Anxiolytic Effect and Improved Sleep Quality in Individuals Taking Lippia citriodora Extract

The current fast-moving, hectic lifestyle has increased the number of individuals worldwide with difficulties in managing stress, which in turn is also affecting their sleep quality. Therefore, the objective of the current study was to assess a natural plant-based dietary supplement comprised of lemon verbena (Lippia citriodora) extract, purified in phenylpropanoids, in alleviating stress and improving quality of sleep. A double-blind, placebo-controlled study was conducted for 8 weeks, followed by a 4-week washout period. Both validated questionnaires and functional tests were performed during the study, whereas questionnaires were used after the washout. As a result, the group taking the lemon verbena extract significantly reduced their perception of stress after 8 weeks, which was corroborated by a significant decrease in cortisol levels. After the washout period, the subjects reported to present even lower stress levels, due to the lasting effect of the ingredient. As for sleep quality, the subjects taking the supplement reported feeling better rested, with a stronger effect observed in women. Sleep tracking using a wearable device revealed that the supplement users improved their times in the deeper stages of sleep, specifically their percentage of time in deep sleep and REM. In conclusion, lemon verbena extract purified in phenylpropanoids is revealed as a natural solution to help individuals to improve their stress and sleep quality.

Worming the Circular Economy for Biowaste and Plastics: Hermetia illucens, Tenebrio Molitor and Zophobas morio

The negative impact of the modern-day lifestyle on the environment is aggravated during the COVID-19 pandemic through the increased use of single-use plastics from food takeaways to medical supplies. Similarly, the closure of food outlets and disrupted supply chains have also resulted in significant food wastage. As the pandemic rages on, the aggravation of increased waste becomes an increasingly urgent problem that threatens the biodiversity, ecosystems, and human health worldwide through pollution. While there are existing methods to deal with the organic and plastic waste, many of the solutions also cause additional problems. Increasingly proposed as a natural solution to man-made unnatural problems, there are insect solutions for dealing with the artificial and organic waste products towards a circular economy, making the use of natural insect solutions commercially sustainable. This review discusses the findings and how some of these insects, particularly the Hermetia illucens, Tenebrio molitor, and Zophobas morio, can play an increasing important role in food and plastics, with a focus on the latter.

T-DSES: A Blockchain-powered Trusted Decentralized Service Eco-System

Existing Web service eco-systems are typically managed in a centralized manner, which hinders their further development due to inherent disadvantages such as trust issues, interest disputes, value separation and so on. The recently emerged blockchains provide distributed ledgers that enable parties who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states, which provide a natural solution. Based on the INKchain, which is an open-source permissioned blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric, this paper proposes Trusted Decentralized Service Eco-System (T-DSES). T-DSES achieves not only fundamental functionalities of conventional systems, but also offers mechanisms to stimulate participants to bring trustworthiness to the whole system. The trustworthiness of T-DSES is realized by three strategies: reliable information of services and mashups, reliable records of participants’ rights, and reliable measurement of participants’ contributions. A customized token “SToken” is created to act as the media of value circulation. In this paper, the overall framework and detailed design of T-DSES are presented, especially including how to utilize Kubernetes to establish a cloud-based environment. A tailored Web front-end ensures the usability of operations. Over real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, analyses and experiments have been conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the presented approach.

A Review on Terrazyme as Pavement Enhancement Approach

During construction, Engineers often face difficulty related to the stability of soil with or on which the structure is being constructed as the unstable soil cannot not withstand the loads imposed over it. Since the layers of pavements distributes the load evenly over the subgrade, the design of pavement layer is very much dependent on the strength of the subgrade soil over which they are to be laid. So, there is an urgent need to improve the properties of subgrade. An effort to treat the earth with an enzyme that proves very much advantageous for engineering purposes. It is a natural solution which is generated by the enzymatic action on fruits, edibles, saccharine and water by means of fermentation. In this research, a bio-enzyme labelled as Terrazyme is being utilized that significantly improves the properties of soil. Terrazyme being cost effective, efficient, non-toxic, non-inflammable increases the stability by accelerating the enzymatic reactions between the argil and cations(organic) and accelerates the cationic interchange operation to lower down the diffused double layer thickness. The paper deals with all the information about terrazyme including its working mechanism and different properties of soil. It has been investigated that on incrementing the dosage of terrazyme in test sample, notable improvement in the value of UCS and CBR value of soil is observed.

Protective Effect of Pomegranate Peel Powder Against Gastric Ulcer in Rats

Gastric ulcer is a serious health problem that affects more than 10% of the World's population. Aspirin is the most common drug causes gastric ulcer also, most of the ulcer drugs have harmful side effects, so studies have focused on finding an alternative natural solution. This work provides a natural solution to protect the gut against ulcers, especially aspirin, by using a diet supplemented with pomegranate peel powder in rats. Levels of active components in pomegranate peel powder were detected using the certified methods. For the biological evaluation, 21 male rats (weight, 140-170 g) were used in three groups, group (1) is a control, group (2) ulcer group, and group(3) (ulcer supplemented group). The duration of the evaluation was 4 weeks. Gastric ulcer was produced by aspirin water suspension (500 mg/kg rat weight). The gene expression of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and tumor necrosis factor (TNF-α) were determined by RT-PCR. Pomegranate peel powder (10 % w/w) reduced the gastric ulcer area and ulcer index, gastric juice volume, and acidity. Pomegranate powder recovers gastric mucus content and gastric tissue at the histological level. Plasma nitric oxide production was raised while plasma TNF-α level was diminutive by pomegranate peel powder. The gastric mucosal TNF-α and COX-2 gene expression were significantly (p≤ 0.05) down-regulated (2.4 and 12.5 fold-change, respectively) using the pomegranate peel powder. This study introduces pomegranate peel powder (10%) as a protective food supplement against gastric ulcers.

On the global Hadamard parametrix in QFT and the signed squared geodesic distance defined in domains larger than convex normal neighbourhoods

We consider the global Hadamard condition and the notion of Hadamard parametrix whose use is pervasive in algebraic QFT in curved spacetime (see references in the main text). We point out the existence of a technical problem in the literature concerning well-definedness of the global Hadamard parametrix in normal neighbourhoods of Cauchy surfaces. We discuss in particular the definition of the (signed) geodesic distance $$\sigma $$ σ and related structures in an open neighbourhood of the diagonal of $$M\times M$$ M × M larger than $$U\times U$$ U × U , for a normal convex neighbourhood U, where (M, g) is a Riemannian or Lorentzian (smooth Hausdorff paracompact) manifold. We eventually propose a quite natural solution which slightly changes the original definition by Kay and Wald and relies upon some non-trivial consequences of the paracompactness property. The proposed re-formulation is in agreement with Radzikowski’s microlocal version of the Hadamard condition.

Write, Attend and Spell

Text entry on a smartwatch is challenging due to its small form factor. Handwriting recognition using the built-in sensors of the watch (motion sensors, microphones, etc.) provides an efficient and natural solution to deal with this issue. However, prior works mainly focus on individual letter recognition rather than word recognition. Therefore, they need users to pause between adjacent letters for segmentation, which is counter-intuitive and significantly decreases the input speed. In this paper, we present 'Write, Attend and Spell' (WriteAS), a word-level text-entry system which enables free-style handwriting recognition using the motion signals of the smartwatch. First, we design a multimodal convolutional neural network (CNN) to abstract motion features across modalities. After that, a stacked dilated convolutional network with an encoder-decoder network is applied to get around letter segmentation and output words in an end-to-end way. More importantly, we leverage a multi-task sequence learning method to enable handwriting recognition in a streaming way. We construct the first sequence-to-sequence handwriting dataset using smartwatch. WriteAS can yield 9.3% character error rate (CER) on 250 words for new users and 3.8% CER for words unseen in the training set. In addition, WriteAS can handle various writing conditions very well. Given the promising performance, we envision that WriteAS can be a fast and accurate input tool for smartwatch.

On sequential traversal of sets

The problem of sequential traversal of megapolises with precedence conditions is investigated; this problem is oriented to mechanical engineering — CNC metal cutting machines. There is the following setting singularity: the terminal component of additive criterion contains the dependence on the starting point. This singularity leads to the fact that the natural solution procedure based on dynamic programming must be applied individually for every starting point. The investigation goal consists in the construction of an optimizing algorithm for determining a complex including a route (a variant of megapolis numbering), a trajectory, and a starting point. The proposed algorithm realizes an idea of directed enumeration of starting points. This algorithm is realized as a program for PC; computations for model examples are made.

A day at the races

Two major barriers to conducting user studies are the costs involved in recruiting participants and researcher time in performing studies. Typical solutions are to study convenience samples or design studies that can be deployed on crowd-sourcing platforms. Both solutions have benefits but also drawbacks. Even in cases where these approaches make sense, it is still reasonable to ask whether we are using our resources – participants’ and our time – efficiently and whether we can do better. Typically user studies compare randomly-assigned experimental conditions, such that a uniform number of opportunities are assigned to each condition. This sampling approach, as has been demonstrated in clinical trials, is sub-optimal. The goal of many Information Retrieval (IR) user studies is to determine which strategy (e.g., behaviour or system) performs the best. In such a setup, it is not wise to waste participant and researcher time and money on conditions that are obviously inferior. In this work we explore whether Best Arm Identification (BAI) algorithms provide a natural solution to this problem. BAI methods are a class of Multi-armed Bandits (MABs) where the only goal is to output a recommended arm and the algorithms are evaluated by the average payoff of the recommended arm. Using three datasets associated with previously published IR-related user studies and a series of simulations, we test the extent to which the cost required to run user studies can be reduced by employing BAI methods. Our results suggest that some BAI instances (racing algorithms) are promising devices to reduce the cost of user studies. One of the racing algorithms studied, Hoeffding, holds particular promise. This algorithm offered consistent savings across both the real and simulated data sets and only extremely rarely returned a result inconsistent with the result of the full trial. We believe the results can have an important impact on the way research is performed in this field. The results show that the conditions assigned to participants could be dynamically changed, automatically, to make efficient use of participant and experimenter time.