Sharif Digital Repository

Aside from the many services that soil provides, it also stores water and makes it available to crops, which is critical for food security. However, the necessity of further studies for overcoming the existing gap in relation to the role of soil in the water, energy, and food nexus system has been preoccupying the experts and specialists around the world for some time. In this sense, the balance between many key ecosystem components based on the Soil, water, energy, and food (SWEF) nexus framework is one of the key characteristics of holistic and accommodative watershed management systems. To the best of our knowledge, the watershed scale is used as a planning unit for the first time in the... 

Ciprofloxacin is a widely used antibiotic that is also a persistent contamination that causes major health and environmental risks. This study investigated the electrochemical removal of ciprofloxacin using a boron-doped diamond anode and a non-supportive electrode to get an accurate understanding of the anode's performance. The effects of current density, initial ciprofloxacin concentration, time, pH, and electrolyte concentration on the removal efficiency of ciprofloxacin were investigated. Additionally, ANN and LSSVM models were used to predict ciprofloxacin removal. The results showed that the BDD anode was effective in removing ciprofloxacin from water, with complete removal of 10 mg... 

The ODYSSEY design methodology is an object-oriented design methodology which models a system in terms of its constituting objects and their corresponding method calls. Some of these method calls are implemented in hardware functional units, while others are simply executed by a general-purpose processor. There is a communication overhead because functional units must communicate with each other and with the processor core. In this paper we utilize the custom instructions capability of Nios II processor to enhance the performance of our ASIP. Since these instructions are in the processor itself, there will be no communication overhead for using them. We analyze the performance of the... 

Motivation: Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) is important and challenging problem of computational biology. Most of the existing methods can only provide a short length multiple alignments in an acceptable time. Nevertheless, when the researchers confront the genome size in the multiple alignments, the process has required a huge processing space/time. Accordingly, using the method that can align genome size rapidly and precisely has a great effect, especially on the analysis of the very long alignments. Herein, we have proposed an efficient method, called FAME, which vertically divides sequences from the places that they have common areas; then they are arranged in consecutive order. Then... 

Introduction: The study of life and the detection of gene functions is an important issue in biological science. Multiple sequences alignment methods measure the similarity of DNA sequences. Nonetheless, when the size of genome sequences is increased, we encounter with the lack of memory and increasing the run time. Therefore, a fast method with a suitable accuracy for genome alignment has a significant impact on the analysis of long sequences. Methods: We introduce a new method in which, it first divides each sequence into short sequences. Then, it uses evolutionary algorithms to align the sequences. Results: The proposed method has been evaluated in seven datasets with different number of... 

Veronica genus (Plantaginaceae) is broadly distributed in different habitats. In this study, the inhibitory activity of free soluble and conjugated phenolic extracts of Veronica persica on key enzymes associated to type 2 diabetes (α-glucosidase and α-amylase) and hypertension (angiotensin I converting enzyme, ACE) was assessed, as well as their antioxidant power. Our results showed that both the extracts inhibited α-amylase, α-glucosidase and ACE in a dose-dependent manner. In particular, free phenolic extract significantly (P < 0.05) inhibited α-glucosidase (IC50 532.97 μg/mL), whereas conjugated phenolic extract significantly (P < 0.05) inhibited a-amylase (IC50 489.73 μg/mL) and ACE... 

The novel idea of the Hydromagnetic Micropump and Flow Controller (HMFC) is used in this paper to construct a laboratory setup capable of bidirectional pumping and controlling the flow in microtubes. A laboratory setup, which contains no moving parts, is integrated with a pressure-driven flow setup to make the presented HMFC device. The device operation is based on controllable motion of magnetic particles, added to the carrier fluid, caused by the magnetic field, produced by solenoids located just next to the microtube. The magnitude of these forces is proportional to the strength and gradient of magnetic field which, in turn, is related to the electrical current and arrangement of the... 

The bus network design problem is an important problem in transportation planning. It is the problem of determining a network of bus lines which best achieves a predetermined objective. This may be done with or without the presence of rapid transit lines. This study is devoted to solving this problem using genetic algorithm. The fitness function is defined as the benefit to the users of the bus network less the cost of the operator of the network, which is to be maximized subject to constraints that properly distribute bus routes over the study area. Objective function calculation depends on the basic data of the city and its bus lines and does not need traffic assignment results. So, it is... 

A new algorithm named random particle optimization algorithm (RPOA) for local path planning problem of mobile robots in dynamic and unknown environments is proposed. The new algorithm inspired from bacterial foraging technique is based on particles which are randomly distributed around a robot. These particles search the optimal path toward the target position while avoiding the moving obstacles by getting help from the robot's sensors. The criterion of optimal path selection relies on the particles distance to target and Gaussian cost function assign to detected obstacles. Then, a high level decision making strategy will decide to select best mobile robot path among the proceeded particles,... 

Flow mediated dilation (FMD) is a non-invasive method for endothelial function assessment providing an index extracted from ultrasonic B-mode images. Although utilized in the research community, the difficulty of its application and high cost of ultrasonic devices prevent it from being widely used in clinical settings. In this study we show that substituting the ultrasonic device with more easily handled and low cost photoplethysmography and electrocardiography is possible. We introduce new indices based on the photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) and show that they are correlated with the ultrasound-based FMD Index. To this end, a conventional ultrasound FMD test was carried... 

Buoyancy-induced fluid flow, which is responsible for most forms of macro-segregation and channel-type segregates in castings, is not directly controllable. If left uncontrolled, natural convection will contribute to non-uniform distribution of alloy constituents and grain structure during solidification of a casting. Non-uniform distribution of chemical composition and physical structure in an alloy casting can significantly affect the reliability of mechanical components. Therefore, materials with acceptable defects can be produced only by trial-and-error and their acceptability is determined by costly inspections. We present a novel technique to control the formation of chimneys and... 

Needle insertion simulation and planning systems (SPSs) will play an important role in diminishing inappropriate insertions into soft tissues and resultant complications. Difficulties in SPS development are due in large part to the computational requirements of the extensive calculations in finite element (FE) models of tissue. For clinical feasibility, the computational speed of SPSs must be improved. At the same time, a realistic model of tissue properties that reflects large and velocity-dependent deformations must be employed. The purpose of this study is to address the aforementioned difficulties by presenting a cost-effective SPS platform for needle insertions into the liver. The study... 

This paper is an endeavor to picture excessive population threats to the resiliency of a large metropolitan area. By employing an existing evolutionary model of traffic flow on a small expository network, we show how chaotic situations occur at certain demand and supply parameter values and try to address the questions: How may one determine city population capacity for its transportation network, what happens if the city passes this limit, or how may one return the city to a stable situation when it runs into unstable or chaotic situations. Under certain assumptions, the paper designs a simulation experiment to revisit the phenomenon discovered by Greenshields in 1934, but for a... 

Recently, some studies on the fair allocation of indivisible goods notice a connection between a purely combinatorial problem called the Rainbow Cycle problem and a fairness notion known as EFX: assuming that the rainbow cycle number for parameter d(i.e. R(d)) is O(dβ logγ d), we can find a (1 − ϵ)-EFX allocation with Oϵ(nβ+1 β logβ+1 γ n) number of discarded goods. The best upper bound on R(d) is improved in a series of works to O(d4), O(d2+o(1)), and finally to O(d2). Also, via a simple observation, we have R(d) ∈ Ω(d). In this paper, we introduce another problem in extremal combinatorics. For a parameter ℓ, we define the rainbow path degree and denote it by H(ℓ). We show that any lower... 

The novel coumarin-3-carboxamides (=2-oxo-2H-1-benzopyran-3-carboxamides) 5a-5g containing lipophilic spacers were synthesized through the Ugi-four-component reaction (Scheme 1). The reactions of aromatic aldehydes 1, 4,4'-oxybis[benzenamine] or 4,4'-methylenebis[benzenamine] as diamine 2, coumarin-3-carboxylic acid (=2-oxo-2H-benzopyran-3-carboxylic acid; 3), and alkyl isocyanides 4 lead to the desired substituted coumarin-3-carboxamides 5a-5g at room temperature with high bond-forming efficiency. These novel coumarin derivatives exhibit brilliant fluorescence at 544 nm in CHCl 3  

Polyphenol-based materials have attracted wide-spread interest from academic and industrial communities because of their unique structure and physicochemical properties. Tannic acid (TA), as a polyphenolic phytochemical with high level of galloyl groups, interacts with various substances (proteins, polysaccharides, and metals) through several modes including hydrogen bonding, hydrophobic and electrostatic interactions. Such hybrid or hybrid-like systems allow the preparation of various advanced materials with promising applications in medicine. In this review, we highlight the recent advances of TA-incorporated materials in medical applications including drug delivery, tissue engineering,... 

This paper studies the problem of secure and resilient distributed cooperative control for autonomous vehicles under false data injection attacks on the vehicular communication net-work. We propose a model-based scheme to detect unknown data falsification attacks using the predicted traj ectory in a distributed nonlinear model predictive control problem. First, as a local agent, each autonomous vehicle stores the information received from its neighboring vehicles to clarify anomalies. The recorded data is investigated over a temporal moving observation window which contains different prediction sequences of the distributed nonlinear model predictive control problem in the previous times. In...