Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad&nbsp;(IIT Palakkad or IIT PKD) is a public autonomous&nbsp;engineering&nbsp;and&nbsp;research&nbsp;institute located in&nbsp;Palakkad,&nbsp;Kerala. It was&nbsp;one of the five new&nbsp;IITs&nbsp;proposed in the&nbsp;2014 Union budget of India. The campus was inaugurated on 3 August 2015. The institute has 94 faculty, 978 students, and 63 non-teaching staffs.

IT Palakkad currently offers four-year Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) and two years MS programmes in 8 different engineering disciplines including&nbsp;Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Civil among others.

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IIT Palakkad

Einstein-Maxwell theory coupled to a dilaton is known to give rise to extremal solutions with hyperscaling violation. We study the behaviour of these solutions in the presence of a small magnetic field. We find that in a region of parameter space the magnetic field is relevant in the infra-red and completely changes the behaviour of the solution which now flows to an AdS 2 × R 2 attractor. As a result there is an extensive ground state entropy and the entanglement entropy of a sufficiently big region on the boundary grows like the volume. In particular, this happens for values of parameters at which the purely electric theory has an entanglement entropy growing with the area, A, like A log(A) which is believed to be a characteristic feature of a Fermi surface. Some other thermodynamic properties are also analysed and a more detailed characterisation of the entanglement entropy is also carried out in the presence of a magnetic field. Other regions of parameter space not described by the AdS 2 × R 2 end point are also discussed. © 2013 SISSA, Trieste, Italy.

World University root node

Department of Physics

Fulltext

Journal of High Energy Physics

Entangled dilaton dyons

The administration of therapeutic factor VIII (FVIII) to patients with haemophilia A induces the development of inhibitory anti-FVIII IgG in a substantial number of patients. For an antigen-specific immune response to develop, antigen-presenting cells (APCs) need to mature and procure appropriate co-stimulatory signals to T cells at the time of presentation of the endocytosed antigen. The nature of the danger signals that induce APC maturation, thus initiating the anti-FVIII immune response, are yet ill-characterized. Contradictory reports on a direct effect of therapeutic FVIII on APC maturation have been released. Here, we investigated whether FVIII directly triggers Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) signalling. The capacity of human recombinant FVIII to promote the maturation of a mouse bone marrow macrophage cell line (BMA) was investigated by flow cytometry. In parallel, the triggering of TLR1.2 or TLR2.6-expressing HEK293 cells by FVIII was analysed following transfection of the cells with a reporter construct for NFκB activity. In contrast, to zymosan, a known TLR2 agonist, human recombinant FVIII did not induce the maturation of mouse BMA macrophages, as analysed by the levels of expression of CD80, CD86, CD40 and I-Ab at the cell surface. Furthermore, incubation of FVIII with cells expressing TLR2 paired with TLR1 or TLR6, failed to activate NFκB, whereas NKκB activity was triggered in the presence of zymosan. Our results confirm that FVIII alone is insufficient to trigger the maturation of APCs that is required to initiate an immune response. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Biological Sciences and Engineering

Haemophilia

Therapeutic factor VIII does not trigger TLR1.2 and TLR2.6 signalling in vitro

Recent reports in mice demonstrate that basophils function as antigen presenting cells (APC). They express MHC class II and co-stimulatory molecules CD80 and CD86, capture and present soluble antigens or IgE-antigen complexes and polarize Th2 responses. Therefore, we explored whether human circulating basophils possess the features of professional APC. We found that unlike dendritic cells (DC) and monocytes, steady-state circulating human basophils did not express HLA-DR and co-stimulatory molecules CD80 and CD86. Basophils remained negative for these molecules following stimulation with soluble Asp f 1, one of the allergens of Aspergillus fumigatus; Bet v 1, the major birch allergen; TLR2-ligand or even upon IgE cross-linking. Unlike DC, Asp f 1-pulsed basophils did not promote Th2 responses as analyzed by the secretion of IL-4 in the basophil-CD4 + T cell co-culture. Together, these results demonstrate the inability of circulating human basophils to function as professional APC.

Scientific Reports

Circulating human basophils lack the features of professional antigen presenting cells

Hedgehog (HH) signaling is a significant regulator of cell fate decisions during embryogenesis, development, and perpetuation of various disease conditions. Testing whether pathogen-specific HH signaling promotes unique innate recognition of intracellular bacteria, we demonstrate that among diverse Gram-positive or Gram-negative microbes, Mycobacterium bovis BCG, a vaccine strain, elicits a robust activation of Sonic HH (SHH) signaling in macrophages. Interestingly, sustained tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) secretion by macrophages was essential for robust SHH activation, as TNF-α-/- macrophages exhibited compromised ability to activate SHH signaling. Neutralization of TNF-α or blockade of TNF-α receptor signaling significantly reduced the infection-induced SHH signaling activation both in vitro and in vivo. Intriguingly, activated SHH signaling downregulated M. bovis BCG-mediated Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2) signaling events to regulate a battery of genes associated with divergent functions of M1/M2 macrophages. Genome-wide expression profiling as well as conventional gain-of-function or loss of- function analysis showed that SHH signaling-responsive microRNA 31 (miR-31) and miR-150 target MyD88, an adaptor protein of TLR2 signaling, thus leading to suppression of TLR2 responses. SHH signaling signatures could be detected in vivo in tuberculosis patients and M. bovis BCG-challenged mice. Collectively, these investigations identify SHH signaling to be what we believe is one of the significant regulators of host-pathogen interactions. © 2013, American Society for Microbiology.

Molecular and Cellular Biology

Sonic hedgehog-dependent induction of MicroRNA 31 and MicroRNA 150 regulates mycobacterium bovis BCG-driven toll-like receptor 2 signaling

Corrigendum: Circulating human basophils lack the features of professional antigen presenting cells (Scientific Reports (2013) 3, (1188) DOI: 10.1038/srep01188)

We introduce a weaker notion of central subspace called almost central subspace, and we study Banach spaces that belong to the class (GC), introduced by Veselý (1997). In particular, we prove that if Y is an almost central subspace of a Banach space X such that Y is in the class (GC), then Y is a central subspace of X . We also prove that if Y is a semi M -ideal in a Banach space X such that Y is an almost central subspace of X, then Y is an M -ideal in X. Certain stability results for quotient spaces, injective tensor product spaces, and polyhedral direct sums of Banach spaces are also derived. © 2013 C. R. Jayanarayanan.

Department of Mathematics

Journal of Function Spaces and Applications

Intersection properties of balls in Banach spaces

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

Rhotics: new data and perspectives

Articulating five liquids: A single speaker ultrasound study of Malayalam

Two-dimensional incompressible, viscous fluid flow around a rotationally oscillating circular cylinder is studied numerically by using a recently developed higher order compact finite difference scheme (HOC) at Reynolds number Re = 500. The stream function vorticity formulation of Navier Stokes equations in cylindrical polar coordinates are considered as the governing equations. Different values of peak rotation rate $\alpha$m and forced oscillation frequency fe are considered. The simulated results are in a good agreement both qualitatively and quantitatively with the previously published results. {\textcopyright} (2013) Trans Tech Publications, Switzerland.

Applied Mechanics and Materials

A transform free higher order compact finite difference scheme for simulating the flow behind a rotationally oscillating circular cylinder at reynolds number 500

Links of a transportation network are subject to several forms of frequent non-severe disruptions 1 like traffic incidents, snowing, flooding, road-space reallocations, road-space infiltrations, 2 infrastructural failures, etc. Disregarding the cause, they may be viewed as multiple simultaneous 3 disruptions on links' capacities. Though the disruption or failure of a single link is widely 4 studied, the area of multiple simultaneous disruptions on transportation networks is under-5 researched. Also, most of the existing studies assume probability distributions of capacity 6 disruptions to be known. The objective of this paper is to study multiple simultaneous 7 disruptions and to establish a consequent critical state. We assign different levels on links' 8 capacities and search for probability distributions over those levels that would result in a critical 9 state. The critical state is modeled as the one which effects in poor network performance and 10 comparably equal expected path costs, that makes it hard for a user to identify the better path (i.e. 11 it induces maximum indifference on expected utilities of alternative paths). We formulate the 12 critical state link disruption problem as a minimax optimization problem and solve it using a 13 coevolutionary algorithm. We evaluate network performance in terms of expected system travel 14 time. The formulation is exemplified by finding expected system travel time at the critical state 15 on test networks. It is also shown how the performance at critical state can be used to measure 16 network robustness.