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Cytokine see-saw across pregnancy, its related complexities and consequences
During pregnancy, a woman's immune system adapts to the changing hormonal concentrations, causing immunologic transition. These immunologic changes are required for a full-term pregnancy, preserving the fetus' innate and adaptive immunity. Preterm labor, miscarriage, gestational diabetes mellitus, and pre-eclampsia are all caused by abnormal cytokine expression during pregnancy and childbirth. A disruption in the cytokine balance can lead to autoimmune diseases or microbiologic infections, or to autoimmune illness remission during pregnancy with postpartum recurrence. The cytokine treatments are essential and damaging to the developing fetus. The current review summarizes the known research on cytokine changes during pregnancy and their possible consequences for pregnant women. Studies suggest that customizing medication for each woman and her progesterone levels should be based on the cytokine profile of each pregnant woman. Immune cells and chemicals play an important function in development of the placenta and embryo. During pregnancy, T cells divide and move, and a careful balance between proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines is necessary. The present review focuses on the mother's endurance in generating fetal cells and the immunologic mechanism involved. 2022 International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics. -
Nutrition paves the way to environmental toxicants and influences fetal development during pregnancy
Nutrition plays a major role in the healthy pregnancy and development of the fetus. In addition, nutrition can expose humans to a wide range of potentially hazardous environmental constituents, such as organic pollutants and heavy metals from marine or agricultural food products while processing, producing, and packaging. Humans constantly face these constituents through air, water, soil, food, and domestic products. During pregnancy, the rate of cellular division and differentiation is higher; exposure to any of these environmental toxicants can lead to developmental defects as they cross the placental barrier and, in some cases, can harm the successive generation too, as some contaminants can act on the reproductive cells of the fetus (Diethylstilbestrol). Pregnant women are considered a vulnerable population to food contaminant exposure and require a proper dietary chart and conscious food choices. Food is a source of both essential nutrients and environmental toxicants. Here, we have researched the possible toxicants of the food industry and their influence on the fetus's in-utero development, along with the importance of dietary interventions and the need to balance a healthy diet to overcome the harms. The cumulative exposure to environmental toxicants can influence the mother's prenatal environment and affect the fetus's development. 2023 -
Customary complications and screening techniques of early pregnancy
Complications arising during pregnancy are one of the significant public health issues around the world. Being the critical aspect for the growth and development in every human's life, it is necessary to assess any pathological disturbance mainly concerning the well-being of the fetus and mother throughout pregnancy. Few women face health downline while pregnancy, whereas few faces before getting pregnant; both the conditions can lead to complications in maternal and fetal health. Usually, pregnancy-related complications disappear as soon as the baby is delivered or shortly after that. Few complications include premature delivery, abruption of the placenta, preeclampsia, and diabetes. At the same time, gestation and these complications reoccur in successive pregnancies at a higher rate. They can also make the women prone to lifelong medical complications such as metabolic diseases or cardiovascular disease later in life. Most of the complications are mild without progression, but it harms both the mother and baby when they progress. Hence, it is important to diagnose early the danger signs and provide antenatal care to elevate the chances of proper health in both the mother and infant throughout the pregnancy and afterwards. This chapter focuses on the complications faced in the early phase of pregnancies and the screening methods utilized to diagnose them early, along with long-term effects in mothers due to some complications. The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. -
COVID-19 in pregnant women and children: Insights on clinical manifestations, complexities, and pathogenesis
Pregnancy changes the body's immune system to counteract the spectrum of infections, including COVID-19, which can pose complications. Pregnant women are less likely to contract COVID-19 infections than the general public. However, pregnant women are at slightly increased risk of becoming severely unwell if they do catch COVID-19, and congenital conditions in pregnant women may worsen the state of infection and lead to critical stages and even mortality. The possibility of vertical transmission has been reported in only a few cases of COVID-19; however, it was not noted in cases of SARS and MERS. Vaccination coverage in pregnant women remains a challenge. Children are the next suspected and vulnerable population to acquire infection after the first and second waves. Children are disproportionately infected compared with older populations, but the severity of infection is less compared to adults. This review highlights the complexities of COVID-19 in pregnant women and the underlying reasons why children tend to be comparatively less severely affected. Ethnicity, nutrition, lifestyle, and therapeutics influence the severity of infection in children. Low expression of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors, indigenous virus competence, and maternal immunity is the first-line defense for children against COVID-19. Habituating herbal medicines from childhood may help support a robust and defensive immune system to counteract novel antigens and encourage healthy generations. 2021 International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics -
A Bose horn antenna radio telescope (BHARAT) design for 21 cm hydrogen line experiments for radio astronomy teaching
We have designed a low-cost radio telescope system named the Bose Horn Antenna Radio Telescope (BHARAT) to detect the 21 cm hydrogen line emission from our Galaxy. The system is being used at the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) (Radio Physics Lab, IUCAA NCRA-TIFR, , ), Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), India, for laboratory sessions and training students and teachers. It is also a part of the laboratory curriculum at several universities and colleges. Here, we present the design of a highly efficient, easy to build, and cost-effective dual-mode conical horn used as a radio telescope and describe the calibration procedure. We also present some model observation data acquired using the telescope for facilitating easy incorporation of this experiment in the laboratory curriculum of undergraduate or post-graduate programs. We have named the antenna after Acharya (teacher or an influential mentor) Jagadish Chandra Bose, honoring a pioneer in radio-wave science and an outstanding teacher, who inspired several world renowned scientists. 2022 Author(s). -
Efficiency Wage and Productivity in the Indian Microfinance Industry: A Panel Evidence
Enhanced productivity remains a crucial agenda for firms to attain cost and competitive advantages in the market. Hence, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of efficiency wage (EW) on the productivity of microfinance institutions (MFIs) with respect to their dual objectives, namely, outreach (depth and breadth) and financial sustainability. Unbalanced panel data of 179 Indian MFIs were collected over the period 20102018 from the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX) market platform (now obtainable from the World Bank catalogue). Under a static model setting (fixed effects model), the observed relationship between EW and MFIs productivity is mixed. On the one hand, EW exhibits a strong and statistically significant positive relationship with the breadth of outreach, even after considering various control variables and alternative proxies of EW. On the other hand, EW shows no positive influence on the MFIs depth of outreach; rather, it results in a mission drift of MFIs, with the poorest of the poor being neglected (weak and insignificant for proxy of EW). Concerning the financial sustainability of MFIs, EW exhibits a positive and statistically significant effect, except for the profitability dimension when an alternative proxy of EW is used. A two-step system generalized method of moments (GMM) performed to limit endogeneity problems also validates most of our findings. The outcomes of this study could help MFIs managers in designing appropriate financial packages to enhance MFIs productivity and subsequently attain the dual objective of outreach and sustainability. 2022 SAGE Publications. -
Ruralurban financial inclusion: Implications on the cost sustainability of microfinance lenders
Despite the higher demand for credit among the rural poor, many commercial banks and microfinance institutions (MFIs) are averse towards microfinancing activities in rural areas due to their high-cost implication compared to urban areas. Therefore, this study empirically investigates the effect of rural and urban financial inclusion on the cost sustainability of MFIs. To this end, a globally representative sample of 1729 MFIs' data covering the period 20082018 were analyzed. Contrary to the orthodox perception, our overall result revealed that lending in rural areas is more cost-efficient than in urban areas, even after considering various proxies and endogeneity issues. 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. -
The Content of Heavy Metals in Cigarettes and the Impact of Their Leachates on the Aquatic Ecosystem
Smoked cigarettes and butts are the most common kind of litter around the world. The buildup of these litters has badly polluted local water bodies and their compartments, and the cumulative effect of many cigarette butts scattered in a centralized location may pose a serious hazard to living species. To understand how heavy metals are leached out into the aquatic ecosystem, researchers must analyse the behavior of the materials that make up cigarettes. Using atomic absorption spectrometry, this study evaluated the content of several metals (such as Cd, Cu, Fe, Pb, Sn, Zn, and Hg) leached from various brands of unsmoked and smoked cigarettes and cigarette butts. The findings revealed that heavy metal is more prevalent in butte. These findings indicate that cigarette litter is a major source of metal contamination in the aquatic ecosystem and that apparent leaching may increase the risk of toxicity to aquatic organisms. 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. -
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Currency Exchange Rate Prediction Using Multi-layer Perceptron
Financial forecasting is an estimate of a future financial outcome and this outcome is related to some kind of value. We can measure this outcome for a company to predict its future stock or to detect the viability of a human for the sanction of a loan. In all these cases, we want to estimate the future outcome based on historical data. Various methods have been developed lately, to make time series predictions. In this work, we have used Multi-layer perceptron algorithm to predict the Currency Exchange rate between US dollar and EURO. The training network has been compiled using TensorFlow. 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. -
Sign Language Recognizer Using HMMs
In our day to day lives, we come across especially abled people who perform their daily chores with the aid of motivation that they get from self-confidence. There are many with hearing impairment. Sign language is the most expressed and natural way for them to communicate. Some chains of restaurants have, in fact, recruited deaf servers providing them with employment opportunities. Therefore, automatic Sign language recognition has become the crux of vision research. This paper is based on a project that builds a system that can recognize words communicated using the American Sign Language (ASL). Having been provided with a preprocessed dataset of tracked hand and nose positions extracted from the video, the set of Hidden Markov Models are trained. Using a part of this dataset, identification of individual words from test sequences is done. It provides them with the ability to communicate better, opening up a lot of opportunities. 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. -
Off balance sheet exposure performance analysis and risk measurment of Indian banks /
Archives of Business Research, Vol.4, Issue 1, pp.112-117, ISSN: 2054-7404. -
Under-pricing of IPOs in Indian capital market and determinants of under-pricing /
Archives of Business Research, Vol.5, Issue 1, ISSN: 2054-7404. -
Electrical transport and magnetoresistance studies on the magnetic moment compensated Mn2V1-xCoxZ (Z=Ga, Al; x=0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1) Heusler alloys
We report the electrical resistivity and magnetoresistance properties of arc-melted Mn2V1-xCoxZ (Z=Ga, Al; x =0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1) alloys, which possess compensated ferrimagnetic behaviour with high TC when x=0.5. Apart from metallicity, the alloys in the Ga series with x= 0, 0.75, 1 composition showed a positive to negative crossover in the magnetoresistance versus temperature curves. This crossover was absent for Mn2V0.75Co0.25Ga and the fully compensated ferrimagnet Mn2V0.5Co0.5Ga. In contrast to this, Co-substituted Mn2VAl exhibits distinctly different resistive behaviour. While the alloys Mn2VAl and Mn2CoAl exhibit metallic and semiconducting behaviour respectively, the intermediate compositions show a gradual metallic to semiconducting transition as the Co concentration increases. The compensated ferrimagnet Mn2V0.5Co0.5Al showed a mixed transport behaviour of metallic and semiconducting nature with a resistivity minimum at 140 K. In contrast to this mixed response of the arc-melted bulk sample, the Mn2V0.5Co0.5Al melt-spun ribbon shows a clear semiconducting nature throughout the temperature range, indicating that the sample preparation methods could highly influence the electrical properties of the investigated compensated ferrimagnets. 2024 Elsevier B.V. -
1-Normal DRA for insertion languages
Restarting automaton is a type of regulated rewriting system, introduced as a model for analysis by reduction. It is a linguistically motivated method for checking the correctness of a sentence. In this paper, we introduce a new definition of normal restarting automaton in which only one substring is removed using the DEL operation in a cycle. This DEL operation is applied to reverse the insertion operation in an insertion grammar. We use this 1-normal restarting automaton to solve the membership problem of insertion languages. Further, we introduce some interesting closure properties of 1-normal restarting automata. 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. -
Polynomial time learner for inferring subclasses of internal contextual grammars with local maximum selectors
Natural languages contain regular, context-free, and context-sensitive syntactic constructions, yet none of these classes of formal languages can be identified in the limit from positive examples. Mildly context-sensitive languages are capable to represent some context-sensitive constructions such as multiple agreement, crossed agreement, and duplication. These languages are important for natural language applications due to their expressiveness, and the fact that they are not fully context-sensitive. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for inferring subclasses of internal contextual languages using positive examples only, namely strictly and k-uniform internal contextual languages with local maximum selectors which can contain mildly context-sensitive languages. 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. -
Polynomial time algorithm for inferring subclasses of parallel internal column contextual array languages
In [2,16] a new method of description of pictures of digitized rectangular arrays is introduced based on contextual grammars, called parallel internal contextual array grammars. In this paper, we pay our attention on parallel internal column contextual array grammars and observe that the languages generated by these grammars are not inferable from positive data only. We define two subclasses of parallel internal column contextual array languages, namely, k-uniform and strictly parallel internal column contextual languages which are incomparable and not disjoint classes and provide identification algorithms to learn these classes. Springer International Publishing AG 2017. -
Shadowing the image archive: In medias res: Inside Nalini Malani's shadow plays, Mieke Bal (2016) /
Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), Vol.7, Issue 2, pp.325-335, ISSN No: 2045-6298. -
Why Employees Need Both Recognition and Appreciation
We often use the words “recognition” and “appreciation” interchangeably, but there’s a big difference between them. The former is about giving positive feedback based on results or performance. The latter, on the other hand, is about acknowledging a person’s inherent value. This distinction matters because recognition and appreciation are given for different reasons. Even when people succeed, inevitably there will be failures and challenges along the way; depending on the project, there may not even be tangible results to point to. If you focus solely on praising positive outcomes, on recognition, you miss out on lots of opportunities to connect with and support your team members — to appreciate them. Managers should make sure they’re doing both. -
