Climate and forest cover changes in district Skardu, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan: A Community Perspective

The country, Pakistan has only five percent (5%) land cover is under forest which is on decline rapidly. Most of the forest is in the northern areas but several factors are influencing negatively. Climate change phenomenon has expedited deforestation. With increase in population, pressure on forest in Baltistan has also increased while climate change factors are unfavorable for its regeneration. Present study was aimed at investigation into community perception on climate change and forest cover changes in district Skardu, Baltistan. Research revealed that forest cover has on decline (either highly decreasedor decreased) like vegetation cover which has also decreased, particularly near villages more as compared to pastures. Similarly, temperature has increased in winter and spring as compared to summer and autumn. Snowfall has decreased during spring more as compared to winters. Contrast to snowfall, rainfall has increased in spring followed by winter, autumn and summer. Glacier sizes are shrinking and monsoon floods have highly increased flowed by melt water increase in channels. Due to change in other climatic factors, crop sowing, fruiting and harvesting periods have prolonged and have a backward shifting trend. Diseases on the plants have increase but in contrast annual yield has increased. Overall indigenous biodiversity has decreased but new bird species have increased. We conclude that there is a visible but unfavorable change is underway forcing every corner of life to shift and adjust itself with new adaptation strategies. Agro pastoral communities in the area feel a threat to their livelihood options if these pathetic changes continue in the future as their reliance has increased on natural resources and ecosystem services for their survival. Climate change and forest decline are some physically verifiable factors and phenomenon and not a simple scientific theory in the lives of rural communities of Baltistan like rest of Gilgit-Baltistan. Government, non-government and civil society organizations need to consider diversification of livelihood options and impacting on adverse factors contributing into climate change undesirably in the area

Climate Change and Agricultural Transformation in Shigar Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan: A Commune-Scientific Perception

Climatic change is no more a theoretical paradigm but a scientific fact now. Its men fed incubation period has over and symptoms are evident not only across highland glaciated areas like Shigar Valley, Baltistan and rest of the world but also downstream areas. Communities living in Shigar Valley are agro-pastoral and depend on snow and glacier meld water for agriculture and other domestic uses. Their principal agriculture produce consists upon wheat, buck wheat and barley. Study revealed that over the last thirty years, inhabitants have gone through a transition towards new adaptation approaches caused by climate change in the valley. With a decline and decrease in glacial mass and agricultural produce local inhabitants seek more employments and off-farm activities rather than spending their time on fields. Temperature has increased and experienced throughout the year has winter has become short and mild followed by warmer prolonged summer experiencing 40°C+ hotness which previous generations has never experienced in their life time. A marking shift of 7-15 days of flowering time is visible. Rainfall has highly increased in its intensity during spring followed by winter. Snowfall has a marking shift from little fall in winter towards heavy fall in spring followed by an increase in monsoon flooding, floral diseases and fuel consumption. Vegetation cover has declined more near village as compared to pastures. Crop sowing, harvesting and snow melt periods have prolonged. Avian, mammalian and herpeto fauna have declined in terms of their species richness and population equally. A change impacting rural livelihood and food insecurity is visible. In a prevailing situation innovative folk wisdom grounded mitigation and adaptation strategies are needed

AXL modulates extracellular matrix protein expression and is essential for invasion and metastasis in endometrial cancer

The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL promotes migration, invasion, and metastasis. Here, we evaluated the role of AXL in endometrial cancer. High immunohistochemical expression of AXL was found in 76% (63/83) of advanced-stage, and 77% (82/107) of high-grade specimens and correlated with worse survival in uterine serous cancer patients. In vitro, genetic silencing of AXL inhibited migration and invasion but had no effect on proliferation of ARK1 endometrial cancer cells. AXL-deficient cells showed significantly decreased expression of phospho-AKT as well as uPA, MMP-1, MMP-2, MMP-3, and MMP-9. In a xenograft model of human uterine serous carcinoma with AXL-deficient ARK1 cells, there was significantly less tumor burden than xenografts with control ARK1 cells. Together, these findings underscore the therapeutic potentials of AXL as a candidate target for treatment of metastatic endometrial cancer

On Supergravity Solutions of Branes in Melvin Universes

We study supergravity solutions of type II branes wrapping a Melvin universe. These solutions provide the gravity description of non-commutative field theories with non-constant non-commutative parameter. Typically these theories are non-supersymmetric, though they exhibit some feature of their corresponding supersymmetric theories. An interesting feature of these non-commutative theories is that there is a critical length in the theory in which for distances larger than this length the effects of non-commutativity become important and for smaller distances these effects are negligible. Therefore we would expect to see this kind of non-commutativity in large distances which might be relevant in cosmology. We also study M5-brane wrapping on 11-dimensional Melvin universe and its descendant theories upon compactifying on a circle.Comment: 25 pages, latex file; v2: typos corrected, Refs. adde

Obstructive sleep apnea and psychomotor vigilance task performance

Background: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a highly prevalent disorder with considerable morbidity and mortality. Vigilance and attentiveness are often impaired in OSA patients. In occupational medicine settings, subjective reports of sleepiness are notoriously inaccurate, making the identification of objective measures of vigilance potentially important for risk assessments of fitness for duty. In order to evaluate the effects of OSA on attentiveness and vigilance, we conducted a cross-sectional study to examine the association between OSA and psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) performance. Methods: Patients attending sleep clinics for evaluation of possible sleep apnea were recruited. The subjects underwent either a standard overnight laboratory polysomnography or home sleep study. Subjective daytime sleepiness was assessed by Epworth sleepiness scale, and vigilance was tested using a portable device. The participants were asked to respond to the PVT signals using their dominant hand. Each PVT administration lasted 10 minutes, with stimuli signals appearing randomly at variable intervals of 2–10 seconds. Results: Mean age of the participants was 46±15 years, and mean body mass index was 34.3±9.8 kg/m2. Participants with higher Epworth scores had worse PVT performance (P<0.05). In multivariate analyses, age, body mass index, and poor sleep efficiency (measured by Pittsburgh sleep quality index score) were associated with worse PVT performance (P<0.05). In contrast, PVT performance did not differ significantly across categories of apnea hypopnea index severity. Subgroup analysis demonstrated that women had worse performance on all PVT measures (P<0.05). Conclusion: PVT performance can be utilized for risk assessments of sleepiness and may be particularly useful among populations where subjective reports are unreliable

Managing the Quality of Chromium Sulphate during the Recycling From Tanning Waste Water

Quality management is a big issue during recovery and recycling process because if desired quality is not received during chromium recovery or recycling process, we may be faced another problem of recycled materials. This also seen that most important that the production processes is useless without taking specific required quality of chromium., in real way about 60%-70% of chromium salt is used as chemical interaction with the hides but 30%-40% of chemical chromium salt is wasted as the solid and liquid form. Therefore, the quality during the recovery process of the chromium sulphate from chromium wastewater that is most important step for controlling environmental pollution with some economical benefits. Recycling of chromium sulphate is possible by using chemical precipitation method for water treatment, two precipitating agents' magnesium oxide and calcium hydroxide plus alum are used for this purpose. Final findings showed that the optimum pH for efficient recovery with required quality was 8 and the Recycling of chromium sulphate was about 99(%) at pH 8 with good sludge with high settling rate. on the Base of these findings an economical production plant can be designed which are useful for quality improvement

Dual Spikes; New Spiky String Solutions

We find a new class of spiky solutions for closed strings in flat, $AdS_3\subset AdS_5$ and $R\times S^2(\subset S^5)$ backgrounds. In the flat case the new solutions turn out to be T-dual configurations of spiky strings found by Kruczenski hep-th/0410226. In the case of solutions living in $AdS$, we make a semi classical analysis by taking the large angular momentum limit. The anomalous dimension for these dual spikes is similar to that for rotating and pulsating circular strings in AdS with angular momentum playing the role of the level number. This replaces the well known logarithmic dependence for spinning strings. For the dual spikes living on sphere we find that no large angular momentum limit exists.Comment: Added reference

Operational Management of Chromium Recycling From Tannery Wastewater

Operational management is an important step in production process of a chemical reaction for getting good quality of yield with economical way as taken in recycling of chromium from tannery waste. It is most widely used the Chromium (III) salts as a chemicalin the process of tanning. Only 60%-70% of chromium salt is used to reacts with theskins and hides but 30%-40% of remaining chromium chemicals are wasted in form of the solid and liquid (as a tanning solutions). Consequently, the recoveryand recycling of the chromium metal content of existed wastewaters is essential for economic reasons and environmental protection. Recycling and recovery of chromium metal is supported by using chemical precipitation methods. For achieving this special aim, calcium hydroxide plus alum and magnesium oxide are used as two precipitating agents. This is a confirmatory Study on the effects of stirring time, pH, sludge and settling rate volume in batch experiments. These Results are showed that the optimum pH for efficient recovery was done at 8.5, good sludge with high settling rate and lower volume during recovery process was achieved. Based on these findings an economical recovery plant was designed. The recovery achieved about 99(%) at pH 8 with stirring at 90 rmp

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for chargino-neutralino production with mass splittings near the electroweak scale in three-lepton final states in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry through the pair production of electroweakinos with mass splittings near the electroweak scale and decaying via on-shell W and Z bosons is presented for a three-lepton final state. The analyzed proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of √s=13  TeV were collected between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139  fb−1. A search, emulating the recursive jigsaw reconstruction technique with easily reproducible laboratory-frame variables, is performed. The two excesses observed in the 2015–2016 data recursive jigsaw analysis in the low-mass three-lepton phase space are reproduced. Results with the full data set are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations. They are interpreted to set exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level on simplified models of chargino-neutralino pair production for masses up to 345 GeV