Isolation of palm tocols using supercritical fluid chromatography

Crude palm oil contains 600 to 1000 ppm of tocols in the form of tocopherols and tocotrienols. These palm tocols have been isolated and analyzed in the past by various chromatographic techniques such as open column chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography, as well as thin-layer chromatography. Supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) has emerged as a more advanced chromatographic technique in recent years. The tocols present in palm oil are successfully isolated using SFC. Identification of these tocols is supported by various spectroscopic techniques such as 1H NMR, 13C NMR, and mass spectrometry.     

Liquid-phase Oppenauer oxidation of primary allylic and benzylic alcohols to corresponding aldehydes by solid zirconia catalysts

Hydrous zirconia and grafted zirconium 1-propoxide catalysts were found active in the Oppenauer oxidation of cinnamyl alcohol, geraniol and 4-tert-butylcyclohexanol (cis- and trans-). The most active hydrous zirconia catalysts were formed by calcining at 250–300 °C. Grafted zirconium 1-propoxide on silica gel and MCM-41 were active in the Oppenauer oxidation of geraniol with high selectivity to the desired citral product. However, over an acidic support such as AlMCM, the grafted zirconium 1-propoxide catalysed the dehydration and isomerisation of the alcohol, leading to low yield to citral. Also, furfural was found to be an efficient oxidant for the titled Oppenauer oxidation. Other solid catalysts such as γ-Al₂O₃, Na–Al₂O₃, zeolite beta and Mg/Al hydrotalcite showed only moderate catalytic activity and selectivity in the Oppenauer oxidation of geraniol. As compared to other solid catalysts, hydrous zirconia solid catalysts used in this work are active and selective towards the formation of desired carbonyl oxidation products; additionally, these solid zirconia catalysts are easy to prepare and recycle, and applicable to different alcohol substrates.

Graphical abstract

Hydrous zirconia calcined at 250–300 °C and grafted zirconium 1-propoxide solid catalysts were found to be efficient for the Oppenauer oxidation of cinnamyl alcohol, geraniol and 4-tert-butylcyclohexanol in toluene when furfural was used as the oxidant.

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Seeker: A bandwidth-based association control framework for wireless mesh networks

The rapid deployment of wireless mesh networks across universities and enterprises, and the pervasiveness of mobile devices equipped with Wi-Fi connectivity, has resulted in a scenario wherein end users have the option to choose from a multitude of access points at any given location. Moreover, with the increasing availability of rich online content, there has been a steady increase in mobile Internet traffic. Since the choice of access point that a user associates with will directly impact his performance, it is imperative that there exist an efficient association control mechanism, in order to enhance the end user’s experience. As part of this work, we propose Seeker, a novel framework for association control in wireless networks that utilizes “available bandwidth” as the design metric. The goal of Seeker is to assist the mesh network in making an intelligent decision regarding which access point a client should associate with. As part of our scheme, we implement and evaluate a passive tool to estimate available bandwidth in wireless networks. We then describe how we use this tool to implement our association control scheme, and evaluate it via extensive experiments on an outdoor testbed. Seeker takes into consideration the performance of the mesh backhaul, in addition to the client-to-AP link quality, thereby achieving significant advantages over traditional association control schemes for wireless-LANs.     

Fast Local Rerouting for Handling Transient Link Failures

Link failures are part of the day-to-day operation of a network due to many causes such as maintenance, faulty interfaces, and accidental fiber cuts. Commonly deployed link state routing protocols such as OSPF react to link failures through global link state advertisements and routing table recomputations causing significant forwarding discontinuity after a failure. Careful tuning of various parameters to accelerate routing convergence may cause instability when the majority of failures are transient. To enhance failure resiliency without jeopardizing routing stability, we propose a local rerouting based approach called failure insensitive routing. The proposed approach prepares for failures using interface-specific forwarding, and upon a failure, suppresses the link state advertisement and instead triggers local rerouting using a backwarding table. With this approach, when no more than one link failure notification is suppressed, a packet is guaranteed to be forwarded along a loop-free path to its destination if such a path exists. This paper demonstrates the feasibility, reliability, and stability of our approach     

The synthesis and characterization of lipophilic peptide-based carriers for gene delivery

Lipophilic carriers have shown great potential in improving the delivery of gene therapeutics. We have synthesized positively charged peptide-based carriers including lipoamino acids. The carriers were shown to interact with DNA by performing isothermal titration calorimetry and particle size and zeta potential experiments. An exothermic reaction resulted from the titration of carrier into DNA. The particle sizes of the carrier/DNA complexes varied over the different charge ratios from 200-800 nm. The zeta potential was negative at a low charge ratio but positive when the amount of carrier was increased. The utilisation of lipophilic carriers is a promising approach to improve the bioavailability of gene delivery.     

Intrinsic birefringence of poly(trimethylene terephthalate)

Highly oriented poly(trimethylene terephthalate) (PTT) fiber has a low birefringence that is unexpected for an aromatic polyester with a high refractive index. To explain this observation, the intrinsic birefringence Δn of PTT crystal was calculated from its bond polarizabilities to be 0.029. This Δn is almost an order of magnitude smaller than poly(ethylene terephthalate)'s value at 0.22, although both polymers have nearly identical crystal refractive indices. The small Δn is due to the arrangement of PTT's methylene groups in gauche conformations, causing the chain‐repeating unit to be tilted ～53° away from the c axis toward the basal plane. Because of the small Δn, the crystalline‐phase orientation made only a small contribution to the overall birefringence despite the fiber's high crystallinity and orientation. To understand the effect of the number of methylene groups on polyester optical anisotropy, the Δn's of a series of poly(m‐alkylene terephthalates) with m = 2–5 were compared and correlated with ψ: an angle made by the normal of the benzene ring with the crystal's axis. As ψ′ decreases, Δn of the polyesters diminishes. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 40: 1513–1520, 2002     

Dolbeault cohomology of G /( P,P )

Let G be a complex connected semi-simple Lie group, with parabolic subgroup P. Let (P,P) be its commutator subgroup. The generalized Borel-Weil theorem on flag manifolds has an analogous result on the Dolbeault cohomology . Consequently, the dimension of is either 0 or . In this paper, we show that the Dolbeault operator has closed image, and apply the Peter-Weyl theorem to show how q determines the value 0 or . For the case when P is maximal, we apply our result to compute the Dolbeault cohomology of certain examples, such as the punctured determinant bundle over the Grassmannian. Received: September 2, 1997; in final form February 9, 1998     

Texture analysis of bone marrow in knee MRI for classification of subjects with bone marrow lesion — Data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative

Visualization of bone marrow lesion (BML) can improve the diagnosis of many bone disorders that are associated with it. A quantitative approach in detecting BML could increase the accuracy and efficiency of diagnosing those bone disorders. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based texture to (a) identify slices and (b) classify subjects with and without BML. A total of 58 subjects were studied; 29 of them were affected by BML. The ages of subjects ranged from 45 to 74 years with a mean age of 59. Texture parameters were calculated for the weight-bearing region of distal femur. The parameters were then analyzed using Mann–Whitney U test and individual feature selection methods to identify potentially discriminantive parameters. Forward feature selection was applied to select features subset for classification. Classification results from eight classifiers were studied. Results show that 98 of the 147 parameters studied are statistically significantly different between the normal and affected marrows: parameters based on co-occurrence matrix are ranked highest in their separability. The classification of subjects achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.914, and the classification of slices achieved an AUC of 0.780. The results show that MRI-texture-based classification can effectively classify subjects/slices with and without BML.     

Distance metric for soft-decision decoding in non-Gaussian channels

A new distance metric for soft-decision decoding in impulsive noise is proposed. Results reveal that soft-decoders employing Euclidean distance as a decoding metric suffer two limitations: an increase in constraint-length leads to degraded performances; secondly, their performance is poorer than hard-decoders. Both limitations are ameliorated by the proposed distance metric.