The leaf extract of Chrysophyllum albidum was studied for hepatoprotective activity against rats with induced liver damage by carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). The rats were divided into five groups of eight rats per group. Animals of group A served as normal and were given only vehicle (distilled water) for 7 days. Animals of group B (positive control) were administered with vehicle on the first four days, and with the vehicle and CCl4 on the fifth, sixth and seventh day. The animals of groups C, D and E were respectively administered with 500, 1000 and 1500 mg/kg of extract & distilled water for the first four days, and with distilled water, extract and CCl4 on the last three days. Animals were subsequently anaesthetized and blood samples were collected for alanine amino transferase (ALT), aspartate amino transferase (AST), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), total bilirubin, total protein and albumin assays; liver organ was isolated and processed for histopathological studies. The results showed that the levels of AST, ALT, ALP and total bilirubin were significantly higher in rats treated with CCl4 indicating liver injury, while these parameters were reduced significantly (p < 0.05) after treatment of rats with the extract. The hepatoprotective activity of C. albidum was also supported by histopathological studies of liver tissue. The liver tissue of rats in the group treated with CCl4 showed marked centrilobular fatty degeneration and necrosis while the groups treated with plant extract showed signs of protection against this toxicant as evidenced by the absence of necrosis.

The line tension of a liquid expanded (LE)/gas (G)-phase boundary of methyl octadecanoate Langmuir monolayer (LM) at the air/water interface is investigated upon adsorption of protein or surfactant dissolved at different concentrations in the aqueous subphase. Optical tweezers experiments coupled with fluorescence microscopy were used to achieve this goal. We combined different theoretical models which view LMs as a 2d-fluid coupled with a 3d-subphase viscose barrier for better understanding of the LM properties such as viscosity and line tension. In particular, the line tension of the LE/G boundary has been investigated at nano-molar subphase concentrations and an increase in the line tension was observed. This result suggests that the presence of the aqueous subphase may affect the viscosity and the line tension of the monolayer and provides a direct test for the validity of existing theoretical models.

We analyzed the antibiotic susceptibility profile of one hundred and fifty (150) Klebsiella pneumoniae strains isolated from different clinical samples (urine= 72, high vaginal swab=12, sputum=50 and wound swab= 16) isolated from patients visiting University of Nigeria teaching hospital (UNTH) Enugu, during June 2008 – May 2009. All samples were analyzed and organism isolated using standard Microbiology techniques, antibiotic susceptibility testing was carried out as described in the manual of antibiotic susceptibility testing. Clonal relatedness of all the K. pneumoniae strains was determined by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA polymerase chain reaction (RAPD-PCR). Antibiotic susceptibility studies revealed that K. pneumoniae from wound samples were the most susceptible strains followed by HVS, sputum and urine. The overall susceptibility profile are as follows; imipenem (100%), amikacin (100%), cefoxitin (99.4%), aztreonam (98%), ceftazidime (98%), cefotaxime (96.7%), amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (96%), ciprofloxacin (96%), tobramycin (93.3%), kanamycin (90%), cefuroxime (86.7%), gentamicin (76%), sulphamethoxazole/trimethoprim (22%), chloramphenicol (15.4%) and ampicillin (5%). RAPD analysis to determine the clonal relatedness of resistance strains grouped them into two clusters (A and B) based on band patterns. All strains resistance to ampicillin and chloramphenicol showed 100% similarity in band patterns (clonal group A) while strains resistance to sulphamethoxazole/trimethoprim showed different band patterns (clonal group B). Our study revealed strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae belonging to two clonal groups based on their resistant to ampicillin, chloramphenicol and sulphamethoxazole/trimethroprim.

The present study was done to investigate the effects of pyrethroid and organophosphate on liver and kidney cells of adult Euphlyctis cyanophlyctis. During the study, the frogs were treated with two concentrations of both the pesticides. Under the effect of Permakil (pyrethroid) the liver cells of treated frog showed necrosis. The cells were clustered and they were collectively formed. The hepatic parenchyma with focal disruption of lobular architecture and focal necrosis was observed. No further significant calcification was observed. Under the effect of Permakil the histological section of kidney of treated frog showed foci of necrosis. Renal parenchyma with necrosis and tubular atrophy was observed. No significant change in the glomerulus was identified. In the case of Sandaphos (organophosphate) the multinucleated, melanomacrophages were observed in histological section of liver of treated frogs. Malignant neoplasmic cells were also found. Hepatic tissue showed focal disruption of lobular architecture. Focal necrosis was identified. Under the effect of Sandaphos hypertrophy and the ruptured cells were identified in the kidney sections of treated frogs. Atrophy, necrosis and inflammation were observed in nephrons.

The roots of Burkea africana and Combretum adenogonium were separately subjected to extraction by macerating using n-hexane, chloroform, methanol and distilled water solvents in an increasing order of polarity indices. Extracts obtained in the extraction process were later screened for the presence of secondary metabolites by methods employed by Mbatchou et al. (2010) which revealed the presence of tannins, anthraquinones, glycosides, alkaloids, saponins, phenolics, amino acids, steroids, terpenoids and flavonoids in the root samples of both B. africana and C. adenogonium. This was an indication that roots of the two plants contained ingredients which have pharmacological effects. Of the four solvents used to extract ingredients from the roots of the two plants, methanol solvent yielded the highest weighed extracts. Methanol and distilled water extracts showed the presence of 80% and above of the tested classes of secondary metabolites. These results indicated the optimal extractable abilities of both methanol and distilled water solvents which were also evident in the antimicrobial test of the root extracts on Salmonella typhi. Methanol extracts of the roots of B. africana demonstrated growth inhibitory effects with mean values of 8.00±0.00mm, 10.33±1.33mm, 12.33±0.33mm and 13.66±0.00mm at concentrations of 500, 1,000, 1,500 and10, 000?g/ml respectively. Distilled water extracts of the same part of plant demonstrated growth inhibitory effects with mean values of 7.33±0.60mm, 9.66±0.33mm, 12.00±1.00mm and 13.00±0.33 at concentrations of 500, 1,000, 1,500 and10, 000?g/ml respectively. Methanol extracts of the roots of C. adenogonium demonstrated growth inhibitory effects with mean values of 5.66±0.37mm, 6.33±0.33mm, 7.33±0.32mm and 11.33±0.32mm at concentrations of 500, 1,000, 1,500 and10, 000?g/ml respectively. Distilled water extracts of the same part of plant demonstrated growth inhibitory effects with mean values of 5.00±1.00mm, 6.33±0.33mm, 8.00±0.32mm and 10.66±0.32mm at concentrations of 500, 1,000, 1,500 and10, 000 ?g/ml respectively. Ciprofloxacin antibiotic drug, used as positive control in the research also demonstrated growth inhibition on the bacterial isolate. The optimal extractable abilities demonstrated by the methanol and distilled water solvents supported their use to isolate antibacterial compounds from the roots of both plants by column chromatographic method. The presence of the fore mentioned classes of secondary metabolites in the root extracts, and the growth inhibitory effects shown on Salmonella typhi revealed that both B. africana and C. adenogonium contained antibacterial compounds which can treat typhoid fever in humans, and can also cure other diseases which affect elephants that feed on parts of the two plants.

The present paper deals with the detailed pharmacognostic evaluation of the crude drug, Caesalpinia bonduc. Morphoanatomy of the leaves of C. bonduc was studied with the aim to aid pharmacognostic and taxonomic species identification using light and confocal microscopy, WHO recommended physico-chemical determinations and authentic phytochemical procedures. Different extracts were prepared using the soxhlation method and these were used for phytochemical analysis and to determine various pharmacognostic parameters. The various procedures were performed following the WHO guidelines. Various pharmacognostic parameters were reported following the WHO guidelines. The physico-chemical and morphological parameters presented in this paper may be proposed as parameters to establish the authenticity of C. bonduc and can possibly help to differentiate the drug from its other species.

A study was undertaken to document the colony morphology (surface, shape, consistency, elevation and colour) in Candida strains. Samples were collected from symptomatic female patients in some cities in Nigeria. Microscopicallydetected (direct mount wet preparation) Candida – positive samples (n=585) were used. The samples made up of high vaginal swabs (83%), endocervical swabs (14%) and urine (3%) were plated on Sabouraud Glucose Agar and incubated at 370C for 48 hours. The surface and consistency types were determined by touching each colony with an inoculation loop (4mm). The cultures yielded 595 isolates of Candida, made up of seven species. Three colony surfaces were identified – Wet (W), Dry Shiny (DS) and Dry Powdery (DP) - with the DS having the highest distribution (65.1%) and DP, the least distribution (12.7%). Also, there were three distinguishable colony consistencies – Creamy (C), Dry Hard (DH), and Dry Grannular (DG) - with distribution of 87, 12 and 1%, respectively. Most of the species showed raised colonies. There were species - specific and intra- specific variations in surface and consistency. Statistically (p? 0.05), some of the colony features were species-dependent while others were not. The results provide an all-encompassing information on the colony morphological diversity in Candida species which is valuable in the understanding of the biology of Candida.

Atmospheric CO2 has a long-term, exponential increase in concentration as well as an annual oscillation. Observations reported here indicate that the intensity of the geomagnetic field (F) has annual trends similar to CO2’s yearly component. The annual amplitudes of both F and CO2 are dependent on latitude, and the increases in amplitude as a function of latitude are essentially identical for F and CO2. The interannual differences in F’s amplitude also show a high correlation with the solar cycle. The analysis presented in this study suggests an association between the intensity of the geomagnetic field and atmospheric CO2 levels, either directly or through interaction with a common modulator.

Both the effective phase velocity and the group velocity of the surface elementary excitations (SEEs), namely quantized capillary waves or ripplons are shown in dependence on the wavenumber k. For comparison, the dispersion relation for a free 4He–atom is also shown. The existence possibilities of three non-dispersive Zakharenko waves are shown. The effective masses of the SEEs are also drawn in dependence on the wavenumber k. Quantum systems in which the nondispersive Zakharenko waves can be found are also discussed

Kinetics of calcite scale deposition under the influence of magnetic field is reported in this article. The reduced deposition rate is believed to depend on many parameters. In this part of study the effect of flow rate, residence time of flowing fluid and scale forming ions under magnetic field and material of construction of tube were considered. Dynamic pressure build up in the flow loop indicated narrowing of effective tube diameter due to scale deposition. It is evident that longer residence time of scaling ions within magnetic field has higher scale inhibition effect. Fluid flow rate and magnetic hysteresis also affect the scale deposition rate. Scale formed under optimum magnetic coverage is exclusively aragonite scales whereas at weaker magnetic coverage yielded predominantly calcite scales. Comparison of flow study under identical condition shows that inhibition effect is better in electrically conductive copper tube than non-conductive plastic tube. The study concludes that magnetic scale inhibition is a feasible solution for calcite scaling problem. Magnetic flux density, magnetic permeability of the tube’s material, exposure time, charge density of the dipoles and flow rates are some of the essential parameters need optimization based on the application.

Geomagnetically induced current (GIC) affect the normal operation of technological systems and are manifestations at ground level of space weather. The maximum GIC values are proxy to the maximum value of time derivatives of the horizontal field (dH/dt). 264 substorms events were obtained from IMAGE magnetometer data from Northern Europe, using Dst to determine the substorm events of varying strengths (from -90nT up to -1800nT) from 1992-2007, and were statistically analysed. In this study we found the maximum time derivatives of the horizontal magnetic field to be statistically significant in October at auroral and subauroral regions. Seasonal variations are also seen, Autumn being more geomagnetically active than other seasons. Our result shows a high correlation of 0.886 and 0.854 in auroral and subauroral regions between the max dH/dt and max AE index. The test of correlation between dH/dt and measured ionospheric response (AE) shows a close relationship between dH/dt and geomagnetic disturbance, and which could improve our space weather prediction systems.

Analysis of 118 years of data relating to tropical storms highlights that there is a significant change in frequency of tropical storms with rising Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) environment over the North Indian Ocean (NIO) on annual, seasonal and sub-seasonal scales. Decadal variability study pointed out that time-series of annual frequency of tropical storms and SST datasets reveal conspicuous turning points in the years, 1970 and 1966 respectively, which coincide with the starting of global warming period. Further there is a significant decreasing trend in the former, while a clear cut increasing tendency is observed in the SSTs field and both trends are statistically significant at 1% level over the NIO. The relationship between them is inverse and the coefficient of correlation between them is -0.52. Next, tropical severe cyclones, which appear maximum in the month of November over NIO have a direct relationship with rising SSTs and a coefficient of correlation between them is to a tune of 0.89 for the above study period. Secondly in the context of recent global warming scenario, datasets (1981-2008) relating to frequency of the tropical systems over the BOB are analyzed in Pre and Post-monsoon seasons; it is observed that there is a clear cut decreasing trend. To find out the possible reason for the decreasing trend, the authors also examined the possible relationships among frequency of the tropical systems, SSTs over the BOB, Madden & Julian Oscillation (MJO) and Southern Oscillation (SO) Indices separately. Total number of systems over the BOB is highly influenced by above SSTs only in the Pre-monsoon season, while they are significantly correlated with MJO and SO Indices in the Post-monsoon season. Above relationships are very robust in the month of November due to high frequency of tropical cyclones in every year. Finally there is a contrasting difference in the frequency of total number of tropical cyclones in the years of El Nino and La Nina episodes

This paper is devoted to study the approximate solution of hypersingular and singular integral equations by means of chebyshev polynomial of second kind. Some examples are presented to illustrate the method.

Whenever light passes from one medium to another, a small portion is always reflected back into the first material. Also, fibres in plantain pseudo-stems are natural fibres, which suffer from thinning, non-uniformity of fibre circumference, knots and other imperfections along their lengths. These are in addition to the plantain fibre characteristics of dispersion, bandwidth, attenuation, equilibrium mode distribution and numerical aperture. Using Snell’s law, refractive index and velocity of light, the critical angle of light in plantain fibres was estimated. The results showed that the critical angle was approximately 35.26o and Fresnel reflection was approximately 0.072. It is also known that if the rays of light propagated in the plantain fibres are less than the critical angle of the plantain fibre core, the rays of light are confined to the core. It is this property of light rays confinement in fibre core that lend themselves to applications in optical communication systems. Consequently, the optical properties derivable from plantain fibre critical angle determination, and with proper modifications and manufacture, could find applications in pulse propagation, optical interconnections in microelectronics, optical computing, photonic switching, analogue optical computing, artificial intelligence and associated memory operations in neural networks. It is, strongly recommended that further research be carried out on the optical properties of plantain pseudo-stems fibres that would enable us derive more benefits in their application, than is currently the case.

We aimed at studying the propagation of Love waves through the crustal layer of earth in the presence of thin surface impedance. The Wiener-Hopf technique and Fourier transform have been used to find the reflected and scattered Love waves. Numerical computation has been done and analysis of results shows the approximate behavior of reflected and scattered waves. It has been observed that both the material and the thickness of the impeding surface affect the propagation of incident waves. The scattered waves have a logarithmic singularity at the tip of scatterer and behave as a decaying cylindrical wave at distant points, dying out at long distances

In this paper we obtain theorems concerning Lp? space with p=1, 0 < p < 1 and 0 < p < 1 2 . We will redefine some theorem of Telyakovskii (1973) and Corollary of Marzuq (1975) as well as Corollary of Ram (1977).

A nanocomposite of poly(N-vinylcarbazole)(PNVC) and platinum (Pt) was prepared by simple solid state polymerization of N-vinylcarbazole (NVC) in the presence of platinic acid (H2PtCl6) at elevated temperature. The mechanism of the polymerization process was proposed. The nanocomposites, the extracted homopolymer and the Pt nanoparticles were characterized by FTIR, XPS, TEM and TGA. FTIR analysis confirmed the polymerization of NVC to PNVC in the presence of Pt ions. XPS studies revealed that the Pt nanoparticles formed contained both Pt(0) and Pt(II). The presence of polaron in the H2PtCl6 doped NVC during polymerization was confirmed by ESR. TEM analysis revealed the cementation of the Pt nanoparticles on the PNVC. Thermo gravimetric stability studies showed that PNVC-Pt nanocomposite is thermally stable than the homopolymer.

A model for predicting rain rate for Nigeria climate is presented. In the formulation of the proposed model, rainfall intensities data were collected from Nigeria meteorological center and LAUTECH. The comparison results show that, in all the models considered, rain rate is underestimated for low availability range of 1.0%. The proposed model therefore, shows a significant improvement over the entire existing models considered in terms of prediction error and RMS values.

Radioactivity concentrations and dose rates of 40K, 226Ra and 228Ra in fishes as internal dose rates from major rivers in Sagamu, Ogun State Southwest of Nigeria had been determined by gamma spectrometry using NaI (TI) detector coupled with a pre-amplifier base to a multiple channel analyzer (MCA). 15 samples of fishes were collected from three rivers: Majowopa, Ibu and Eruwuru. Tilapia zilli had the highest mean concentrations of 40K and 226Ra of values 89.13 ± 6.83Bq/kg and 3.06 ± 0.26Bq/kg respectively. The highest mean concentration of 228Ra was found in Papyrocranus afer with value 3.12 ± 0.29Bq/kg. The highest dose rates of 40K and 226Ra were obtained form Tilapia zilli with values of 0.00801mGy/yr and 5.36 x 10-7mGy/yr respectively. For 228Ra, Papyrocranus afer had the highest dose rate of value 3.50 x 10-13mGy/yr. The average dose rate of the radionuclides in the fishes was calculated to be 1.74 x 10-3mGy/yr which is below the 0.4 mGy/yr limit recommended by NCRP (1991) as reported by Blaylock et, al (1993) which has no negative radiological health implication to the aquatic animals.