing trend for rice whiteness with decreasing in paddy dehusking rate. It was decreased from 36.1 to 30.8, 36.5 to 30.1 and 35.4 to 29.8 for the varieties of Binam, Khazar and Sepidroud varieties, respectively as the paddy dehusking rate increased from 60 to 90%.

The present paper deals with the performance modeling and simulation of the paper making system of a paper plant. The paper plant is a complex and repairable engineering unit which comprises of various systems including feeding, chipping, digesting, washing, bleaching, screening and paper making etc. One of the most important functionaries of a paper plant is paper making system which is having four main subsystems. Considering the exponential distribution for the probable failures and repairs, the performance model has been developed with the help of mathematical formulation based on Markov birth-death process. Using probabilistic approach, the differential equations have been developed. Then these equations are further solved by using normalizing conditions so as to determine the steady state availability i.e. measure of performance of paper making system of a paper plant. The performance of each subsystem of the paper making system of a paper plant also has been analyzed for selecting the best possible maintenance strategies in a paper plant. So, the findings of this paper will be highly useful to the plant management for timely execution of best possible maintenance strategies and hence to enhance the system performance.

The process of economic development in an economy results in distinct structural changes. As a country progresses and the gross domestic product (GDP) basket enlarges, a shift in economic activity occurs away from agriculture towards services and manufacturing sectors, owing to higher elasticity of the latter two sectors than that of former sector. The process in turn leads to structural shifts, and consequent diminishing significance of primary activities and growing dominance of secondary and tertiary activities. This process brings with it significant changes in the production process, consumption pattern and various other social indicators. An in-depth understanding of inter-sectoral dynamics becomes all the more important for policy makers so that effective monetary, credit and fiscal policies could be designed in order to be able to achieve the broader objective of inclusive development. In this backdrop, the present paper endeavors to study linkages between agriculture and other Sectors in the Indian economy both through input-output (I-O) approach

This work deals with the vibrational spectroscopy of Hexafluorobenzene (HFB) by means of quantum chemical calculations. The FTIR and FT-Raman spectra were measured in the condensed state. The fundamental vibrational frequencies and intensity of vibrational bands were evaluated using density functional theory (DFT) with the standard B3LYP / 6-311+G** basis set combinations, and was scaled using various scale factors which yields a good agreement between observed and calculated frequencies. The vibrational spectra were interpreted with the aid of normal coordinate analysis based on scaled quantum mechanical force field. The results of the calculations were applied to simulated infrared and Raman spectra of the title compound, which showed excellent agreement with the observed spectra.

Unified Modeling Language has been widely used in software development for modeling the problem domain to solution domain. The major problems lie in comprehension and testing which can be found in whole process. Program slicing is an important approach to analyze, understand, test and maintain the program. It is a technique for analyzing program by focusing on statements which have dependence relation with slicing criterion. Program slicing is of two types (i) Static slicing (ii) Dynamic slicing. Dynamic slicing refers to a collection of program execution and may significantly reduce the size of the program slice because runtime information, collected during execution, is used to compute the program slice. In this paper we introduce an approach for constructing dynamic slice of unified modeling language (UML) using sequence diagram, state chart diagram, class diagram along with the activity diagram. First we construct an intermediate representation known as model dependency graph. MDG combines information extracted from various sequence diagrams along with those from class, state-machine, sequence diagram and activity diagrams. Then dynamic slice is computed by integrating the activity models into the MDG. Finally for a given slicing criterion test cases has been generated.

Due to economic reasons arising out of deregulation and open market of electricity, modern day power systems are being operated closer to their stability limits. Maintaining voltage stability and specified voltage levels at all nodes in a large & heavily loaded Power network is a critical & challenging task for power engineers. A number of different approaches have been reported in papers for improvement of voltage stability. In this paper a method for improving voltage stability in a power network has been suggested based on Network Reconfiguration approach. Network Reconfiguration is intended to enhance the voltage stability by determination of switching options that maximizes voltage stability for a particular set of loads and is performed by altering the topological structure of the system. In this paper, reconfiguration of a power network is achieved by addition of new power lines to the existing network. The paper reports an application of ANNs in voltage stability enhancement. A generalized ANN model has been proposed for enhancement of voltage stability under varying load conditions. Training data sets for ANN training is generated by varying both real and reactive loads at the buses. An IEEE-14 Bus system considered to demonstrate the performance of the developed ANN model. The proposed ANN model is trained using conjugate Gradient Descent Back-propagation Algorithm and tested by applying arbitrary input data. The test results of the ANN model are found to be closely matching of the results obtained by off-line simulation.

Commitment is a manifestation of individual owns self and reflect values standard that are basic to an individual’s existence as a person. Based on the result shown that the commitment a closely associate with the attitudes of each employee in an organization. Attitudes can be described as an evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people or events (Robbins & Judges, 2007), it’s because employee’s attitudes can reflect from the emotion on attachment to the particular organization and amplify employee’s productivity. This study particularly examines the importance employee attitudes that can be revealing from the aspect on affective commitment. Affective commitment is one part of the organizational commitment. Which is organizational commitment can be classified into three (3) aspects which are affective commitment, continuance commitment and normative commitment. The objective of this study is to measure the employee attitudes among non academic in UiTM Kedah by using the affective commitment. 100 samples were selected involved eight departments in UiTM Kedah. The results show affective commitment is positively influence the employee commitment. In conclusion, it is hoped that this paper will give some insight to promote the importance on affective commitment among the government servant especially the non-academic staff in UiTM Kedah in order to increase their level of efficiency concerning the attitudes stability towards their own organization attached.