Fusion of a Low-cost Electronic Nose and Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Qualitative and Quantitative Detection of Beef Adulterated with Duck

A low-cost electronic nose (E-nose) based on colorimetric sensors fused with near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was proposed as a rapid and convenient technique for detecting beef adulterated with duck. The total...

Rheological Approaches of Wheat Flour Dough Enriched with Germinated Soybean and Lentil

Germination is a convenient technique that could be used to enhance the nutritional profile of legumes. Furthermore, consumers’ increasing demand for diversification of bakery products represents an opportunity to use such germinated flours in wheat-based products. Thus, this study aimed to underline the effects of soybean germinated flour (SGF) and lentil germinated flour (LGF) on the rheological behavior of dough during different processing stages and to optimize the addition level. For this purpose, flour falling number, dough properties during mixing, extension, fermentation, and dynamic rheological characteristics were evaluated. Response surface methodology (RSM) was used for the optimization of SGF and LGF addition levels in wheat flour, optimal and control samples microstructures being also investigated through epifluorescence light microscopy (EFLM). The results revealed that increased SGF and LGF addition levels led to curve configuration ratio, visco-elastic moduli, and maximum gelatinization temperature rises, while the falling number, water absorption, dough extensibility, and baking strength decreased. The interaction between SGF and LGF significantly influenced (p < 0.05) the falling number, dough consistency after 450 s, baking strength, curve configuration ratio, viscous modulus, and maximum gelatinization temperature. The optimal sample was found to contain 5.60% SGF and 3.62% LGF added in wheat flour, with a significantly lower falling number, water absorption, tolerance to kneading, dough consistency, extensibility, and initial gelatinization temperature being observed, while dough tenacity, the maximum height of gaseous production, total CO2 volume production, the volume of the gas retained in the dough at the end of the test, visco-elastic moduli and maximum gelatinization temperatures were higher compared to the control. These results underlined the effects of SGF and LGF on wheat dough rheological properties and could be helpful for novel bakery products development.

A Review of Factors Affecting the Effectiveness of Phishing

Phishing has become the most convenient technique that hackers use nowadays to gain access to protected systems. This is because cybersecurity has evolved and low-cost systems with the least security investments will need quite advanced and sophisticated mechanisms to be able to penetrate technically. Systems currently are equipped with at least some level of security, imposed by security firms with a very high level of expertise in managing the common and well-known attacks. This decreases the possible technical attack surface. Nation-states or advanced persistent threats (APTs), organized crime, and black hats possess the finance and skills to penetrate many different systems. However, they are always in need of the most available computing resources, such as central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM), so they normally hack and hook computers into a botnet. This may allow them to perform dangerous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and perform brute force cracking algorithms, which are highly CPU intensive. They may also use the zombie or drone systems they have hacked to hide their location on the net and gain anonymity by bouncing off around them many times a minute. Phishing allows them to gain their stretch of compromised systems to increase their power. For a normal hacker without the money to invest in sophisticated techniques, exploiting the human factor, which is the weakest link to security, comes in handy. The possibility of successfully manipulating the human into releasing the security that they set up makes the life of the hacker very easy, because they do not have to try to break into the system with force, rather the owner will just open the door for them. The objective of the research is to review factors that enhance phishing and improve the probability of its success. We have discovered that hackers rely on triggering the emotional effects of their victims through their phishing attacks. We have applied the use of artificial intelligence to be able to detect the emotion associated with a phrase or sentence. Our model had a good accuracy which could be improved with the use of a larger dataset with more emotional sentiments for various phrases and sentences. Our technique may be used to check for emotional manipulation in suspicious emails to improve the confidence interval of suspected phishing emails.

Selection and Evaluation of Reference Genes for qRT-PCR in Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

As an accurate and convenient technique, the qRT-PCR is always used in the quantitative expression analysis of functional genes. Normalization of the data relies on stable reference genes. The fall armyworm Spodoptera frugiperda (J. E. Smith) is an important invasive and migratory pest that seriously threatens corn production around the world. In this paper, we selected 10 candidate reference genes (18S, AK, RPL10, RPS24, 28S, SOD, ATP, GAPDH, ACT, and a-TUB) and determined their expression levels under different conditions (different developmental stages, various tissues, mating status, hormones, diets, and temperatures). Subsequently, the stability of reference genes was evaluated by four algorithms (Delta Ct method, geNorm, NormFinder, BestKeeper). The optimal combination of reference genes for each treatment was obtained by geNorm. Finally, the comprehensive ranks were determined by the online tool RefFinder. Results showed that the most stable reference genes were SOD, RPL10, and RPS24 for developmental stages, α-TUB, RPL10, and ATP for different tissues, AK, RPL10, and 18S for mating status, 18S and AK under hormone treatment, 18S, RPL10, and SOD under diet treatment, RPL10, 18S, and RPS24 under temperature treatment. This study confirmed recent data on a few reference genes and provided an evaluation of a number of additional reference genes of S. frugiperda under various conditions.

Effect of Gold Nanoparticles Size Capped with Surfactant on the Transformation of Plasmid into Escherichia coli Bacteria

Bacterial transformation has great importance in molecular biology, as it is used for introduction of foreign genes into bacterial cells either chemical or physical ways. Using calcium chloride to prepare competent cells and heat shock is the most widely used method for bacterial transformation. This method is an efficient and convenient technique but it has in some extent low transformation efficiency. Here we report the use of nanoparticles that significantly improve the transformation efficiency up to 10 times higher than the standard heat shock method by the assistance of (˜ 15, 25 nm) SDS capped gold nanoparticles in the transformation process that leads to the formation of temporary nano-channels across the bacterial cell wall to deliver plasmids into cells. Transformation of bacteria with plasmid was examined using Β-galactosidase assay.

Two-Dimensional Crystalline Gridding Networks of Hybrid Halide Perovskite for Random Lasing

We report fabrication of large-scale homogeneous crystallization of CH3NH3PbBr3 (MAPbBr3) in the patterned substrate by a two-dimensional (2D) grating. This achieves high-quality optotelectronic structures on local sites in the micron scales and a homogeneous thin-film device in a centimeter scale, proposing a convenient technique to overcome the challenge for producing large-area thin-film devices with high quality by spin-coating. Through matching the concentration of the MAPbBr3/DMF solutions with the periods of the patterning structures, we found an optimized size of the patterning channels for a specified solution concentration (e.g., channel width of 5 μm for a concentration of 0.14 mg/mL). Such a design is also an excellent scheme for random lasing, since the crystalline periodic networks of MAPbBr3 grids are multi-crystalline constructions, and supply strong light-scattering interfaces. Using the random lasing performance, we can also justify the crystallization qualities and reveal the responsible mechanisms. This is important for the design of large-scale optoelectronic devices based on thin-film hybrid halide perovskites.

A new passive islanding detection technique for different zones in utility grid

Distributed generation (DG) has reformed the meaning of traditional generation of power from large-scale to small-scale generation. The main issue of connecting the DG to the utility grid is the detection of unintended islanding. This paper shows the impact of the islanding phenomenon in the case of grid-connected photovoltaic arrays and how to develop a convenient technique to detect this phenomenon. A passive islanding detection algorithm is proposed for all types of DGs by varying and analyzing the DC-link voltage for voltage source converter in the photovoltaic inverter. The proposed algorithm is applied on the low and medium voltage scales. Furthermore, a comparison for applying the proposed technique with resistance load on the two scales is presented. In addition, the proposed technique for anti-islanding protection is performed and compared with a lot of techniques such as underfrequency, overfrequency, and rate of change of frequency according to the detection time of islanding. The simulation results using MATLAB/ SIMULINK platform illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Submental flap reconstruction for medium sized tongue defects: technique and surgical outcome-a retrospective study

Background: Defects of the tongue has the major effect on speech and swallowing. Free flaps serve as an ideal choice for reconstruction but in developing countries, local flaps serve as an alternative in decreasing the morbidity and improving functional outcome with easy reproducibility by majority of head and neck surgeons. Surgical outcomes associated with submental flaps (SMF) used in the reconstruction of medium-sized defects of the tongue was evaluated as well a novel modification of the technique to safeguard the feeding vessel was presented.Methods: A total of 40 patients with tongue cancer who underwent SMF reconstruction from 2014 to 2017 with minimum 2 year follow up were retrospectively studied. The patient characteristics, tumor stage, nodal status, intraoperative findings, postoperative complications, locoregional recurrence, cosmetic satisfaction and functional outcomes were noted.Results: Out of 40 patients, 27 had pT2, 7 had pT3 and 6 patients had pT4 disease while 6 patients had pN1 and 2 patients had pN2 disease. Total flap necrosis, marginal skin paddle necrosis and total skin paddle loss were observed in 0, 5 and 1 patient(s), respectively. Venous congestion of the flap was the most common complication seen while no orocutaneous fistula or marginal mandibular palsy were seen. Five patients had locoregional recurrence and two patients had distant metastases. Functional and cosmetic outcome was excellent in most of patients.Conclusions: The SMF is a reliable and convenient technique that can serve as an alternative to free flaps in the reconstruction of medium-sized defects of the tongue.

Automatic program verification in Dynamic Logic with applications to smart contracts

In critical systems, failures or errors can cause catastrophes, such as deaths or considerably losses of money. Model checking provides an automated way to prove the correctness of programs' requirements. It is a convenient technique to use in systems that need reliability. Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) is a formal system designed to reason about programs. This work presents a compiler implementation from a subset of the C language and also for the Smacco model, both to the PDL language, and after that to the language of the nuXmv model checker. This implementation is linked with a Blockchain model generation system to model and reason about smart contracts.