Reservoir Potential Assessment of the Tortonian-Calabrian Sediments from Offshore Makran(Southwest Pakistan)through a Multidisciplinary Approach

The Tortonian–Calabrian strata of Offshore Makran(Pakistan)is investigated for the purpose of reservoir assessment.The stratigraphy and petrophysics indicate that the Neogene sediments have tight reservoir potential with porosities in the range of 3%–9%and 40%–50%water saturation.The mineralogical cross plots indicate a mixed lithology with an abundance of dolomite and calcite,together with minor quartz content and shale.The seismic interpretation demonstrates medium–high amplitude reflection patterns,mud diapirs coupled with onlapping strata and the occurrence of bottom simulating reflectors(BSRs).The BSRs are characterized by diminished amplitude,low continuity and exhibiting acoustic blanking zones.The high formation pressure results indicate overpressure zones,suggesting the occurrence of overpressured shales in the Jal Pari-1A.The presence of mud diapirs and gas chimneys are the result of tectonic forces acting at the junction of the Arabian,Indian and Eurasian plates,whereas,BSRs prove the existence of gas charged sediments supporting the formation of mud diapirism in the region.It is concluded that the high rates of sedimentation during the Neogene are likely to have contributed to the development of the high formation pressure.Revised mud weights,casing policies,pore pressure transients and geophysical inversion studies will help alleviate drilling risks in future exploration strategies.

Right versus left fully robotic live donor nephrectomy and open kidney transplantation:Does the laterality of the donor kidney really matter?

Objective Robotic-assisted live donor nephrectomy(LDN)is being gradually adopted across transplant centers.The left donor kidney is preferred over right due to anatomical factors and ease of procurement.We aimed to study donor and recipient outcomes after robotic procurement and subsequent open implantation of right and left kidneys.Methods All fully robotic LDNs and their corresponding open kidney transplants performed at our center between February 2016 and December 2021 were retrospectively analyzed.Results Out of 196 robotic LDN(49[right]vs.147[left]),10(5.1%)donors had intra-operative events(6.1%[right]vs.4.8%[left],p=0.71).None of the LDN required conversion to open surgery.The operative times were comparable for the two groups.Nausea(13.3%)was the most common post-operative complication.There was no mortality in either LDN group.Herein,we report our outcomes on 156 recipients(39 right and 117 left allografts)excluding robotic implants,exports,and pediatric recipients.There were no significant differences between right and left kidney recipients with respect to 1-year post-transplant patient survival(100.0%vs.98.1%,p=0.45)or graft survival(93.9%vs.97.1%,p=0.11),or delayed graft function(7.7%vs.5.1%,p=0.55).Conclusion Non-hand-assisted robotic live donor nephrectomies can be safely performed with excellent outcomes.Right LDN was not associated with higher incidence of complications compared to left LDN.Open implantation of robotically procured right renal allografts was not associated with higher risk of recipient complications.

Application of Zinc, Iron and Boron Enhances Productivity and Grain Biofortification of Mungbean

Deficiencies of essential vitamins,iron(Fe),and zinc(Zn)affect over one-half of the world’s population.A significant progress has been made to control micronutrient deficiencies through supplementation,but new approaches are needed,especially to reach the rural poor.Agronomic biofortification of pulses with Zn,Fe,and boron(B)offers a pragmatic solution to combat hidden hunger instead of food fortification and supplementation.Moreover,it also has positive effects on crop production as well.Therefore,we conducted three separate field experiments for two consecutive years to evaluate the impact of soil and foliar application of the aforementioned nutrients on the yield and seed biofortification of mungbean.Soil application of Zn at 0,4.125,8.25,Fe at 0,2.5,5.0 and B at 0,0.55,1.1 kg ha−1 was done in the first,second and third experiment,respectively.Foliar application in these experiments was done at 0.3%Zn,0.2%Fe and 0.1%B respectively one week after flowering initiation.Data revealed that soil-applied Zn,Fe and B at 8.25,5.0 and 1.1 kg ha−1,respectively,enhanced the grain yield of mungbean;however,this increase in yield was statistically similar to that recorded with Zn,Fe and B at 4.125,2.5 and 0.55 kg ha−1,respectively.Foliar application of these nutrients at flower initiation significantly enhanced the Zn contents by 28%and 31%,Fe contents by 80%and 78%,while B contents by 98%and 116%over control during 2019 and 2020,respectively.It was concluded from the results that soil application of Zn,Fe,and B enhanced the yield performance of mungbean;while significant improvements in seed Zn,Fe,and B contents were recorded with foliar application of these nutrients.

Generation of structure light in probe absorption spectrum via microwave-driven Y-type atomic system

Behavior of structure light is investigated by monitoring probe absorption using a microwave-driven Y-type atomic media configuration.The system under consideration is driven by one of the control vortex beams as well as an extra non-vortex control beam to ensure electromagnetically induced transparency.The significant aspect in the generation of structured light is the azimuthal phase-dependent modification for probe absorption.Further intensity distribution for absorption spectra is examined for simultaneously evaluating both the control vortex beams.We also go through the radial distribution of intensity for various orbital angular momentum values.Different modes of structural beams may be distinguished using the suggested approach.Our research gives us a way for rapidly transferring vortex wavefronts from control field to probe absorption profile.This could be useful in quantum information processing.

Decision Making Algorithmic Approaches Based on Parameterization of Neutrosophic Set under Hypersoft Set Environment with Fuzzy, Intuitionistic Fuzzy and Neutrosophic Settings

Hypersoft set is an extension of soft set as it further partitions each attribute into its corresponding attribute-valued set.This structure is more flexible and useful as it addresses the limitation of soft set for dealing with the scenarios having disjoint attribute-valued sets corresponding to distinct attributes.The main purpose of this study is to make the existing literature regarding neutrosophic parameterized soft set in line with the need of multi-attribute approximate function.Firstly,we conceptualize the neutrosophic parameterized hypersoft sets under the settings of fuzzy set,intuitionistic fuzzy set and neutrosophic set along with some of their elementary properties and set theoretic operations.Secondly,we propose decision-making-based algorithms with the help of these theories.Moreover,illustrative examples are presented which depict the structural validity for successful application to the problems involving vagueness and uncertainties.Lastly,the generalization of the proposed structure is discussed.

Isothermal, kinetic, and thermodynamic studies for solid-phase extraction of uranium(VI) via hydrazine-impregnated carbonbased material as efficient adsorbent

The current study describes the application of a new extraction method for efficient uranium adsorption via cost-effective hydrazine-impregnated activated carbon.Various experimental parameters such as time, adsorbent weight, temperature(°C), and uranium concentration were thoroughly investigated. The synthesized adsorbent was characterized via X-ray diffraction, Fourier transformation infrared spectroscopy(FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis. The results showed86% uranium extraction under optimized conditions(20% P2O5 at 25 °C, 120 min). The obtained findings fit well with thermodynamic and isothermal(Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms) models and pseudo second-order kinetics. In thermodynamic studies, the negative sign of(DG°) specified the spontaneity of process, the negative sign of(DH°) revealed endothermicity, and the positive sign of(DS°) showed high randomness after adsorption.

In vivo screening of essential oils of Skimmia laureola leaves for antinociceptive and antipyretic activity

Objective:To study the screening of essential oils of Skimmia laureola leaves(SLO)for acute toxicity,antinociceptive,antipyretic and anticonvulsant activities in various animal models.Methods:SLO were extracted using modified Clevenger type apparatus.Acute toxicity test was used in mice to observe its safety level.Antinociceptive activity of SLO was evaluated in acetic acid induced writhing and hot plate tests.Yeast induced hyperthermic mice and pentylenetetrazole induced convulsive mice were used for the assessment of its antipyretic and anticonvulsant profile respectively.Results:Substantial safety was observed for SLO in acute toxicity test.SLO showed a high significant activity in acetic acid induced writhing test in a dose dependent manner with maximum pain attenuation of 68.48%at 200 mg/kg i.p.However,it did not produce any relief in thermal induced pain at test doses.When challenged against pyrexia evoked by yeast,SLO manifested marked amelioration in hyperthermic mice,dose dependently.Maximum anti-hyperthermic activity(75%)was observed at 200 mg/kg i.p.after 4 h of drug administration.Nevertheless,SLO had no effect on seizures control and mortality caused by pentylenetetrazole.Conclusions:In vivo studies of SLO showed prominent antinociceptive and antipyretic activities with ample safety profile and thus provided pharmacological base for the traditional uses of the plant in various painful conditions and pyrexia.Additional detail studies are required to ascertain its clinical application.

An assessment of k-εturbulence models for gas distribution analysis

This paper presents the gas distribution analysis by injecting air fountain into the containment and simulations with the HYDRAGON code. Turbulence models of standard k-ε(SKE), re-normalization group k-ε(RNG) and a realizable k-ε(RLZ) are used to assess the effects on the gas distribution analysis during a severe accident in a nuclear power plant. By comparing with experimental data,the simulation results of the RNG and SKE turbulence models agree well with the experimental data on the prediction of dimensionless density distributions. The results illustrate that the turbulence model choice had a small effect on the simulation results, particularly the region near to the air fountain source.

Ag-Co3O4：Synthesis,characterization and evaluation of its photo-catalytic activity towards degradation of rhodamine B dye in aqueous medium

Synthesis,characterization of Co_3O_4 and Ag-Co_3O_4 composites and evaluation of their photo-catalytic activities towards photo-degradation of aqueous solution of rhodamine B dye under irradiation of visible light have been described in this paper.Co_3O_4 was prepared by solid phase mechano chemical process using Co(NO_3)_2·6H_2O and NH_4 HCO_3 as precursor materials.Ag was deposited on Co_3O_4 from AgNO_3 using Calotropis gigantea extract as reducing agent.XRD,SEM and FTIR were used for characterization of prepared composites.Photo-catalytic efficiencies of as-prepared Co_3O_4 and Ag-Co_3O_4 were evaluated for aqueous phase photo-degradation of rhodamine B.It was found that deposition of Ag on Co_3O_4 highly enhanced the photo-catalytic activity of Co_3O_4.Photo-catalytic degradation followed the Eley–Rideal mechanism.About 100% and 91% photo-degradation of 40 ml dye solution achieved at 313 K in 90 and 120 min over 0.05 g of Ag-Co_3O_4 as photo-catalyst using 100 and 200 mg·L^(-1) as initial concentration of dye respectively.

Antipyretic and anticonvulsant activity of n-hexane fraction of viola betonicifolia

Objective:To investigate the antipyretic and anticonvulsant activities of n-hexane fraction of Viola betonicifolia(V.betonicifolia).Methods:The antipyretic effect was scrutinized using brewer's yeast induced pyrexia and anticonvlsion effect was tested using pentylenetetrazol and strychnine induced convulsion in mice.Results:N-hexane fraction of V.betonicifolia demonstrated highly significant antipyretic activity during various assessment times(1-5 h)when challenged in yeast induced pyrexia test.The effect was in a dose dependent manner with maximum attenuation(82.50%)observed at 300 mg/kg i.p.When tested in pentylenetetrazol induced convulsion test,the 1st stage(Ear and facial twitching)and 2nd stage(Convulsive wave through the body)was 100%protected during 24 h at all the test doses(300,400 and 500 mg/kg i.p.),while the latency time of remaining stages was significantly increased.The maximum effect was observed by n-hexane fraction of V.betonicifolia at 400 and 500 mg/kg i.p.,as the latency time for generalized clonic-tonic seizure(5th stage)was increased up to 25.34 min.However,n-hexane fraction of V.betonicifolia had no protection in strychnine induced convulsion test.Conclusions:In conclusion,phytopharmacological studies provide scientific foundation to the folk uses of the plant in the treatment of pyrexia and neurological disorders.

A Deep Learning Approach for Crowd Counting in Highly Congested Scene

With the rapid progress of deep convolutional neural networks,several applications of crowd counting have been proposed and explored in the literature.In congested scene monitoring,a variety of crowd density estimating approaches has been developed.The understanding of highly congested scenes for crowd counting during Muslim gatherings of Hajj and Umrah is a challenging task,as a large number of individuals stand nearby and,it is hard for detection techniques to recognize them,as the crowd can vary from low density to high density.To deal with such highly congested scenes,we have proposed the Congested Scene Crowd Counting Network(CSCC-Net)using VGG-16 as a core network with its first ten layers due to its strong and robust transfer learning rate.A hole dilated convolutional neural network is used at the back end to widen the relevant field to extract a large range of information from the image without losing its original resolution.The dilated convolution neural network is mainly chosen to expand the kernel size without changing other parameters.Moreover,several loss functions have been applied to strengthen the evaluation accuracy of the model.Finally,the entire experiments have been evaluated using prominent data sets namely,ShanghaiTech parts A,B,UCF_CC_50,and UCF_QNRF.Our model has achieved remarkable results i.e.,68.0 and 9.0 MAE on ShanghaiTech parts A,B,199.1 MAE on UCF_CC_50,and 99.8 on UCF_QNRF data sets respectively.

Dependency of Torque on Aerofoilcamber Variation in Vertical Axis Wind Turbine

The advancements in the wind turbine technology specially associated with Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWT), has been improved for last couple of years. This is due to extensive use of computational techniques. This paper investigates dependency of torque on aerofoil geometry by performing numerical simulation on Darrieustype VAWT with fix pitch blades. Coordinate points for aerofoil was generated using Java Foil software. Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) turbulence modelling was used for predicting the flow and efficiency of the three blades VAWT. The unsteady flow condition was considered to make simulation as realistic as possible. In order to visualize high strain flow and separation, we used two equation models i.e. k-ε with RNG. NACA 0012 aerofoil was used and camber variations were carried out for developing samples of aerofoil to check the enhancement in performance of VAWT. Results demonstrate the torque and power along with its coefficients. It has been investigated that the performance efficiency was significantly improved by changing the aerofoil camber, demonstrating highest torque with camber (C3) aerofoil and the least performance was observed using camber (C0).

Productive performance, egg quality, hematological parameters and serum chemistry of laying hens fed diets supplemented with certain fat-soluble vitamins, individually or combined, during summer season

This present study aimed to determine the efficacy of supplementing layer diets with vitamin A(0, 8,000 and16,000 IU/kg diet) and vitamin E(0, 250 and 500 mg/kg diet) either individually or in combination on egg production and quality, and blood hematology and chemistry of birds reared under summer conditions. A total of 135 Bovans Brown laying hens were distributed to 9 treatment groups with 5 replicates of 3 hens/pen in a 3 × 3 factorial design. A significant improvement in feed conversion ratio(FCR) was observed as supplementary vitamin A or E increased(P 0.01). Hens fed diets supplemented with 16,000 IU vitamin A plus 500 mg vitamin E/kg diet had the best FCR among all groups. Egg quality traits were not significantly affected by the interaction of vitamin A and vitamin E levels. There was a significant increase in monocytes(P ≤ 0.01)and a decrease in basophils counts(P ≤ 0.05) in response to vitamin E. Significant decreases were observed in packed cell volume(PCV), thyroxine(T_4), alanine transferase(ALT), albumin, total cholesterol and total lipids((P ≤ 0.05 or P ≤ 0.01) P 0.01), and increases were observed in serum concentrations of globulin(P ≤ 0.05)and calcium(P ≤ 0.01) due to vitamin A. The combination of 0 IU vitamin A and 500 mg vitamin E/kg diet had the highest values of PCV(40.09%) and hemoglobin(Hb)(10.33 mg/100 mL) among all groups. Vitamin E raised serum values of total protein, total cholesterol and total lipids(P ≤ 0.05 or P≤ 0.01). Feed intake, FCR,PCV, Hb, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, T_4, ALT and total protein were significantly affected by the interaction of vitamins A and E(P ≤ 0.05 or P ≤ 0.01). The interaction of vitamins A and E was only significant with respect to serum total protein(P ≤ 0.05). It can be concluded that layer diets supplemented with vitamins A and E had good results in alleviating the harmful impacts of high ambient temperature. The combination of 16,000 IU vitamin A and 500 mg vitamin E per kilogram diet is preferable for obtaining better production of laying hens reared under hot summer conditions.

Gut microbiotad-a positive contributor in the process of intermittent fasting-mediated obesity control

Historically,intermittent fasting(IF)has been considered as an effective strategy for controlling the weight of athletes before competition.Along with excellent insight into its application in various spaces by numerous studies,increasing IF-mediated positive effects have been reported,including anti-aging,neuro protect ion,especially obesity control.Recently,the gut microbiota has been considered as an essential manipulator for host energy metabolism and its structure has been reported to be sensitive to dietary structure and habits,indicating that there is a potential and strong association between IF and gut microbiota.In this paper,we focus on the crosstalk between these symbionts and energy metabolism during IF which hold the promise to optimize host energy metabolism at various physical positions,including adipose tissue,liver and intestines,and further improve milieu internal homeostasis.Moreover,this paper also discusses the positive function of a potential recommendatory strain(Akkermansia muciniphila)based on the observational data for IF-mediated alternated pattern of gut microbiota and a hopefully regulatory pathway(circadian rhythm)for gut microbiota in IF-involved improvement on host energy metabolism.Finally,this review addresses the limitation and perspective originating from these studies,such as the association with tissue-specific bio-clock and single strain research,which may continuously reveal novel viewpoints and mechanisms to understand the energy metabolism and develop new strategies for treating obesity,diabetes,and metabolic disorders.

A Survey on Biosafety Practices in Lab Personnel in 12 Selected Areas of Karachi,Pakistan

The objective of this study was to realize the degree of biosafety precautions and measures recorded among different Private Hospitals and Diagnostic labs personnel situated in different areas of Karachi,Pakistan.One thirty two private hospital based laboratory technicians were selected from all 12 selected areas in Karachi.The laboratory technicians were interviewed then a survey form was completed by the interviewer.The survey was conducted in 3 months duration from May 2017 to July 2017.The total number of members in this study was 132,of which 85 were males and 47 were females.Results presented that 65%of the laboratory technicians did not use any type of PPE and 35%of the respondents recapped used syringes frequently while 25%recapped occasionally.For avoiding the reuse of syringes,Pakistani governments recommend that they be cut before discarding;however,only 65%of the respondents followed the given procedure.Even though mouth pipetting is considered outdated,45%of the technicians continue to do so for numerous purposes.Results of this survey established an absence of awareness about good and proper lab practices and lab biosafety measures among lab technicians in Karachi,Pakistan.

Optoelectronic and elastic properties of metal halides double perovskites Cs_(2)InBiX_(6)(X = F, Cl, Br, I)

Structural geometry, electronic band gaps, density of states, optical and mechanical properties of double perovskite halides Cs2InBiX6(X = F, Cl, Br, I) are investigated using the density functional theory. These compounds possess genuine perovskite stoichiometry, evaluated using various geometry-based indices like tolerance factor, octahedral factor, and formation energy. The fundamental electronic band gaps are direct and valued in the range 0.80–2.79 e V. These compounds have narrow band gaps(except Cs2InBiX6) due to strong orbital coupling of the cations. The valence band maximum and conduction band minimum are confirmed to be essentially of In 5 s and Bi 6 p characters, respectively. The splitting of Bi 6 p bands due to strong spin-orbit coupling causes reduction in the band gaps. These compounds have large dispersion in their bands and very low carrier effective masses. The substitution of halogen atoms has great influence on the optical properties. The mechanical properties reveal that Cs2InBiX6(X = F, Cl, Br, I) satisfy the stability criteria in cubic structures.