Shahid Beheshti University

The therapeutic properties of curcumin, especially in cancer treatment, are well known, although its rapid metabolic degradation and poor solubility limit its clinical use. This research uses a double emulsion technique to develop a novel Dextran/Zein/ZIF-8@Curcumin nanoemulsion. Chemical and crystalline characterizations were performed with FTIR and XRD, respectively. The loading and entrapment of cargo significantly increased with adding ZIF-8 into the nanocarrier, reaching LE (%) and EE (%) values of 46.25% and 83%, respectively. Morphological studies (FE-SEM and DLS) show an efficient size range, uniform distribution, and dense spherical morphology. The surface charge measurement reveals a high negative value of -39 mV, indicating good colloidal stability. The pH stimulus-responsive release of the loaded CUR from nanoemulsion was observed through different release profiles under acidic (pH 5.4) and neutral (pH 7.4) conditions. A high release rate was identified at the acidic pH, whereas a slower controlled release occurred at the normal pH. Fitting the experimental release data into kinetic models confirmed pH sensitivity, with the Korsmeyer-Peppas model providing the best fit in both environments. These improvements show their effect in the MTT assay, increasing cellular inhibition in Hep-G2 cells and reducing cell viability to nearly 50%. Meanwhile, the controlled low release rate under normal conditions enhances the viability of normal cells and makes the nanocarrier more biocompatible.

Quantitative accident analysis methods are being used alongside qualitative ones to enhance transportation safety. One key measure to assess safety improvement actions is the Crash Modification Factor (CMF). CMFs are estimated using various methods, including case-control. This method defines two groups from data: the case group, which includes instances of crashes, and the control group, which includes instances without any reported crashes. In the case-control method, a sample is drawn from the control group to match the number of observations within the case. Consequently, the estimates from the case-control method are based on a single estimation of the logit binary model and do not utilize all the available data. To address this limitation, this research's main objective is to add robustness to estimated CMF by resampling from the control group and comparing the results with the standard, simpler methods. Additionally, we will evaluate the impact of U-turns on road safety, considering their placement and geometric characteristics.

In this research, factors other than the presence of a U-turn are referred to as intervening factors, as we aim to estimate the CMF of midsection U-turn elimination. We resampled from the control group for one thousand iterations, creating a distribution for the CMF and providing a robust estimate. Some intervening factors, such as traffic volume, are continuous; therefore, we used two different discretization methods in addition to keeping traffic volume as a continuous variable in the descriptive model.

We show that the CMF distribution is skewed and has a wide range, which makes it inaccurate to use a single value in safety analysis instead of considering the entire distribution. Furthermore, we verify the effect of stratifying algorithms based on statistical inference of robust CMFs. We also show that CMF values derived from different sets of intervening variables result in statistically significant differences, with more than half of comparison pairs showing significantly variation. The results also show that different stratification methods lead to significantly different robust CMF values.

The robust case-control, i.e. the method used in this research, is recommended for use by safety analysts. Generating a distribution of CMF values allows for a statistical comparison of obtained CMF values with the value of one, thereby indicating whether a safety action is ineffective.

DNA strands have been used recently as one of the ideal materials in molecular computation because of the fascinating properties of these molecules, like high parallelism and programmability. Several architectures are proposed in recent years for design DNA-based logic gates. These gates have improved through time in several properties like scalability, time responsiveness, output quality, and material utilization. However, as their fundamental limitations, these gates are considered to be disposable, and also, can impose high costs. The mentioned issues can decrease their practicality. Hence, in recent years, researchers have proposed several methods to address these limitations. However, the reported methods have some drawbacks, such as low restoration quality and degraded output concentration. Also, some of these gates use the dual-rail design that results in high complexity and cost. This paper introduces a design scheme to solve the disposability of a DNA-based gate with better gate-restoration and output quality compared to the addressed methods considerably. So that, in this work successful to restoration the gate up to the 90% than existing methods, and achieved the output quality about four-fold than the previous method. Moreover, it uses the single-rail method for representing the inputs and output signals that decrease the manufacturing cost of the system.