Owls of the forest’s edge

It looked like just a few random vertical poles stuck in between carefully-planted paddy fields adjoining the Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. The poles were crudely fashioned and topped with flattened pads of hay, stuffed into polythene or white cloth bags

Conservation of a fragmented population of blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra)

The Vallanadu Blackbuck Sanctuary (VBS), Tamil Nadu, India is a small protected area (PA) designated to conserve blackbuck. We did a study on habitat use and suitability in the PA that has come under various management interventions. The occupancy of blackbuck was positively correlated with areas lying within the PA, but the encounter rate of blackbuck was significantly higher in areas outside the PA. Being small in size, VBS may not hold a large population of blackbucks, but may help in saving the species which once widely occurred in the southernmost parts of India

Clinico-etiological profile of acute kidney injury in children admitted to paediatric intensive care unit of a tertiary care centre

Background: Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) refers to a reversible accumulation of urea, creatinine and nitrogenous waste products and disturbances in maintenance of fluid and electrolyte homeostasis. The incidence of AKI continues to increase in the Paediatric age group particularly in critically ill children with the etiology shifting from primary renal disorders to multifactorial cause. The objective of the study to determine the incidence, clinical profile and outcome of AKI in critically ill children using p-RIFLE criteria.Methods: A prospective observational study was done with 342 children aged between 1-12 years, admitted in Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) of Institute of Child Health and Research Centre, Madurai Medical College, Madurai during July 2015 to June 2016.Results: The overall incidence of AKI among critically ill children was 30.1%. The mortality rate was 43.7% and 20.7% patients with AKI had partial renal recovery at the time of discharge. 27.2% patients required renal replacement therapy (RRT). Infectious causes 57.3% (Sepsis, Meningoencephalitis, Bronchopneumonia) dominated the etiological profile.Conclusions: Incidence of AKI is high in critically-ill children. AKI continues to be associated with adverse outcomes, including high mortality and partial renal recovery

Implementation of Cloud Connected Smart Robot for Environmental and Industrial Platform

Cloud robotics is an emerging field that is centred on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services of a cloud computing environment. In this paper, a system is designed with an autonomous Pick and Place robot to sense environmental data such as temperature and Motion, along with GPS coordinates and sends them on the cloud. The mobile robot is controlled using an LPC1764 microcontroller and communicates with the cloud via a CC3200 Launchpad. A private cloud is set up using Open Stack that provides Infrastructure as a Service. The collected data are stored in a cloud server which could be viewed through a mobile app and can be used to create awareness about the environmental changes of the location under study. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system

Microguards and micromessengers of the genome

The regulation of gene expression is of fundamental importance to maintain organismal function and integrity and requires a multifaceted and highly ordered sequence of events. The cyclic nature of gene expression is known as ‘transcription dynamics’. Disruption or perturbation of these dynamics can result in significant fitness costs arising from genome instability, accelerated ageing and disease. We review recent research that supports the idea that an important new role for small RNAs, particularly microRNAs (miRNAs), is in protecting the genome against short-term transcriptional fluctuations, in a process we term ‘microguarding’. An additional emerging role for miRNAs is as ‘micromessengers’—through alteration of gene expression in target cells to which they are trafficked within microvesicles. We describe the scant but emerging evidence that miRNAs can be moved between different cells, individuals and even species, to exert biologically significant responses. With these two new roles, miRNAs have the potential to protect against deleterious gene expression variation from perturbation and to themselves perturb the expression of genes in target cells. These interactions between cells will frequently be subject to conflicts of interest when they occur between unrelated cells that lack a coincidence of fitness interests. Hence, there is the potential for miRNAs to represent both a means to resolve conflicts of interest, as well as instigate them. We conclude by exploring this conflict hypothesis, by describing some of the initial evidence consistent with it and proposing new ideas for future research into this exciting topic

Geo-Spatial Information for Managing Ambiguity

An innate test emerging in any dataset containing data of space as well as time is vulnerability due to different wellsprings of imprecision. Incorporating the effect of the instability is a principal while evaluating the unwavering quality (certainty) of any question result from the hidden information. To bargain with vulnerability, arrangements have been proposed freely in the geo-science and the information science look into group. This interdisciplinary instructional exercise crosses over any barrier between the two groups by giving an exhaustive diagram of the distinctive difficulties required in managing indeterminate geo-spatial information, by looking over arrangements from both research groups, and by distinguishing likenesses, cooperative energies and open research issues

A novel hybrid face recognition framework based on a low-resolution camera for biometric applications

In research work, human face recognition is an essential biometric symbol persistently continued so far due to its different levels of applications in society. Since the appearance of the human faces can have many variations due to issues like the effect of illumination, expression and face pose. These differences are correlated with one another, which results in a helpless ability to recognize a particular person's face. The motivation behind our work in this paper is to give a new framework for face recognition based on frequency analysis that contributes to solving the distinguishing proof issues with enormous varieties of boundaries like the effect of illumination, expression, and face pose. Here three algorithms combined for provable results: i) Difference of Gaussian filtered discrete wavelet transform (DDWT) for feature extraction; ii) Log Gabor (LG) filter for feature extraction; and iv) Multiclass support vector machine classifier, where feature coefficients of DDWT and LG filter are fused for classification and parameters evaluation. The evaluation of our experiment is carried out on a large database consisting of 15 persons of each 200-face image which are captured using a 5-megapixel low-resolution web camera and yielding satisfactory results on various parameters compared to existing methods

A Study of Thought, Language, Communication disorder in Schizophrenia

INTRODUCTION: Schizophrenia is a chronic severe psychiatric disorder. The life time prevalence ranges from 0.3 – 0.6 %. It manifests as form and content of thought disorder. It has different language behavior, conceptually divergent. These are assessed by naturalistic observation of language behavior. In western countries, more studies are done on thought, language, communication disorder, but rare in our population. We conducted a study of thought, language, communication disorder in institute of mental health, Chennai, Tamilnadu. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To examine type, severity, prevalence of thought, language, communication disorder in schizophrenia and difference between acute episode of schizophrenia and chronic institutionalized schizophrenia and also examine correlation between thought, language, communication disorder with socio demographic variables. METHODOLOGY: The study was conducted in Institute of Mental health, Madras Medical College, Chennai, a tertiary care centre for Tamil Nadu after approval from the Institutional Ethics Committee. Acute episode of schizophrenia patients are those who are admitted as inpatients, within first week of admission. Chronic institutionalized patients are those who are as in-patients for more than 2 years time period. A total of 100 sample size with 50 acute episode of schizophrenia patients and 50 chronic institutionalised (in-patients > 2 years duration) schizophrenia patients. Andreasen scale is used. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: We find significant difference in type, severity, prevalence of thought language communication disorder variables in our population.Significant correlation of thought language communication variables with socio demographic variables. We find there is no signicant difference in variables with length of stayal in chronic institutionalized patients

Formulation and Evaluation of hydrodynamically balanced system of Baclofen

Spasticity is a feature of altered skeletal muscle performance in muscle tone involving hypertonia; it is also referred to as an unusual "tightness", stiffness, or "pull" of muscles palsy and spinal. Spasticity, a condition in which certain muscles are continuously contracted, affects over 12 million worldwide. Baclofen is the largest prescribed drug for this indication, worldwide. Even though once-daily extended release GRS is available in the market, it is very expensive as it is a coated multi-layer gas generating floating tablet. The main objective is to develop once-daily sustained release gastro-retentive floating system of Baclofen in an economical way by using HPMC and natural gums. Fourteen formulations of floating matrix tablets of Baclofen (F1 – F14) were prepared by using different polymers and additives (HPMC K100M, HPMC K15M, HPMC K4M, Guar gum Xanthan gum PEO WSR301,- 303, sodium bicarbonate, Avicel PH-102, Talc, Magnesium stearate) at different concentrations by direct compression method. The formula 11 was found to be optimum and released 98.47% of Baclofen in 24hrs. Hence, it was selected as the optimized formulation. Marketed formulation exhibited FLT of 63.67±4.01 seconds, TFT of 24 hours and released 95.07±0.41% drug in 24 hours. Finally, once-daily sustained release gastro-retentive floating tablets of Baclofen were successfully formulated in a relatively economical way when compared to the marketed formulation and found to be superior when compared to the marketed formulation

Ozone prediction based on support vector machine

The prediction of tropospheric ozone concentrations is very important due to negative effects of ozone on human health, atmosphere and vegetation. Ozone Prediction is an intricate procedure and most of the conventional models cannot provide accurate prediction. Machine Learning techniques have been widely used as an effective tool for prediction. This study is investigating the implementation of Support vector Machine-SVM to predict Ozone concentrations. The results show that the SVM is capable in predicting ozone concentrations with acceptable level of accuracy. Sensitivity analysis has been conducted to show what is the most effective parameters on the proposed model