Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a collection of large number of tiny sensor nodes that are deployed to monitor the physical environment such temperature, humidity, etc. The sensor readings must be routed to the base station and then to the end-user. These sensor nodes have limited capabilities, especially the energy reserve, the processing ability and the memory storage. So, the routing protocols design for this kind of networks is a crucial challenge. Since these routing protocols should be simple, energy-efficient, and robust to operate with a very large number of nodes. They should also be auto-configurable to node failures and changes of the network topology dynamically. This paper presents a new algorithm for gathering data in WSN based on chain forming using greedy algorithm. It focuses on equitably distributing the energy load over the whole network nodes. To avoid fast node dying, the leader role is better distributed over nodes based on their required energies to transmit to the sink. Thus, the entire network nodes would have the same lifetime and then as result, the network lifetime would be extended. We have conducted simulation-based evaluations to illustrate the performance of the proposed technique. The simulation results show that this algorithm allows network stability extension compared to the most known chaining algorithm.
In this paper, various shapes of planar monopole antenna on different ground plane structures are presented. It is designed for the 1-2 GHz frequency band for L-band application. A monopole of square, circular, triangular and hexagon shape is mounted vertically on the dielectric of glass epoxy (FR4 lossy substrate) with relative permittivity of 4.3, thickness of 1.6 mm above the ground plane through a single feeding strip. Simulation results such as impedance bandwidth, directivity, gain and radiation pattern are also analyzed and compared. The effect of feeding strip is a critical parameter for the performance of antenna, is studied for various shapes of monopole antenna are investigated. The radiation performance is also shown to be acceptable over a wide range of frequency.
A P-shaped wearable antenna is proposed for the application of ISM (Industrial Scientific Medical) band at frequency 2.45 GHz. This proposed antenna is studied using different numerical techniques. Those techniques are Method of Moment (MoM) and Finite Element Method (FEM). This proposed structure is a high directive gain, low-cost, low weight base station antenna. The characteristic analysis such as return loss (RL), VSWR and radiation pattern of this antenna has been investigated numerically. Numerical study has been carried out by using Ansoft HFSS V13 simulating software.
The assessment on the current information on the species composition of pest rodents and the local communities' perception on their pest status was carried out in Dire Dawa Administration from March 2010 to September 2011. Stratified and multistage random sampling techniques were used to sample representative villages (urban and rural) and respondents (n=150). Both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered through trapping, observation, questionnaire and interview. The collected data were tabulated and organized and appropriate statistical analysis like frequency distribution, percentage and chi-square test were used. For the survey of species composition and relative abundance of pest rodents Sherman live-traps and snap traps were set in the selected standardized and variable trapping grids. Five hundred and nine new individual rodents were captured from the trap nights of 986 Sherman live-traps and 130 snap traps. Twelve species of pest rodents were recorded of which eight were trapped and the four were observed in the study grids. The present result revealed as rodents were the most noxious pests causing substantial damage to agricultural crops, household items and human health through different mechanisms like feeding, discomforting, contaminating and mechanical damage and disease transmission. Techniques like using cat, hunting and trapping, rodenticides and field sanitations were frequently used. The present records of high pest rodent species composition not only indicate as the area is highly infested but it also indicates the existence of a high stock of rodent species diversity that requires an immediate development and application of ecological based rodent pest management strategy.
Cholesterol is an extremely important biological molecule involved in a multitude of biological processes regarded as vital for our survival. Yet, the function that has attracted more attention is its contribution to the development of atherosclerosis, a chronic inflammatory disease of blood vessels, which constitutes an underlying cause of coronary heart disease. Atherosclerosis is the principal cause of myocardial and cerebral infarction and remains the chief cause of death across many parts of the globe. Shockingly, despite its extreme physiological importance, cholesterol remains the most controversial nutrient ever. Misconception continues to exist not only among the people lacking knowledge in nutrition, but also among many nutrition researchers. The misconceptions surrounding cholesterol have been so pronounced and persistent that its beneficial effects are hardly heard of. Pharmaceutical companies are using this mass (cholesterolphobia) to flourish their business. However, recent studies demonstrate that cholesterol plays a minor role in cardiovascular disease. The objectives of this article are twofold. Firstly we review research articles to analyze the existing ideas regarding the link between heart diseases and cholesterol. Then we provide an up-to-date information about some health impacts of cholesterol and highlight the effects of anti-cholesterol drugs based on the researches performed to date.
Among 12 isolated soil yeasts, four isolates were selected according to their salt tolerance and these four isolates tolerated 14% NaCl. Moreover, they can tolerant to KCl, MgCl2 and CaCl2. Phosphate solubilization of selected soil yeast isolates were detected in Pikovskaya's broth supplemented with various NaCl concentrations (ranging from 0% to 10%). They can solubilize insoluble phosphate at all NaCl concentrations. But with increasing NaCl concentration, phosphate solubilization was decreased and the best solubilization was occurred at 6 days incubation period. Above 10% NaCl concentration, these isolates cannot solubilize insoluble phosphate, Ca3 (PO4)2. On maize germination under NaCl stressed conditions, it was found that soil yeast isolates enhanced maize germination when compared with uninoculated treatment. Above 0.5% NaCl concentration, germination percentage of maize was obviously different between inoculated and uninoculated treatments. Like in phosphate solubilization, germination percentage was decreased with increasing NaCl concentration. At 2% NaCl concentration, germination was not found. So these isolates tolerated to some degree of NaCl, there is limited range for their functioning. After treating salt affected soils with soil yeast isolates for four weeks, salinity of treated soils was slightly decreased but total nitrogen content, K+, and available nutrients (P and K2O) were slightly increased when compared with those of untreated soil.
Sodium alginate is one of such biodegradable polymers, which has been extensively exploited for the preparation of nanoparticles (NPs) for controlled delivery of several therapeutic agents. ICD-85 (venom derived peptides) has been shown to exhibit anti-cancer activity. In this report sodium alginate nanoparticles employed to improve upon its effectiveness. ICD-85 loaded NPs were prepared by ionic gelation method and were characterized by the particle size, zeta potential, transmission electron microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy and in vitro release studies. The in vitro cytotoxicity was evaluated by MTT assay. TEM revealed ICD-85 loaded NPs to have spherical shapes with a size of approximately 200 nm. The zeta potential of the ICD-85 loaded NPs was estimated as
Studies on bacteriophage growth and its development played a vital role in the history of molecular biology which in turn helped in clarification of many points. Most of the previous studies on bacteriophage development and growth have been performed under optimal conditions for the host cell. While On the other hand these conditions may not be optimal for the T4 bacteriophage. As a matter of fact in nature E. coli faces many unfavorable growth conditions, good example are those conditions prevailing in the human gut in which E.coli manages to survive well. This study characterizes the effects and influences of well-defined physiological conditions on T4 bacteriophage growth and development. In addition to this, T4 bacteriophage interactions with its bacterial host have also been demonstrated. In our present study we observed that the maximum growth and lysis of T4 bacteriophage was on luria-bertani (LB) and nutrient media (NM). Moreover the T4 bacteriophage production and lysis was also good in luria-bertani plus glucose (LB+G) media but when compared with its production in luria-bertani (LB) and nutrient media it was found to be less than these medium. Our study results also showed that in minimal media (MM) rate of growth and lysis activity of T4 bacteriophage was lowest as compared to other mentioned medium.
In the last decades, competition between port container terminals, especially between geographically close one, is rapidly increasing. To improve this competitiveness, terminal managers try to achieve rapid container vessel loading and unloading, that corresponds to a reduction of the time in port for vessels. In this paper, we focus our attention on the operational decision problem related to the seaside area of maritime container terminals. In particular, we study The Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP) which is considered as a core task of managing maritime container terminals and the optimization of these operations affects significantly the time spent by vessels at berth. The main goal behind this planning problem is to find the optimized sequence of loading and unloading tasks on a set of deployed quay cranes in order to exploit the full performances of port's resources while reducing the berth's total time occupation by vessels. In this paper, we provide a rich model for quay crane scheduling problem that covers important parameters such as ready time and due dates of Quay cranes (QCs), safety margin in order to avoid congestion between QCs and precedence relations among tasks. The proposed model seeks for a more compact mathematical formulation that can be easily solved by a standard optimization solver. Thus, we formulated the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem as a mixed-integer linear model that minimizes the sum of the QCs holding cost and tardiness penalty cost.
The practice of agroforestry can be much beneficial in the African communities where there are harsh environmental conditions, low technologies of agricultural production, fragmented land tenure system, unreliable livelihoods and chronic food insecurity. This paper is an outcome of a descriptive survey study that was conducted in Nambale division, Busia County in Kenya, which partly examined the factors influencing adoption of agroforestry practices among rural households. The adoption of agroforestry has not been very successful due to land ownership and land rights aspects that have adversely affected its adoption to the larger extent. In Kenya, land ownership remains exceedingly skewed in many rural parts of the country. The authors argue that when land ownership is extremely unequal, agroforestry activities and its growth delivers fewer paybacks for the poor rural households. Land tenure problems have been exacerbated by continuous fragmentation of land, land inheritance, gender imbalance in land ownership and the rights to land use. The paper concludes that the decision to adopt agroforestry was partly influenced by land and tree tenure, size of land and gender equity (women's rights to property and recognition of co-ownership). Additionally, rural households' investments in agroforestry increase with increasing in land tenure. The important policy recommendation made is that laws affecting adoption of agroforestry practices should be updated and harmonized in-order to achieve the 10% tree cover and for farmers and households to achieve the maximum benefits of agroforestry.
Grid Computing is the technology of dividing computer networks with different and heterogeneous resources based on distribution computing. Grid computing has no limitation due to its geographical domain and the type of undercover resources. Generally, a grid network can be considered as a series of several big branches, different kinds of microprocessors, thousands of PC computers and workstations in all over the world. The goal of grid computing is to apply available computing resources easily for complicated calculations vie sites which are distributed geographically. In another words, the least cost for many users is to support parallelism, minimize the time of task operation and so on in scientific, trade and industrial contexts. To reach the goal, it is necessary to use an efficient scheduling system as a vital part for grid environment. Generally, scheduling plays very important role in grid networks. So, selecting the type of scheduling algorithm has an important role in optimizing the reply and waiting time which involve as two important factors. As providing scheduling algorithms which can minimize tasks runtime and increase operational power has remarkable importance in these categories. In this paper, we discuss about scheduling algorithms which involve independent algorithms such as Minimum Execution Time, Minimum Completion Time, Min-min, Max-min and XSuffrage.
Coal is known as black gold, the food of industry. It has been used as one of the main energies for human being since the 18th century. Although its important place has been taken by petroleum nowadays, due to the daily drying up of petroleum for quite a period of time in the future, the large quantity of coal reserves and with the rapid development of science and technology, especially maturity and wide use of integrated coal gasification technology, coal will become one of the energies that cannot be replaced in human life and production. Coal increased fastest for five successive years. Coal consumption increased by 4.5% in the world which is higher than the average level 3.2% of last ten years. However, the use of coal has brought up serious ecological environment problems. In the 20th century, serious air environmental pollution events, such as acid rain, damage to ozonosphere, global warming, photochemical smog and urban coal smog, are all related to coal burning. The principal source of main pollutants in air, for example, SO2, NOx, CO, fume dust, particles, organic pollutants and heavy metals, are caused by coal burning. These pollutants have caused irreversible damage to human health and ecological environment. Finally this paper describes coal consumption and environmental problems due to coal utilization.
Drug resistance has mushroomed up after advent of every major class of antimicrobial drugs, varying in time from as short as 1 year (penicillin) to >10 years. Organisms associated with nosocomial and community acquired infections are also becoming drug resistant due to the over utilization of antibiotics, consequently leading to high morbidity, mortality and increased health costs. One such example of a beta lactamase producing bacteria is New Delhi Metallo beta lactamase (NDM-1) producing Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, and was reported for the first time in the year 2009 in a Swedish patient. NDM-1 bacterial strains possess more potent hydrolysis ability towards almost all antibiotics, including Carbapenems. NDM-1 bacterial strains are sensitive to Tigecycline and Colistin but there is problem of side effects associated with them. In such a situation where NDM-1 strains are displacing antibiotic sensitive strains and are resistant to most of the chemotherapeutic agents, there is a need for the search of novel alternative effective therapeutic agents. The present bioprospective study aims to analyze the potential of various natural plants or their products, based upon bioactivity parameters and presence of chemical constituents, using matrix based modeling, followed by optimization. The outcomes of the lead identification need verification with respect to antimicrobial potential against virulent NDM-1 Escherichia coli.
Condition-based maintenance is a kind of maintenance which conducted before fault by judging device exception and predicting device fault based on device condition information provided through monitoring device condition. The analysis result of fault diagnosis technology and production management information system which has namely arranged the maintenance plan. The implement device maintenance in light of device health condition due to prevents excessive maintenance or disrepair of device to the utmost extent. During operation, primary device of hydropower plant constantly suffers from sand abrasion, cavitation damage, mechanical wear and other mechanical or electrical damage, which reduces the efficiency of generating equipment and shortens the service life. If timely monitoring and diagnosis and appropriate maintenance are not provided, accident may be induced and cause great economic losses; to make primary devices for production and transmission of electric energy of hydropower plant have high reliability and be in good operating conditions, such primary devices must be maintained. The aim of this paper is to define the gradually improving sensor and monitoring technology which offer the possibility of condition-based maintenance of hydroelectric generating unit and the extraction and analysis methods of fault characteristics. Therefore discussion is summarized briefly on composition, configuration and functions of Condition-based Maintenance System (DSS). And also describes the short introduction of Condition-based Maintenance (DSS) system in typically project of Songjianghe Hydropower Plant as used for primary devices.
An Integral part of generator is Excitation System and new technology of Excitation System has been developed utilizing a power sources. The most important a portion of electric power system is synchronous generator due to it is the source of electrical energy and energy transformation is possible only when generator excitation exists. The generator excitation systems work when generator excitation system operates a dc charge to the generator heads to energize the field of magnetic around them to enable the electricity that should be generated. There are brushless and brush-type exciters and generators are built in exciters or charge can be established from any external source. This paper presents the control and configuration of synchronous generator excitation system as current mainstream technology, which is widely designed for feeding of turbo generator excitation winding with auto- regulated DC in generator operation, control normal and emergency modes. In this paper discuss appended on excitation system models of synchronous generator and emphasis on drawbacks, different possibilities to regulate generator excitation, de-excitation systems and overvoltage Protection with special newly developed nonlinear system regulation. And also append short descriptions of functions, compositions, Structure and Working Principle of Generator Excitation System.