Woollahra Sustainability Plan

Woollahra Municipal Council (WMC) is currently undertaking a process to develop the Woollahra Sustainability Plan (WSP). The purpose of the WSP is to provide a long-term and integrated approach to planning for a sustainable community in the Woollahra local government area. The WSP will identify a long-term community derived vision with associated actions to achieve more sustainable practices in Council's function areas and activities, in addition to enabling planning of a more sustainability-focused community. The vision and actions in the WSP will embody the principles of Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD). The WSP development process is being undertaken in three stages. The first is a background stage consisting of audit and gap analysis activities, the second (the subject of this report) is a community visioning and issues stage, and the third will consist of the development of an action plan. The Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) was engaged to undertake visioning and issues consultation for Stage 2. Objectives for Stage 2 include the following: to inform and involve the community in the preparation of the WSP to build strong partnerships between Council and the community to identify a community derived, long term vision for the future of Woollahra to identify sustainability related issues for Council to address in its Sustainability Plan, including social, economic and environmental issues to involve a range of people in the project including the youth, children, seniors and families and to employ a range of consultation methods and techniques to engage the community and gain the necessary community input and participation in the project

A Secure System for Evaluation and Management of Authentication, Trust and Reputation in Cloud-Integrated Sensor Networks

Volume 8 Issue 4 (April 201

Nucleic acid melting by Escherichia coli CspE

Escherichia coli contains nine members of the CspA family. CspA and some of its homologues play critical role in cold acclimation of cells by acting as RNA chaperones, destabilizing nucleicacid secondary structures. Disruption of nucleic acid melting activity of CspE led to loss of its transcription antitermination activity and consequently its cold acclimation activity. To date, the melting activity of Csp proteins was studied using partially double-stranded model nucleic acids substrates forming stem–loop structures. Here, we studied the mechanism of nucleic acid melting by CspE. We show that CspE melts the stem region in two directions, that CspE-induced melting does not require the continuity of the substrate's loop region, and CspE can efficiently melt model substrates with single-stranded overhangs as short as 4 nt. We further show that preferential binding of CspE at the stem–loop junction site initiates melting; binding of additional CspE molecules that fully cover the single-stranded region of a melting substrate leads to complete melting of the stem

Groundwater recharge and age-depth profiles of intensively exploited groundwater resources in northwest India

Intensive irrigation in northwest India has led to growing concerns over the sustainability of current and future groundwater abstraction. Environmental tracers and measurements of groundwater residence times can help quantify the renewal processes. Results from 16 paired locations show the interquartile ranges for residence times in shallow alluvial groundwater (8–50 m deep) to be 1–50 years and significantly less than those from deeper groundwater (76–160 m deep) at 40–170 years. The widespread occurrence of modern tracers in deep groundwater (>60% of sites had >10% modern recharge) suggests that there is low regional aquifer anisotropy and that deep aquifers are recharged by a significant component of recent recharge via vertical leakage. Stable isotope and noble gas results at all depths conform to modern meteoric sources and annual average temperatures, with no evidence of significant regional recharge from canal leakage in this study area close to the Himalayas

LIQUISOLID COMPACT TECHNIQUES: A REVIEW

The poor dissolution rate of water-insoluble drugs is still a substantial problem confronting the pharmaceutical industry. There are several methods used to increase the solubility of drugs, of those liquid-solid compact technique is a new and promising addition towards such a novel aim, that the solubility of the insoluble drug moiety is increased by the aid of non-volatile solvents and hence increasing the dissolution and bioavailability. Oral drug administration has been one of the most convenient and widely accepted routes of delivery for most of the therapeutic agents. It is one of the most extensively used routes of drug administration because of its obvious advantages of ease of administration, improved patient compliance, and convenience. The enhancement of oral bioavailability of poorly water-soluble drugs remains one of the most challenging aspects of drug development. A more recent technique, powdered solution technology†or Liquisolid technologyâ€, has been applied to prepare water-insoluble drugs into rapid-release solid dosage forms. The limited solubility of drugs is a challenging issue for the industry, during the development of the ideal solid dosage form unit. The technique is based upon the dissolving the insoluble drug in the nonvolatile solvent and admixture of drug loaded solutions with appropriate carrier and coating materials to convert into acceptably flowing and compressible powders

Corrigendum: whole-transcriptome analysis of Verocytotoxigenic Escherichia coli O157:H7 (Sakai) Suggests Plant-Species-Specific Metabolic Responses on Exposure to Spinach and Lettuce Extracts.

Verocytotoxigenic Escherichia coli (VTEC) can contaminate crop plants, potentially using them as secondary hosts, which can lead to food-borne infection. Currently, little is known about the influence of the specific plant species on the success of bacterial colonisation. As such, we compared the ability of the VTEC strain, E. coli O157:H7 ‘Sakai’, to colonise the roots and leaves of four leafy vegetables: spinach (Spinacia oleracea), lettuce (Lactuca sativa), vining green pea (Pisum sativum) and prickly lettuce (L. serriola), a wild relative of domesticated lettuce. Also, to determine the drivers of the initial response on interaction with plant tissue, the whole transcriptome of E. coli O157:H7 Sakai was analysed following exposure to plant extracts of varying complexity (spinach leaf lysates or root exudates, and leaf cell wall polysaccharides from spinach or lettuce). Plant extracts were used to reduce heterogeneity inherent in plant-microbe interactions and remove the effect of plant immunity. This dual approach provided information on the initial adaptive response of E. coli O157:H7 Sakai to the plant environment together with the influence of the living plant during bacterial establishment and colonisation. Results showed that both the plant tissue type and the plant species strongly influence the short-term (1 hour) transcriptional response to extracts as well as longer-term (10 days) plant colonisation or persistence. We show that propagation temperature (37 versus 18 oC) has a major impact on the expression profile and therefore preadaptation of bacteria to a plant-relevant temperature is necessary to avoid misleading temperature-dependent wholescale gene-expression changes in response to plant material. For each of the plant extracts tested, the largest group of (annotated) differentially regulated genes were associated with metabolism. However, large-scale differences in the metabolic and biosynthetic pathways between treatment types indicate specificity in substrate utilisation. Induction of stress-response genes reflected the apparent physiological status of the bacterial genes in each extract, as a result of glutamate-dependent acid resistance, nutrient stress or translational stalling. A large proportion of differentially regulated genes are uncharacterised (annotated as hypothetical), which could indicate yet to be described functional roles associated with plant interaction for E. coli O157:H7 Sakai

FORMULATION AND EVALUATION OF TOPICAL ANTIFUNGAL GEL CONTAINING ITRACONAZOLE

Objective: The present research has been undertaken with the aim to develop a topical gel formulation of Itraconazole. Itraconazole is an imidazole derivative and used for the treatment of local and systemic fungal infection. The oral use of Itraconazole is not much recommended as it has many side effects. Commercially Itraconazole topical gel preparation are not available in the market, thus this formulation is made for better patient compliance and to reduce the dose of the drug and to avoid the side effects like liver damage and kidney damage.Methods: The gel was formulated by changing the polymer ratio. Various formulation (F1, F2, F3, F4, F5) were developed by using a suitable polymer (carbopol 934p and HPMC). The formulation was evaluated for % yield, spreadability, extrudability, wash ability and viscosity in vitro drug release study, skin irritation study, stability testing.Results: Viscosity studies of various formulations revealed that formulation F3 was better to compare to others. From among all the developed formulation, F3 shows better drug diffusion, did good Rheological properties. pH of the F3 formulation is sufficient enough to treat the skin infections. Results indicated that the concentration of carbopol-934 and HPMC K4M significantly affects drug release and rheological properties of the gels.Conclusion: It was concluded that formulation F3 was the best formulation among this formulation. Hence formulation F3 should be further developed for scale-up to industrial production

Android Application for Ticket Booking using QR-Code

India?s population increase day by day, mostly common peoples are depends on the railway locals for travelling to their destinations. Due to increase in travelling passengers by local trains, it is time consuming and frustrated process to buy tickets in a standing queue. To encounter this, the railway has introduced the concept of ATVM cards but losing or theft cards proved to be uneconomical. Our project deals with implementation of a smart-phone application to buy a local railway tickets which is simple and easy to use.The customer application consists of Registration and buying ticket through QR-code.Payment can be done through user?s account i.e. if user is agree to buy ticket then the equivalent ?amount? of the ticket will be deducted from the users account. After payment, ticket is generated on server side, saved in the database and also sent back to the user mobile and saved in the application?s memory which serves as a ticket for the user. The ticket checker application is used to validate the ticket by entering the serial number obtained by the user and searching in the railway database to check whether the user?s ticket is valid or invalid