A Comparative Analysis of Bacterial Growth with Earphone Use

Background: Recently the worldwide usage of earphones has increased especially among the school and college students who have a high rate of sharing among them. Alike airline headsets, headphones and stethoscope ear-pieces, ear phones can easily be a vector of potential pathogens, which can give rise to otitis externa. Purpose: To compare the bacterial growth of the external ear in association with earphone and assess the role of earphones as vector or microorganisms. Material and Methods: 50 voluntary male subjects (age 18-25 years) were chosen and divided into two groups, A and B, according to the use of earphones. Swabs were taken from their left ear and the left earpiece of the earphone. Samples were processed as recommended. Results: In group A, bacteria were found in 20 (80%) ear and 14 (56%) earphone swabs. In group B, bacteria were found in 23 (92%) ear and 17 (68%) earphone swabs. Group B showed heavy growth and a significant increase in the number of bacterial growths after frequent and constant use. Conclusion: Frequent and constant use of earphones increases the bacterial growth in the ear and sharing of earphones might be a potential vector of commensals. It is therefore, always better not to share or else to clean the earphones before sharin

RTL2RTL Formal Equivalence: Boosting the Design Confidence

Increasing design complexity driven by feature and performance requirements and the Time to Market (TTM) constraints force a faster design and validation closure. This in turn enforces novel ways of identifying and debugging behavioral inconsistencies early in the design cycle. Addition of incremental features and timing fixes may alter the legacy design behavior and would inadvertently result in undesirable bugs. The most common method of verifying the correctness of the changed design is to run a dynamic regression test suite before and after the intended changes and compare the results, a method which is not exhaustive. Modern Formal Verification (FV) techniques involving new methods of proving Sequential Hardware Equivalence enabled a new set of solutions for the given problem, with complete coverage guarantee. Formal Equivalence can be applied for proving functional integrity after design changes resulting from a wide variety of reasons, ranging from simple pipeline optimizations to complex logic redistributions. We present here our experience of successfully applying the RTL to RTL (RTL2RTL) Formal Verification across a wide spectrum of problems on a Graphics design. The RTL2RTL FV enabled checking the design sanity in a very short time, thus enabling faster and safer design churn. The techniques presented in this paper are applicable to any complex hardware design.Comment: In Proceedings FSFMA 2014, arXiv:1407.195

Mapping Novel Pathways in Cardiovascular Disease Using eQTL Data: The Past, Present, and Future of Gene Expression Analysis

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genetic variants associated with numerous cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Newly identified polymorphisms associated with myocardial infarction, dyslipidemia, hypertension, diabetes, and insulin resistance suggest novel mechanistic pathways that underlie these and other complex diseases. Working out the connections between the polymorphisms identified in GWAS and their biological mechanisms has been especially challenging given the number of non-coding variants identified thus far. In this review, we discuss the utility of expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) databases in the study of non-coding variants with respect to cardiovascular and metabolic phenotypes. Recent successes in using eQTL data to link variants with functional candidate genes will be reviewed, and the shortcomings of this approach will be outlined. Finally, we discuss the emerging next generation of eQTL studies that take advantage of the ability to generate induced pluripotent stem cell lines from population cohorts

Synthesis of AgInS2 nanoparticles Directly in Poly (3-hexyl thiophene) (P3HT) Matrix: Photoluminescence quenching studies

Inorganic semiconductor AgInS, nanoparticles and P3HT/AgInS2 composite was synthesized by decomposition of silver indium xanthate. The synthesized nanoparticles and composite were characterized by XRD and UV-Vis spectroscopy. PL quenching of the composite demonstrate that the electron transfer from polymer to inorganic NPs through ex-situ solution blending is less efficient in PL quenching as compared to in-situ synthesis