New Antiproliferative Tricyclic Sesquiterpenoid from the Leaves of Ocimum sanctum

A new tricyclic sesquiterpenoid 2‐(hydroxymethyl)‐5,5,9‐trimethyltricyclo[7.2.0.0^3,6]undecan‐2‐ol ( 1 ), was identified from the leaves of Ocimum sanctum, and its structure was elucidated by extensive NMR and ESI‐MS analyses. Compound 1 was found to have potent antiproliferative activity against the MCF‐7 cell line.     

Stabilizing effect of diffusion in enhanced oil recovery and three-layer Hele-Shaw flows with viscosity gradient

In the presence of diffusion, stability of three-layer Hele-Shaw flows which models enhanced oil recovery processes by polymer flooding is studied for the case of variable viscosity in the middle layer. This leads to the coupling of the momentum equation and the species advection-diffusion equation the hydrodynamic stability study of which is presented in this paper. Linear stability analysis of a potentially unstable three-layer rectilinear Hele-Shaw flow is used to examine the effects of species diffusion on the stability of the flow. Using a weak formulation of the disturbance equations, upper bounds on the growth rate of individual disturbances and on the maximal growth rate over all possible disturbances are found. Analytically, it is shown that a short-wave disturbance if unstable can be stabilized by mild diffusion of species, where as an unstable long-wave disturbance can always be stabilized by strong diffusion of species. Thus, an otherwise unstable three-layer Hele-Shaw flow can be completely stabilized by a large enough diffusion, i.e., by increasing enough the magnitude of the species diffusion coefficient. The magnitude of this diffusion coefficient required to completely stabilize the flow will depend on the magnitude of interfacial viscosity jumps and the viscosity gradient of the basic viscous profile of the middle layer.     

Tricritical behavior of the R(I)-R(V) rotator phase transition in a mixture of alkanes with nanoparticles

A phenomenological theory is presented, which describes the tricritical behavior of the R(I)-R(V) rotator phase transition in the mixture of alkanes with nanoparticles. The influence of the nanoparticles on the R(I)-R(V) transition in alkanes is discussed by varying the coupling between the order parameters of the rotator phases and nanoparticle. When nanoparticle solutes are added to pure alkanes, the R(I)-R(V) transition temperature is increased. It was observed from the theoretical calculations that for a particular value of the concentration of the nanoparticles, the first order R(I)-R(V) transition becomes second order at a tricritical point. Calculations based on this model agree qualitatively with experiment.     

Physicochemical Characteristics of Styrene-Butadiene Latex- modified Mortar Composite vis-à-vis Preferential Interactions

The interaction between styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) film and the ions from C₂S and C₃S hydration of Portland cement mortar composites has been evaluated by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), and the morphology of the composites characterized with scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The specimen used was cured for 28 days. FTIR spectrum supports the interaction of SBR with cement in the composite. Compressive strength, bulk density and water absorption properties of the cured composites were tested. Addition of SBR latex in Portland cement mortar increases the compressive strength and decreases the water absorption. Bulk density study revels interface formation in the composite. The role of the interface in relation to compressive strength of the composite has been discussed. A simple Matrix System model is shown to account composition dependence of bulk density.     

Iris segmentation using variational level set method

Continuous efforts have been made to process degraded iris images for enhancement of the iris recognition performance in unconstrained situations. Recently, many researchers have focused on developing the iris segmentation techniques, which can deal with iris images in a non-cooperative environment where the probability of acquiring unideal iris images is very high due to gaze deviation, noise, blurring, and occlusion by eyelashes, eyelids, glasses, and hair. Although there have been many iris segmentation methods, most focus primarily on the accurate detection of iris images captured in a closely controlled environment. The novelty of this research effort is that we propose to apply a variational level set-based curve evolution scheme that uses a significantly larger time step to numerically solve the evolution partial differential equation (PDE) for segmentation of an unideal iris image accurately, and thereby, speeding up the curve evolution process drastically. The iris boundary represented by the variational level set may break and merge naturally during evolution, and thus, the topological changes are handled automatically. The proposed variational model is also robust against poor localization and weak iris/sclera boundaries. In order to solve the size irregularities occurring due to arbitrary shapes of the extracted iris/pupil regions, a simple method is applied based on connection of adjacent contour points. Furthermore, to reduce the noise effect, we apply a pixel-wise adaptive 2D Wiener filter. The verification and identification performance of the proposed scheme is validated on three challenging iris image datasets, namely, the ICE 2005, the WVU Unideal, and the UBIRIS Version 1.     

Absorption and circular dichroism spectra of a single crystal of K3Pr2(NO3)9

Low-temperature absorption and circular dichroism spectroscopy have been used to study single crystals of cubic potassium praseodymium double nitrate (anhydrous), K₃Pr₂(NO₃)₉. A model calculation of the optical activity has been performed to correlate the observed rotational strengths for crystal-field component-to-component transitions.     

Strong Self-Similar Fluctuations of Target Fragments in Ring-like Events in Ultra-Relativistic Nuclear Collision

The intermittent fluctuation of target evaporated particles is studied in both ring-like and jet-like events emitted in ^32 S-emulsion interactions at 200 A Ge V within the framework of multi-dimensional factorial moment methodology using the concept of the Hurst exponent. It is observed that the intermittent fluctuation in the ring-like event is self-similar, whereas in the jet-like event fluctuation is self-affine. However, study indicates that the strength of fluctuation in the ring-like events is much stronger than that in the jet-like events.     

On a Fourier Method of Embedding Domains Using an Optimal Distributed Control

We propose a domain embedding method to solve second order elliptic problems in arbitrary two-dimensional domains. This method can be easily extended to three-dimensional problems. The method is based on formulating the problem as an optimal distributed control problem inside a rectangle in which the arbitrary domain is embedded. A periodic solution of the equation under consideration is constructed easily by making use of Fourier series. Numerical results obtained for Dirichlet problems are presented. The numerical tests show a high accuracy of the proposed algorithm and the computed solutions are in very good agreement with the exact solutions.