Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bioactive Compounds and Bioactivities of Centella asiatica (L.) Urban Prepared by Different Drying Methods and Conditions

Centella asiatica (L.) Urban has attracted significant research and commercial interest due to its many health-promoting bioactive compounds, especially phenolic compounds and triterpene saponins, which possess several functional capacities, including antioxidant activity and antimicrobial activity. Prior to its use, however, C. asiatica usually needs to be dried to extend its storage life and to prepare the material for subsequent pharmaceutical processing. The present study investigated the effects of selected drying methods and temperature on the drying characteristics, phenolic compounds, triterpene saponins, antioxidant activity, and antimicrobial activity of dried C. asiatica. Hot-air drying (HAD), combined infrared–hot air drying (IR-HAD), and low-pressure superheated steam drying (LPSSD) were carried out at various temperatures (50, 60, 70°C). The results showed that higher drying temperatures led to higher drying rates but to lower levels of total phenolic compounds, total triterpene saponins, antioxidant activity, and antimicrobial activity. At the same drying temperature, IR-HAD resulted in the highest drying rates; this was followed by LPSSD and HAD in a descending order. Nevertheless, LPSSD resulted in the highest levels of the tested bioactive compounds, antioxidant activity, as well as antimicrobial activity. LPSSD at 50°C yielded dried C. asiatica of the best overall quality.
Performance of Natural Zeolites for the Treatment of Mixed Metal-Contaminated Effluents

Two natural zeolites, clinoptilolite and chabazite, have been evaluated with respect to their selectivity and removal performance for the treatment of effluents con taminated with mixed heavy metals, namely Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, Cr, Ni and Co. Parameters such as metal concentration, pH and presence of competing ions were examined and removal performance was determined in terms of the zeolites, ion exchange capacity measured at room temperature. The study showed that at metal concentrations ranging from 1 mg l-1 to 10 mg l-1 the zeolites exhibited an optimum removal efficiency at metals concentration of 10 mg l-1. Clinoptilohte and chabazite exhibited different selectivity profiles for all metals studied except for Pb for which both zeolites performed exceptionally well. The selectivity sequences for clinoptilolite and chabazite are summarized as follows: chabazite (Pb>Cd>Zn>Co>Cu>Ni>Cr); and clinoptilolite (Pb>Cu>Cd>Zn>Cr>Co>Ni). The study also showed that the chabazite exchange capacity is superior to that of clinoptilolite which is mainly due to the higher Al substitution of Si which provides chabazite with a negative framework favourable to higher exchange capability. Solution pH was found to have an effect on metal removal as pH can influence both the character of the exchanging ions and the zeolite itself. The metal removal mechanism was demonstrated to be controlled by ion exchange and precipitation was negligible. The results also showed that Ca was a major competing cation for ion exchange for both clinoptilolite and chabazite when concentrations exceeded 1000 mg 1-1. Overall, chabazite and clinoptilolite removal efficiency was not affected by the presence of more than one heavy metal in solution which demonstrates their potential application in the treatment of effluents contaminated with mixed heavy metals. © 1997 ISWA
Tensile Properties of Crystalline Polymers: Linear Polyethylene

The forcelength relations of a set of linear polyethylene fractions and polymers having most probable molecular weight distributions, encompassing a wide molecular weight range, have been investigated. The study of these polymers can serve as models for semicrystalline polymers. The polymers were crystallized in such a manner as to develop as wide a range as possible in the values of the independent structural variables that describe the crystalline state. Several important generalizations can be made from this work. The sharpness of the transition from a brittle to ductile type deformation is established, as is its dependence on molecular weight and certain of the other key structural parameters
Structure of ion-pairs derived from dihydroanthracenes II. Nuclear magnetic resonance studies

N. m. r. studies of 9, 10-dihydroanthracene, its 10-alkyl substituted derivatives and of the respective Li+ salts established the stereochemistry of these compounds. The spectra show that neither the molecules of these hydrocarbons nor of their lithium salts are planar, although in the anions the carbon 9 atoms possess a considerable amount of sp2 character. The anion of the unsubstituted salt vibrates rapidly through the planar configuration while the substituted anion prefers one conformation, apparently that in which the alkyl group is equatorial. The n. m. r. spectrum of the unsubstituted salt is compared with those of the lithium salts of some similar hydrocarbons, namely, fluorene and diphenylmethane.
Database research in crystal engineering

The Cambridge Structural Database is a storehouse of over 250 000 small-molecule organic and organometallic crystal structures. Statistical analysis of structural data provides a better understanding of the nature of hydrogen bonds and intermolecular interactions and facilitates in the identification of frequently occurring interaction patterns and supramolecular synthons. With an enhanced knowledge of hydrogen bond synthons in crystals, novel strategies may be designed for the self-assembly of supramolecular architectures from multi-functional molecules. The twin phenomena of polymorphism and pseudopolymorphism have been studied by extracting information on molecular conformations and solvent inclusion from the database. The approach geometry of hydrogen bond donors to various functional groups derived from small-molecule crystal structures is used as a model in structure-based drug design and pharmacophore mapping. Thus, the implications of crystal engineering today go far beyond organic and metal–organic crystal design into supramolecular materials, nanotechnology, ligand–protein binding and crystal structure prediction. This Highlight surveys the importance of database research in some of these areas.
Identification of Resistant Sugar Beet (Beta vulgaris L.) Genotypes against Beet Curly Top Disease

The Severe strain of Beet Curly Top Virus (BCTV-Svr) and Beet Curly Top Iran Virus (BCTIV) are considered as the main causal agents of sugar beet curly top disease in Iran and mixed infections of BCTV-Svr and BCTIV usually occur in nature. As the use of resistant cultivars is the safer and stable tool for management of the disease, the objective of current work was to identify sugar beet genotypes resistant to both agents. To this end, the reaction of thirty-eight sugar beet genotypes to infection by each of BCTV-Svr and BCTIV was separately evaluated using their infectious clones under the greenhouse condition. Incubation period, recovery, and disease severity index were considered for selection of resistant genotypes. As a result, ten and seven sugar beet genotypes resistant to, respectively, BCTV-Svr and BCTIV were selected. To evaluate the resistant genotypes, the experiments were repeated under greenhouse condition. In the field experiment with natural infection of viruses, the resistant genotypes were assessed and six sugar beet genotypes (S1 91019, S1 91022, S1 91023, S1 91028, S1 91029, and S1-91041) resistant to BCTV-Svr and BCTIV were identified; which could be used in future breeding programs.
Prevalence of Escherichia coli in milk and some dairy products in Beni-Suef governorate, Egypt.

ARTICLE INFO The aim of the study was directed to investigate the prevalence of Escherichia coli in raw milk, cream, large and small scale yoghurt, Kareish cheese, and large and small scale ice cream by conventional bacteriological methods as well as detection of the wzy gene (O-antigen polymerase gene) using polymerase chain reaction for further identification of recovered isolates. A total of 200 random samples including 40 raw milk, 40 fresh cream, 20 of each large and small scale yoghurt, 40 Kareish cheese and 20 of each large and small scale ice cream were obtained from different localities in Beni Suef governorate, Egypt. The present study could provide useful information for the prevalence of E. coli in the examined samples: 75%, 62.5%, 0%, 25%, 80%, 10% and 25% respectively. E. coli isolate were serologically identified as: O26, O111:H4, O121, O125:H21, O169, O126:H7 and O158 in raw milk, O6:H16, O55:H7, O119:H6, O125:H6 and O146:H21 in fresh cream, O55:H7, O125:H21 in small scale yoghurt and O18, O55:H7, O114:H21, O158, O125:H21and O153:H45 in Kareish cheese. Interestingly PCR successfully amplified the wzy gene (O-antigen polymerase gene) in all E. coli isolates which is associated with LPS biosynthesis and bacterial pathogenicity and increases the ability of E. coli to withstand the anti-bacterial defense mechanism. Article history:
Ethnic Identity in American History and America’s Exceptional Religiosity: Theory and Some Evidence

Why is religiosity in contemporary America exceptionally high relative to those in other rich countries? I develop a simple theory that hinges on the sense of security of immigrant-identity, which is informed by both religion and ethnicity. Commitments to religion and to ethnicity are complementary in the determination of identity, and immigrants consciously invest in the endogenous component of their sense of identity through the actions they choose (like socialising with an ethnic group or performing religious activities). I demonstrate that the level of religiosity increases with the extent of ethnic fractionalisation in the society. I offer some empirical evidence for the theory using contemporary cross-sectional data from the 50 states of the US. I test this theory against two alternative theories that have been offered to explain the high American religiosity. I find a robust positive and statistically significant correlation between religiosity and state-level ethnic fractionalisation. When tested with world data, the model is rejected — lending further support for the claim that America’s religiosity derives from its unique history of exceptionally high and ethnically diverse immigration.
Order-Fair Consensus in the Permissionless Setting

Transaction-order-manipulation attacks have become commonplace in public blockchains such as Ethereum, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. In these blockchains, a miner can unilaterally determine the order of transactions inside a block, and this ordering is not checked by other users, leaving room for the miner to manipulate the order for its own benefit. This gap is also evident from existing security results for permissionless blockchains. As prime examples, the breakthrough work of Garay et al. (Eurocrypt 2015) and Pass et al. (Eurocrypt 2017) showed the security properties of consistency and liveness for Nakamoto's seminal proof-of-work protocol. However, consistency and liveness do not provide any guarantees on the relationship between the order in which transactions arrive into the network and the finalized order in the ledger. As a solution, a recent paper by Kelkar et al. (Crypto 2020) introduced a third useful property for consensus protocols: (transaction)-order-fairness, which proposes a strong relationship between the transaction arrival order and their order in the ledger. Their model was limited to the classical (permissioned) setting however, where the set of protocol nodes is fixed a priori, and does not fit well for permissionless environments where order-manipulation attacks have been most prominent. In this work, we initiate the investigation of order-fairness in the permissionless setting and design two protocols that realize this new property addition to standard requirements of consistency and liveness. The key insight behind our protocols in providing order-fairness is that a miner can no longer unilaterally determine ordering and proposals from many miners are combined in a fair way to construct the finalized ordering.
The Journal of Toxicological Sciences

The aim of the present study is to investigate whether or not bromobenzene (BB) toxicity varies with circadian periodicity. Seven-week-old male ICR mice were injected with 900 mg/kg (5.73 mmol/kg) BB intraperitoneally at 4 different time points of a day (zeitgeber time [ZT]: ZT0, ZT6, ZT12, and ZT18). Mortality was then monitored for 7 days after injection. Interestingly, mice were sensitive to BB acute toxicity at ZT6 while tolerant at ZT18. Moreover, in mice that were given a non-lethal dose of BB (540 mg (3.44 mmol)/kg), levels of alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase, used as markers of hepatic injury, markedly increased in response to injection at ZT6, but did not increase significantly in response to injection at ZT18. In contrast, the markers of renal injury (creatinine and blood urea nitrogen), showed no significant difference in response to the two injection times. To further investigate this extreme circadian variation, we examined hepatic and renal lipid peroxidation levels, and conducted histopathological studies. Similar to our observation with alanine aminotransferase and creatinine, hepatic lipid peroxidation and histopathological changes were more pronounced than renal changes, and showed circadian variation. Our present investigation demonstrated that BB-induced mortality had clear circadian variation, and suggested that hepatic injury was one of the important factors for determination of this variation.
Long-Term Storage Effect in Frozen Dough by Spectroscopy and Microscopy

ABSTRACT Storage of dough at low temperatures (-20°C) has a considerable effect on the final quality of baked bread; this is most obviously reflected in lowered specific volumes. In this study, a suite of structural characterization techniques is applied to examine the underlying mechanism of storage damage at the molecular, microstructural, and macroscopic level. By using infrared spectroscopy, the dehydration of the gluten component could be established at the molecular level, and its kinetics could be monitored in time. Time-domain nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) showed increased water mobility, which could be attributed to a release of water from the gluten matrix. At the microstructural level, the growth of ice crystals could be monitored by means of cryogenic scanning electron microscopy (cryo-SEM). These ice crystals are preferably formed in gas cells with kinetics that are slower than those during infrared spectroscopy but similar to those in time-domain NMR. At the macroscopic level, ice crystal.
AN AVERAGING ESTIMATOR FOR TWO-STEP M-ESTIMATION IN SEMIPARAMETRIC MODELS

In a two-step extremum estimation (M-estimation) framework with a finite-dimensional parameter of interest and a potentially infinite-dimensional first-step nuisance parameter, this paper proposes an averaging estimator that combines a semiparametric estimator based on a nonparametric first step and a parametric estimator which imposes parametric restrictions on the first step. The averaging weight is an easy-to-compute sample analog of an infeasible optimal weight that minimizes the asymptotic quadratic risk. Under Stein-type conditions, the asymptotic lower bound of the truncated quadratic risk difference between the averaging estimator and the semiparametric estimator is strictly less than zero for a class of data generating processes that includes both correct specification and varied degrees of misspecification of the parametric restrictions, and the asymptotic upper bound is weakly less than zero. The averaging estimator, along with an easy-to-implement inference method, is demonstrated in an example.
Evaluation of Genetic Diversity of Rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) Cultivars Using SRAP Markers

_____________________________________________________________________________ 1 Department of Biotechnology, Institute of Science and High Technology and Environmental Sciences, Graduate University of Advanced Technology, Kerman, Islamic Republic of Iran. * Corresponding author; e-mail: m.abdolinasab@kgut.ac. ir Rapeseed is cultivated as a valuable oilseed plant throughout the world. The rapeseed oil contains significant amounts of unsaturated fatty acids. A total number of twenty-five cultivars of (winter/spring) rapeseed were grown in greenhouse conditions. In order to investigate genetic diversity, genomic DNA was extracted from the leaves and polymerase chain reaction was performed using 12 pairs of SRAP primers. Based on the results, 96 polymorphic bands were detected, in which the EM10-ME10 primer pairs with 14 bands and the EM1-ME14 and EM10-Me1 primer pairs with 4 bands had produced the maximum and minimum number of polymorphic bands, respectively. The Polymorphic Information Content (PIC) index varied from 0.25 to 0.499 and the genetic diversity based on Nei's index was 0.18 to 0.33. The cluster analysis using UPGMA method, with 95% accuracy of the grouping, was introduced as more appropriate than the other clustering methods. This method divided the studied cultivars into five distinct groups. The most genetic distance was recorded between Hydromel and Elvis, Zarfam, Artist and Okapi cultivars, and the lowest was shown between Artist and Okapi cultivars. Based on the results of principal coordinate analysis, the first and second components explained 83.66% of the variation, which represents the improper distribution of the SRAP markers on the whole genome. Overall, this study demonstrated high genetic diversity among cultivated rapeseed cultivars, which may be attributed to their high genetic background and environmental effects.
The Effect of Organizational Culture, Leadership Style and Work Satisfaction on the Principals’ Performance in Riau Islands

This study aims to examine the direct influence of organizational culture (X1), leadership style (X2) and job satisfaction (X3) on the performance of principals (X4). The correlative descriptive quantitative research methods will explore information about organizational culture with leadership styles in achieving job satisfaction for high school teachers and staff on the performance of principals in Riau Islands Province. Variable data were obtained through the instruments of 35 variable items with Likert scales score in rank 1–5. Management of Islamic Education Institutions implements Organizational Culture with effective and efficient leadership styles. Supervision continues to be carried out by implementers of education, government, and end users, as an effort to improve the quality of national education and the quality of the quality of Indonesian society carried out in a sustainable manner. It utilized not only the science, the technology in advances but paid the attention to global challenges as well. The Islamic education management system is a coordinative, systematic and integrative process. The process starts with organizing planning, mobilizing, and monitoring. Based on the results of the variable calculation together affecting the performance of the principal (X4) obtained a value of 91% so that H0 is rejected and Ha is accepted. It can be concluded that organizational culture, leadership style, and job satisfaction have a significant influence on the performance of the principal.
Impact of diverse tillage on soil moisture dynamics

Impact of diverse tillage on soil moisture dynamics The influences of traditional and reduced tillage on the water content dynamics of two soils were investigated in a long-term field experiment under nearly the same meteorological conditions for a winter wheat monoculture during three years. In addition to the moisture changes, the basic physicochemical properties, water retention, differential porosity and hydraulic conductivity of the investigated soils were measured. The results have shown the dependence between moisture and the tillage system applied for both types of soil. The soil water content was higher under reduced tillage in comparison to traditional management.
The effect of incentive spirometry on pulmonary function recovery and satisfaction with physical therapy of cardiac surgery patients

Introduction: The assessment of patient satisfaction with the received physical therapy (PT) is a necessary part of PT system analysis. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of incentive spirometry on pulmonary function recovery and the level of satisfaction with PT in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Materials and methods: 70 patients of both sexes were randomly divided into сontrol group (CG) and training group (TG). Both groups received standardized PT (early mobilization, therapeutic exercises, coughing). TG patients also used Tri-Ball breathing exerciser (flow-oriented incentive spirometry). Outcome Measures: the indicators of pulmonary function and satisfaction with PT results on the 7th postoperative day. Results: Pulmonary function results were statistically the same in CG and TG both before the surgery and on the seventh postoperative day. According to the results of the assessment of patient satisfaction with PT, none of the groups showed advantages in any of the seventeen items. Both groups of patients showed high scores in all items of PT satisfaction questionnaire. The overall score had no statistical difference in the groups as well: 82.5 (79; 85) points in CG and 80.5 (74.75; 85) points in TG (p = 0.315) out of a maximum of 85 points. Conclusions: The investigation of pulmonary function and patient satisfaction with the received physical therapy did not confirm the effect of flow-oriented incentive spirometry included in the physical therapy program on the level of satisfaction and pulmonary function test results.
Management Control Systems in Nepalese Commercial Banks

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine whether the mechanisms of MCS have been adequately developed and applied in the Nepalese commercial banks or not. Methodology Used – Descriptive and analytical research designs have been used for the study. Primary data have been collected through the questionnaires using convenience and judgmental sampling from the Nepalese commercial banks. Questionnaires have been developed in five scales and mean, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, correlation and factor analysis have been used as tools. Cronbach’s alpha test has been done to test the reliability of the data. Findings – All the commercial banks have applied the mechanisms of MCS.
Characteristics of the Basal Interface of the Martian South Polar Layered Deposits

We expand on previous studies of the South Polar Layered Deposits' (SPLD) basal interface using data acquired by the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) to obtain detailed maps of elevation, topography, and reflected radar power. Using these maps, we derive the thickness (ranging from 0 to 3.7 km) and volume of the SPLD (∼1.60 × 106 km3). While most basal interfaces reflect less power than the average SPLD surface, areas with basal echo power exceeding that of the surface are widespread throughout the SPLD, including at the location of potential subglacial water bodies in Ultimi Scopuli. The occurrence of these high basal echo power signatures appears to be largely frequency independent in MARSIS data. While the cause of the relatively high basal echo power values is uncertain, our observations suggest that this behavior is widespread, and not unique to Ultimi Scopuli.