Computing

Aging is associated with reduced IL-2 production and T cell proliferation. Vitamin E supplementation, in aged animals and humans, increases cell division and IL-2 production by naive T cells. The immune synapse forms at the site of contact between a T cell and an ...

Colonization factor CS6 expressed by enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) is a nonfimbrial polymeric protein. A substantial proportion of ETEC strains isolated from patients in endemic settings and in people who travel to regions where ETEC is endemic are ETEC strains expressing CS6, either alone or in combination with fimbrial colonization factor CS5 or CS4. However, relatively little is known about the natural immune responses elicited against CS6 expressed by ETEC strains causing disease. We studied patients who were hospitalized with diarrhea ( n = 46) caused by CS6-expressing ETEC (ETEC expressing CS6 or CS5 plus CS6) and had a disease spectrum ranging from severe dehydration (27%) to moderate or mild dehydration (73%). Using recombinant CS6 antigen, we found that more than 90% of the patients had mucosal immune responses to CS6 expressed as immunoglobulin (IgA) antibody-secreting cells (ASC) or antibody in lymphocyte supernatant (ALS) and that about 57% responded with CS6-s...

<p>3D printing is one of the additive manufacturing technology that has gain popularity for time saving and complex design. This technology increases a degree of flexibility for potential 3D RF applications such as wearable and conformal antennas. This paper demonstrates a circular patch antenna fabricated on 3D printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) filament. The main reason of using a 3D printer is that it is accurate, easy to fabricate of a complex geometry and the ability to create new antennas that cannot be made using conventional fabrication techniques. The ABS material has a tangent loss of 0.0051 and the relative permittivity is 2.74. The thickness of the substrate is 1.25 mm. The simulation has been performed using Computer Simulation Technology (CST). The return loss from simulation software is in good match with measurement which is 12.5dB at 2.44GHz. Hence, from the results obtained, the ABS could be used as a substrate for an antenna.</p>

In this paper, a smart campus model using wireless connectivity in a large scale campus area (such as university and school) is presented. The smart campus solution provides learning process availability anywhere and anytime to assist students and teachers/lecturers. A test reconfigurable Cellular Base Station (BS) system is built using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP). This project built a testbed, called Bangi-MIMO using LabVIEW Communication System Design Suite 2.0 software and National Instruments (NI) USRP™ RIO software defined radios (SDRs). Bangi-MIMO uses the NI Software and Hardware testbed due to its simplified design flow for creating FPGA-based logic and streamlined deployment for high-performance processing. This project demonstrates a video-based smart campus for smart education.

3D printing is one of the additive manufacturing technology that has gain popularity for time saving and complex design. This technology increases a degree of flexibility for potential 3D RF applications such as wearable and conformal antennas. This paper demonstrates a circular patch antenna fabricated on 3D printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) filament. The main reason of using a 3D printer is that it is accurate, easy to fabricate of a complex geometry and the ability to create new antennas that cannot be made using conventional fabrication techniques. The ABS material has a tangent loss of 0.0051 and the relative permittivity is 2.74. The thickness of the substrate is 1.25 mm. The simulation has been performed using Computer Simulation Technology (CST). The return loss from simulation software is in good match with measurement which is 12.5dB at 2.44GHz. Hence, from the results obtained, the ABS could be used as a substrate for an antenna.

This paper presents the development of a flexible antenna made of Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and Copper (Cu) patch. The antenna comprises of Cu tape as the patch and ground plane, PDMS composite as the substrate and SMA connector as the coaxial feed with dimensions of 21.5mm patch radius, 60×60×3 mm3 substrate area and 60×60 mm2 ground plane area. In this study, we also create a PDMS+glass microsphere composite as substitute to the PDMS substrate. The PDMS+glass inclusion reduces PDMS's relative permittivity and loss tangent to 1.9 and 0.014 respectively which could enhance antenna's performance. To overcome adhesiveness issue between Cu patch and PDMS substrate, the antenna was encapsulated with another thin layer of PDMS/PDMS+glass substrate of 0.6mm thickness to ensure a constant distance from the ground plane. CST software was used to simulate antenna resonance frequency prior to the fabrication. Measurements using a Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) showed that the PDMS su...

This paper presents a newly developed flexible Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-Copper (CU) patch antenna. The circular-shaped antenna consists of a 21.28mm radial size Cu patch embedded on a PDMS square substrate. PDMS has a low loss tangent of 0.004 and a relative permittivity of 2.74 that will enhance the RF parameters of the flexible antenna. There are three layers of material used to build the antenna. The first and the third layers are made from Cu tape and function as the ground and patch respectively. Meanwhile, the sandwiched layer is the PDMS substrate. However, several limitations of the antenna were observed, including low adhesiveness between layers, which made it impossible to perform metal and dielectric depositions. Thus, a thin layer of PDMS has been built on top of a patch layer to increase the adhesive strength between the copper patch and the PDMS substrate. The paper also discussed the return loss of the antenna with and without sandwich in planar, bending in x-axis ...

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for free space optical communications is an attractive solution for forwarding the vital health information of victims from a flood-stricken area to neighboring ground base stations during rescue operations. A critical challenge to this is maintaining an acceptable signal quality between the ground base station and UAV-based free space optics relay. This is largely unattainable due to rapid UAV propeller and body movements, which result in fluctuations in the beam alignment and frequent link failures. To address this issue, linearly polarized Laguerre–Gaussian modes were leveraged for spatial mode diversity to prevent link failures over a 400 m link. Spatial mode diversity successfully improved the bit error rate by 38% to 55%. This was due to a 10% to 19% increase in the predominant mode power from spatial mode diversity. The time-varying channel matrix indicated the presence of nonlinear deterministic chaos. This opens up new possi...