Ginger has an abundant amount of biological compounds. Both fresh and dried gingers have a beneficial effect. It has popularity as spices all over the world. However, for the last century ginger, and ginger extracts have been acquired an interest in their medicinal properties. Ginger is being used for the medical care and avoidance of diseases in the past. Now it is considered a medicinal plant. Ginger has been showed to contribute as anti-carcinogenic, anti-diabetic, anti-tumor activity. It is also effective against pregnancy-induced nausea and vomiting and has proved for the treatment of motion sickness and arthritis. Numerous studies have taken place by an animal models for confirmation of ginger pharmacological activity. In this review, we focused on the ginger and its constituents and therapeutic activity of ginger extracts.

Aspergillus flavus AUMC 10331 and A. oryzae AUMC 10329 were used in consortium culture for the production of xylanase enzyme from rice husk using solid-state fermentation technique. The xylanase purification was performed using ion exchange resin IR-120 EP and Sephadex G-75. The purified xylanase showed a total activity of 293.0 IU and a specific activity of 350.96 IU/mg protein and the enzyme was purified to 8.1 fold with 2.7% recovery. The purified xylanase was active over a wide spectrum of pHs from 3-10 and the highest activity was obtained at pH 7.0 followed by 74% of xylanase activity at pH 9.5. At pH 9.5, the xylanase exhibited its optimal activity at 70 °C indicating that the xylanase was alkaliphilic and thermophilic xylanase. The xylanase activity was greatly increased by FeSO4 and CuSO4 up to 332.15% and 194.1% respectively and slightly inhibited by CoCl2. Km and Vmax for the purified xylanase were determined at pH 9.5 and 70 °C for birchwood xylan as 22.13 mg/ml and 135.13 IU/min respectively. The crude and purified enzyme showed high specificity towards the xylans tested. The highest activity was observed for oat spelt xylan; it was three times the activity of birchwood xylan for the crude enzyme and more than six times for the purified enzyme. The specific activity of the xylanase towards birchwood xylan was lower than oat spelt xylan and avicell. The purified xylanase did not act towards carboxymethyl cellulose compared with the crude one.

Eighteen advanced wheat lines were evaluated for irrigated optimum and late sown conditions in different environmental regions of Bangladesh. The experiments were conducted at Bangladesh Wheat and Maize Research Institute (BWMRI), Dinajpur, Regional Wheat Research Centre, Joydebpur and Regional Agricultural Research Station, Jashore, Bangladesh. The advanced wheat lines along with two check varieties BARI Gom 21 and BARI Gom 32 were evaluated in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications under irrigated timely sown (ITS) and irrigated late sown (ILS) conditions. The objective of the study was to find out the heat-tolerant wheat lines for the future breeding programs to develop heattolerant wheat varieties. Significant variations were observed among tested genotypes on phenology, yield, and yield contributing characters at different seeding conditions in different locations. The highest thousand-grain weight (TGW) (60.9 g) was achieved in BAW 1328 in ITS conditions at Dinajpur followed by BAW 1333 (60.4 g) and BAW 1333 (58 g) in the same location and same seeding time. The lowest TGW (23 g) was obtained in the ILS condition at Jashore. The highest grain yield (GY) (6312 kg ha-1) was obtained in BARI Gom 32 at Dinajpur in the ITS condition. The lowest grain yield, 1501 kg ha-1 was obtained in BAW 1331 at Jashore under ILS condition. Regarding environmental locations, Dinajpur was better placed for wheat production. Among the tested advanced lines, BAW 1322, BAW 1334, BAW 1337, and BAW 1338 showed better performance under ILS condition and these advanced lines were selected for the future breeding programs to develop heat-tolerant varieties. The selected advanced lines had a high yield with better tolerance to Bipolaris leaf blight (BpLB), leaf blast and resistance to leaf rust diseases.

The study was carried out from November to March, 2013-2014 in two agricultural research centers/stations. Sixteen genotypes along with two check varieties BARI Gom 21 and BARI Gom 26 were evaluated in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications under irrigated timely sown (ITS) and irrigated late sown heat stress (ILS) conditions to find out the heat-tolerant wheat lines for future breeding program to develop heat-tolerant wheat varieties. Significant variations were observed among tested genotypes on phenology, yield and yield contributing characters at late sown heat stress condition (ILS) in both locations. The higher yield across location and genotype was recorded in ITS condition (4224 kg ha-1) than ILS condition (3113 kg ha-1). Regarding environmental locations, Dinajpur was better placed for wheat production. Among the tested genotypes, Gen-3, gen-8, Gen-10, Gen-11, and Gen-16 showed better performance under ILS condition and these genotypes were selected for the future breeding programs to develop heat-tolerant varieties. The selected genotypes had high yield, bold and plump grains with better tolerance to Bipolaris leaf blight (BpLB) and resistance to leaf rust diseases.

Accurate electricity load estimation is an important issue for the operation of the power system and it is one of the essential works of future power planning for large cities. Every power prediction model has its own benefits and drawbacks and has its particular application range. Researchers categorized the load energy forecasting as Short-Term Load Forecasting (STLF), Medium-Term Load Forecasting (MTLF) and Long-Term Load Forecasting (LTLF), which entirely depends on time in which estimation is scheduled. As electricity load forecasting can be seen as a machine learning problem, so a number of automated methodologies and models are included in the literature review. In this work, we aim to explore and implement state of art machine learning techniques like Polynomial Regression, Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in order to predict the short term and medium-term load consumption for the historical data accurately. For this study, hourly load data of an Urban 11 KV Feeder was collected from the 220 KV grid station. Weather parameters like temperature, pressure and humidity data for the particular region were taken from Lahore Meteorological Department. Data were divided into several datasets (daily, weekly and monthly) to achieve short term and medium-term electrical load prediction using aforementioned techniques. Input parameters used in this study were temperature (both dry and wet), humidity and pressure while predicted hourly load demand was used as output. Final results tables show that the performance of the SVR predictor is much better than other techniques both in short term and medium load forecasting.

Eleven advanced lines of spring wheat along with check varieties BARI Gom 21, BARI Gom 26 and BARI Gom 32 were evaluated at Bangladesh Wheat and Maize Research Institute (BWMRI), Dinajpur; Regional Wheat Research Center (RWRC) Gazipur; Regional Agricultural Research Station (RARS), Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), Jashore; RWRC, Rajshahi and RARS, BARI, Jamalpur in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with three replications during, November, 2017 to March, 2018. The trial was conducted under irrigated timely sown (ITS) and irrigated late sown (ILS) conditions. The genotypes were evaluated for yield and yield components, heading, maturity, disease reaction, etc. The effect of sowing time, location and genotype and their different interaction levels were significant for most of the traits. Wheat yield was significantly reduced in ILS condition as compared to the ITS condition. Regarding location, Dinajpur was better place for wheat production than other tested places. The mean value of the thousand-grain weight (TGW) of all genotypes was higher as compared to all check varieties. Out of eleven genotypes, ten produced a higher yield than BARI Gom 26, five produced a higher yield than BARI Gom 32. All the eleven genotypes were out yielded of the check variety BARI Gom 21. The highest yield (4099kg ha-1) was obtained in Dinajpur and the lowest yield (3108 kg ha-1) was obtained in Jamalpur. Genotypes, BAW 1290, BAW 1293, BAW 1317, BAW 1318 showed comparatively better performance in ILS condition representing that these advanced wheat lines were less affected by terminal heat stress under late sowing condition.

Height measurement considered as an important parameter for health monitoring. The increasing demand for telemedicine services requires a robust and affordable height measurement system. In addition, the system should have the ability to interact with a remote destination. Unfortunately, existing height measurement tools are incompatible with telemedicine services. In this paper, a low-cost autonomous height measurement system has been proposed. Moreover, the system utilizes an ultrasonic sensor to measure the human height and processes the sensor’s data through a Micro Controller Unit (MCU). Finally, the MCU communicates with the remote terminal through a Bluetooth module. A special wearable prototype has been developed to deploy the hardware for real-life applications. The experiment results demonstrate that the results obtained by the proposed system are reliable with a mean error rate of 0.02%.

In this paper, a novel priority-based framework for semi-autonomous multi agent-based search and rescue mechanism is proposed. The framework proposes a novel multi-layered architecture consisting of multi-agents capable of target detection, role allocation, and connectivity based on access to resources. Four different operations have been proposed namely mapping, searching, coordination and information fusion. Three different roles for the agents have been proposed namely mapper, searcher, and coordinator where mapper agent contributes in developing local maps, searcher agent explores the local map for target detection and coordinator agent is responsible for cluster coordination and communication among inter-cluster, intra-cluster and information fusion module. A novel concept of cell priority index (CPI) has been proposed to determine the level of damages and zone prioritization for a rescue operation. Two different novel indices namely role suitability index and role weighting index have been proposed for efficient allocation of roles among agents. The ad-hoc network model of the proposed system is evaluated for performance metrics under different mobility mechanisms in different propagation environments to suggest possible mobility approaches to be adopted for effective search and rescue mechanisms.