Mycotoxins are poisonous compounds produced by certain species of fungi found in contaminated grain. There are five major groups of mycotoxins which can occur in grains: Aflatoxin, fumonisin, ...deoxynivalenol (DON), ochratoxin (OT), and zearalenone (ZEN). Their occurrence may start in the field, harvesting, handling, storage, and processing. DON, ZEN, and fumonisins may start to cause the grains at the field/or pre-harvest while aflatoxin and OT are mostly occurring during storage due to improper postharvest handling. Most of the grains susceptible to mycotoxins such as maize, peanut/groundnut, sorghum, millet, wheat, and rice were reviewed. The main postharvest factors for the cause of grain mycotoxin contamination are mechanical injury, insect infestation, time of harvesting, drying method, types of storage structure and conditions, handling and processing. Temperature, moisture and humidity are the main factors for the growth and development of mycotoxins. Developing countries especially African are more vulnerable for the causes due to lack of well-established infrastructures, regulations, and standards. Postharvest mitigation strategies are an important and cost-effective method to control the cause. The core grain postharvest interventions used as mitigating strategies of mycotoxin includes rapid and proper drying, postharvest insect control, proper transportation and packaging, good storage conditions, use of natural and chemical agents and irradiation. Grain processing such as sorting, cleaning, milling, fermentation, baking, roasting, flaking, nixtamalization and extrusion cooking are also reported to reduce mycotoxin concentration. In general, system approach to good manufacturing practice and HACCP based implementation are important to mitigate mycotoxins in grains.
•Postharvest mycotoxins in grains occurred due to improper postharvest handling.•Good postharvest management are cost effective mycotoxin mitigation strategies.•Timely harvesting, rapid drying and good storage are among mitigation strategies.•Processing, irradiation and chemicals controls are also good mitigation methods.•Good infrastructures, regulations and standards are required to control mycotoxins.
Preeclampsia (PE) is a serious condition that threatens pregnancy with severe sequelae on both the mother and infant. Early detection of PE will lead to favorable outcomes, and using readily ...available markers like hematological indices is an attractive choice. Examine the diagnostic utility of hematological indices in pregnant women to predict preeclampsia and its severity. In a retrospective case–control study that included 252 women, all had their complete blood picture evaluated during their first and third trimesters as part of their outpatient antenatal care during their pregnancy. They were also divided into 3 groups: healthy pregnant women (control), non-severe PE, and severe PE, each involving 84 women. The changes in platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR) between 1st and 3rd trimesters showed an excellent ability to differentiate between severe PE and control (area under the curve = 0.954, cutoff ≤ ‐5.45%) and a good ability to differentiate between severe PE and non-severe PE (area under the curve = 0.841, cutoff ≤ ‐7.89%). Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio showed a good to excellent ability to differentiate between severe PE and non-severe PE compared to control in the first and third trimesters and the percentage change between them. Changes in neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio and PLR strongly predict preeclampsia and its severity since they offer more predictive values than measuring NLP and PLR at different stages of pregnancy individually.
Aging is a natural phenomenon that occurs in all living organisms. In humans, aging is associated with lowered overall functioning and increased mortality out of the risk for various age-related ...diseases. Hence, researchers are pushed to find effective natural interventions that can promote healthy aging and extend lifespan. Royal jelly (RJ) is a natural product that is fed to bee queens throughout their entire life. Thanks to RJ, bee queens enjoy an excellent reproductive function and lengthened lifespan compared with bee workers, despite the fact that they have the same genome. This review aimed to investigate the effect of RJ and/or its components on lifespan/healthspan in various species by evaluating the most relevant studies. Moreover, we briefly discussed the positive effects of RJ on health maintenance and age-related disorders in humans. Whenever possible, we explored the metabolic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms through which RJ can modulate age-related mechanisms to extend lifespan. RJ and its ingredients-proteins and their derivatives e.g., royalactin; lipids e.g., 10-hydroxydecenoic acid; and vitamins e.g., pantothenic acid-improved healthspan and extended lifespan in worker honeybees
,
flies,
crickets, silkworms,
nematodes, and mice. The longevity effect was attained via various mechanisms: downregulation of insulin-like growth factors and targeting of rapamycin, upregulation of the epidermal growth factor signaling, dietary restriction, and enhancement of antioxidative capacity. RJ and its protein and lipid ingredients have the potential to extend lifespan in various creatures and prevent senescence of human tissues in cell cultures. These findings pave the way to inventing specific RJ anti-aging drugs. However, much work is needed to understand the effect of RJ interactions with microbiome, diet, activity level, gender, and other genetic variation factors that affect healthspan and longevity.
This study suggests a novel progress in the change journey toward sustainability by empirically investigating the mediation role of employee engagement with environmental initiatives between green ...HRM practices and individual green behavior. Further, this study invoked the classical theory of person-organization-fit to examine the role of certain personality traits in moderating the associations between HRM practices and employee engagement with environmental initiatives. A quantitative research method with a purposeful-sampling technique was used to reach 376 employees who work at four and five-star hotels operating in Jordan. The study provides original findings indicating that employee engagement partially mediates the association between green HRM practices and individual green behavior. Additionally, this study emphasizes the importance of organization-person interaction in fostering employee engagement with environmental initiatives.
International trends in traditional diabetes complications (cardiovascular, renal, peripheral vascular, ophthalmic, hepatic or neurological diseases) and mortality rates are poorly characterised. An ...earlier review of studies published up to 2015 demonstrated that most data come from a dozen high-income countries (HICs) in North America, Europe or the Asia–Pacific region and that, in these countries at least, rates of acute glycaemic fluctuations needing medical attention and amputations, myocardial infarction and mortality were all declining over the period. Here, we provide an updated review of published literature on trends in type 2 diabetes complications and mortality in adults since 2015. We also discuss issues related to data collection, analysis and reporting that have influenced global trends in type 2 diabetes and its complications. We found that most data on trends in type 2 diabetes, its complications and mortality come from a small number of HICs with comprehensive surveillance systems, though at least some low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from Africa and Latin America are represented in this review. The published data suggest that HICs have experienced declines in cardiovascular complication rates and all-cause mortality in people with diabetes. In parallel, cardiovascular complications and mortality rates in people with diabetes have increased over time in LMICs. However, caution is warranted in interpreting trends from LMICs due to extremely sparse data or data that are not comparable across countries. We noted that approaches to case ascertainment and definitions of complications and mortality (numerators) and type 2 diabetes (the denominator) vary widely and influence the interpretation of international data. We offer four key recommendations to more rigorously document trends in rates of type 2 diabetes complications and mortality, over time and worldwide: (1) increasing investments in data collection systems; (2) standardising case definitions and approaches to ascertainment; (3) strengthening analytical capacity; and (4) developing and implementing structured guidelines for reporting of data.
Graphical abstract
The changing face of diabetes complications Gregg, Edward W; Sattar, Naveed; Ali, Mohammed K
The lancet. Diabetes & endocrinology,
06/2016, Volume:
4, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The global increase in type 2 diabetes prevalence is well documented, but international trends in complications of type 2 diabetes are less clear. The available data suggest large reductions in ...classic complications of type 2 diabetes in high-income countries over the past 20 years, predominantly reductions in myocardial infarction, stroke, amputations, and mortality. These trends might be accompanied by less obvious, but still important, changes in the character of morbidity in people with diabetes. In the USA, for example, substantial reductions in macrovascular complications in adults aged 65 years or older mean that a large proportion of total complications now occur among adults aged 45-64 years instead, rates of renal disease could persist more than other complications, and obesity-related type 2 diabetes could have increasing effect in youth and adults under 45 years of age. Additionally, the combination of decreasing mortality and increasing diabetes prevalence has increased the overall mean years lived with diabetes and could lead to a diversification of diabetes morbidity, including continued high rates of renal disease, ageing-related disability, and cancers. Unfortunately, data on trends in diabetes-related complications are limited to only about a dozen countries, most of which are high income, leaving the changing character for countries of low and middle income ambiguous.
A path planning and control approach of a non-holonomic three-wheeled mobile robot (WMR) for online navigation in road following and roundabout environments is presented in this paper. We proposed a ...complete navigation algorithm that enables the WMR to autonomously navigate on the road with various scenarios. With such an algorithm, the robot is able to localize itself within the road environment and find a collision free-path starting from a pre-defined start position to a goal point using a novel approach called laser simulator (LS). The path planning and roundabout detection are determined based on LS and sensor fusion of a laser range finder, camera, and odometry measurements. The sensor fusion algorithm is used to remove noises and uncertainties from sensors' data and provide optimum measurements for path planning. A robot motion control scheme is used for the purpose of controlling the kinematic parameters of WMR using a resolved acceleration control coupled with an active force control for rejecting the disturbances. Experimental results show the capability of the proposed algorithms to robustly drive the robot on the road following and roundabout environments.
The popularity of online social networks has created massive social communication among their users and this leads to a huge amount of user-generated communication data. In recent years, ...Cyberbullying has grown into a major problem with the growth of online communication and social media. Cyberbullying has been recognized recently as a serious national health issue among online social network users and developing an efficient detection model holds tremendous practical significance. In this paper, we have proposed set of unique features derived from Twitter; network, activity, user, and tweet content, based on these feature, we developed a supervised machine learning solution for detecting cyberbullying in the Twitter. An evaluation demonstrates that our developed detection model based on our proposed features, achieved results with an area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve of 0.943 and an f-measure of 0.936. These results indicate that the proposed model based on these features provides a feasible solution to detecting Cyberbullying in online communication environments. Finally, we compare result obtained using our proposed features with the result obtained from two baseline features. The comparison outcomes show the significance of the proposed features.
•We propose a set of unique features based on tweets information to detect cyberbullying.•Machine learning model based on the proposed features is developed.•The developed model is effective in detecting cyberbullying in the Twitter network.
The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates billions of smart devices that can communicate with one another with minimal human intervention. IoT is one of the fastest developing fields in the history of ...computing, with an estimated 50 billion devices by the end of 2020. However, the crosscutting nature of IoT systems and the multidisciplinary components involved in the deployment of such systems have introduced new security challenges. Implementing security measures, such as encryption, authentication, access control, network and application security for IoT devices and their inherent vulnerabilities is ineffective. Therefore, existing security methods should be enhanced to effectively secure the IoT ecosystem. Machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) have advanced considerably over the last few years, and machine intelligence has transitioned from laboratory novelty to practical machinery in several important applications. Consequently, ML/DL methods are important in transforming the security of IoT systems from merely facilitating secure communication between devices to security-based intelligence systems. The goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive survey of ML methods and recent advances in DL methods that can be used to develop enhanced security methods for IoT systems. IoT security threats that are related to inherent or newly introduced threats are presented, and various potential IoT system attack surfaces and the possible threats related to each surface are discussed. We then thoroughly review ML/DL methods for IoT security and present the opportunities, advantages and shortcomings of each method. We discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in applying ML/DL to IoT security. These opportunities and challenges can serve as potential future research directions.
•A screen printable metal-metal composite ink was developed.•A strain sensor was fabricated on a flexible and stretchable substrate.•Electro-mechanical response of sensor towards varying elongations ...was investigated.•Strain sensor with wavy line configuration performs better than the straight line.
A novel printed strain sensor, based on metal-metal composite, was developed for applications in the biomedical and civil infrastructural industries. The sensor was fabricated by screen printing a silver nanowire (Ag NW)/silver (Ag) flake composite on a flexible and stretchable thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) substrate in two design configurations: straight line and wavy line. The capability of the fabricated strain sensors was investigated by studying its electro-mechanical response towards varying elongations. Average resistance changes of 104.8%, 177.3% and 238.9%, over 100 cycles, and 46.8%, 141.4% and 243.6%, over 200 cycles, were obtained for the sensors with the straight and wavy line configurations at elongations of 1 mm, 2 mm and 3 mm, respectively. A sensitivity of 21% and 33%, in resistance change for every 1% strain, was calculated for the printed strain sensors with the straight and wavy line configurations, respectively. The results obtained thus demonstrate the feasibility of employing conventional addictive screen printing process for the development of strain sensors for applications that require a flexible and stretchable form factor.
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