Exploring the Prospects of Macadamia Nutshells for Bio-Synthetic Polymer Composites: A Review.

The global production of macadamia nuts has witnessed a significant increase, resulting in the accumulation of large quantities of discarded nutshells. These nutshells possess the properties of remarkable hardness and toughness, which are comparable to those of aluminum. Incorporating natural fillers to enhance the properties of composite materials for various applications, including light duty, structural, and semi-structural purposes, is a common practice. Given their inherent hardness and toughness, macadamia nutshells present an intriguing choice as fillers, provided that the manufacturing conditions are economically viable. With the urgent need to shift toward natural fillers and reduce reliance on synthetics, exploring macadamia nutshells as components of natural fiber composites becomes imperative. This review aims to comprehensively examine the existing body of knowledge on macadamia nutshells and their bio-synthetic polymer composites, highlighting key research findings, achievements, and identifying knowledge gaps. Furthermore, the article will outline prospective areas of focus for future research endeavors in this domain, aligning with the universal goal of minimizing synthetic materials.

A Consortium Blockchain-Based Secure and Trusted Electronic Portfolio Management Scheme.

In recent times, electronic portfolios (e-portfolios) are being increasingly used by students and lifelong learners as digital online multimedia résumés that showcase their skill sets and achievements. E-portfolios require secure, reliable, and privacy-preserving credential issuance and verification mechanisms to prove learning achievements. However, existing systems provide private institution-wide centralized solutions that primarily rely on trusted third parties to issue and verify credentials. Furthermore, they do not enable learners to own, control, and share their e-portfolio information across organizations, which increases the risk of forged and fraudulent credentials. Therefore, we propose a consortium blockchain-based e-portfolio management scheme that is decentralized, secure, and trustworthy. Smart contracts are leveraged to enable learners to completely own, publish, and manage their e-portfolios, and also enable potential employers to verify e-portfolio credentials and artifacts without relying on trusted third parties. Blockchain is used as an immutable distributed ledger that records all transactions and logs for tamper-proof trusted data provenance, accountability, and traceability. This system guarantees the authenticity and integrity of user credentials and e-portfolio data. Decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials are used for user profile identification, authentication, and authorization, whereas verifiable claims are used for e-portfolio credential proof authentication and verification. We have designed and implemented a prototype of the proposed scheme using a Quorum consortium blockchain network. Based on the evaluations, our solution is feasible, secure, and privacy-preserving. It offers excellent performance.

Design and Implementation of High-Performance ECC Processor with Unified Point Addition on Twisted Edwards Curve.

With the swift evolution of wireless technologies, the demand for the Internet of Things (IoT) security is rising immensely. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) provides an attractive solution to fulfill this demand. In recent years, Edwards curves have gained widespread acceptance in digital signatures and ECC due to their faster group operations and higher resistance against side-channel attacks (SCAs) than that of the Weierstrass form of elliptic curves. In this paper, we propose a high-speed, low-area, simple power analysis (SPA)-resistant field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation of ECC processor with unified point addition on a twisted Edwards curve, namely Edwards25519. Efficient hardware architectures for modular multiplication, modular inversion, unified point addition, and elliptic curve point multiplication (ECPM) are proposed. To reduce the computational complexity of ECPM, the ECPM scheme is designed in projective coordinates instead of affine coordinates. The proposed ECC processor performs 256-bit point multiplication over a prime field in 198,715 clock cycles and takes 1.9 ms with a throughput of 134.5 kbps, occupying only 6543 slices on Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA platform. It supports high-speed public-key generation using fewer hardware resources without compromising the security level, which is a challenging requirement for IoT security.

Improved approach for electric vehicle rapid charging station placement and sizing using Google maps and binary lightning search algorithm.

The electric vehicle (EV) is considered a premium solution to global warming and various types of pollution. Nonetheless, a key concern is the recharging of EV batteries. Therefore, this study proposes a novel approach that considers the costs of transportation loss, buildup, and substation energy loss and that incorporates harmonic power loss into optimal rapid charging station (RCS) planning. A novel optimization technique, called binary lightning search algorithm (BLSA), is proposed to solve the optimization problem. BLSA is also applied to a conventional RCS planning method. A comprehensive analysis is conducted to assess the performance of the two RCS planning methods by using the IEEE 34-bus test system as the power grid. The comparative studies show that the proposed BLSA is better than other optimization techniques. The daily total cost in RCS planning of the proposed method, including harmonic power loss, decreases by 10% compared with that of the conventional method.

General perception and self-practice of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among undergraduate pharmacy students of Bangladesh.

BACKGROUND: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is a combination of herbal medicine, traditional therapies, and mind-body intervention. This descriptive study was designed to assess the knowledge, attitudes, perception and self-use of CAM among Bangladeshi undergraduate pharmacy students. The study also evaluated their opinions about its integration into the pharmacy course curriculum. METHODS: It was a cross-sectional, questionnaire-based study conducted on 250 pharmacy students of five reputed public universities of Bangladesh. RESULTS: This study revealed that majority of the pharmacy students were using or had previously used at least one type of CAM. Among the students, 59% had used homeopathy followed by Ayurveda (30%), meditation (29%), massage (13%), Unani (9%), yoga (6%) and acupuncture (2%). Students' attitudes towards CAM were influenced by family and friends, books and journals, the internet and to a lesser degree by health practitioners. A significant (p < 0.05) number of students had knowledge about CAM. A majority of the students (90%) had positive, while 10% had negative attitudes towards CAM. Lack of knowledge and trained professionals were found to be the major interruptions to CAM use. 84.45% acknowledged the importance of knowledge about CAM for them as future healthcare practitioners. Furthermore, the majority of the students also believed that ideas and methods of CAM would be beneficial for conventional medicine. CONCLUSIONS: From the findings of the study, it can be recommended that an approach should be taken to educate the students about the fundamentals of CAM use so that it may fulfill the professional needs of our future pharmacists.

Health Risk Assessment of Pesticide Residues via Dietary Intake of Market Vegetables from Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The present study was designed to assess the health risk of pesticide residues via dietary intake of vegetables collected from four top agro-based markets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. High performance liquid chromatography with a photo diode array detector (HPLC-PDA) was used to determine six organophosphorus (chlorpyrifos, fenitrothion, parathion, ethion, acephate, fenthion), two carbamate (carbaryl and carbofuran) and one pyrethroid (cypermethrin) pesticide residues in twelve samples of three common vegetables (tomato, lady's finger and brinjal). Pesticide residues ranged from below detectable limit (<0.01) to 0.36 mg/kg. Acephate, chlorpyrifos, ethion, carbaryl and cypermethrin were detected in only one sample, while co-occurrence occurred twice for fenitrothion and parathion. Apart from chlorpyrifos in tomato and cypermethrin in brinjal, all pesticide residues exceeded the maximum residue limit (MRL). Hazard risk index (HRI) for ethion (10.12) and carbaryl (1.09) was found in lady's finger and tomato, respectively. Rest of the pesticide residues were classified as not a health risk. A continuous monitoring and strict regulation should be enforced regarding control of pesticide residues in vegetables and other food commodities.

Retraction: Adyel et al. Health Risk Assessment of Pesticide Residues via Dietary Intake of Market Vegetables from Dhaka, Bangladesh. Foods 2013, 2, 64-75.

The following article [1], doi: 10.3390/foods2010064, website: http://www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/2/1/64, has been retracted by the authors because of some major errors in broad field of pesticide residues identification and concentrations. During random cross check retention time of pesticides by HPLC did not match with the standards of detected pesticides. As a result concentration of all detected pesticides, maximum residue limits (MRLs) and health risk assessments were changed. All these errors made the article [1] as a wrong one. All authors have confirmed that the reported results produced using quite inappropriate procedures. As first author herein, I take full responsibility for the retraction of our experiments and any other errors in its contents, and would like to offer my apologies on behalf of my co-authors to the readership of Foods for any inconveniences caused by this retraction.