Semi-active base isolation system has been proposed mainly to mitigate the base drift of isolated structures while in most cases, its application causes the maximum acceleration of superstructure to be increased. In this paper, designing optimal semi-active base isolation system composed of linear base isolation system with low damping and magneto-rheological (MR) damper has been studied for co...

Escherichia Coli is the ubiquitous microorganism contaminating the drinking water. This study is using granular bed filtration as a vigorous, simple and economical method to prevent the penetration of bacterial contamination, by discovering an alternative filter media from local source namely the burnt oil palm shell (BOPS). The result indicated that dual media BOPS/sand were higher reduction a...

Energy consumption and water resource in the cultivation and harvesting steps still need to be minimized for the popularization of the microalgae-based products. An efficient electro-flocculation method for harvesting Dunaliella Salina integrated with local sand has been successfully applied. Sand was effective for speeding up the processes of flocculation and sedimentation of algal flocs and t...

We study the behavior of mortars where 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% and 100% of their original natural sand was replaced by ceramic sand in a search of potential new building materials that will help to conserve natural resources and that are environmentally friendly. In this paper, the physical properties of the sands and their derived mortars, including their compressive strength, flexural strength...

Rodent baits containing systemic insecticides are potential tools to interrupt the cycle of transmission of Leishmania parasites by killing sand flies that take bloodmeals from rodents as adults. Bio-indicators that can be used in conjunction with rodent-targeted sand fly control methods also have been developed to demonstrate that the insecticide treatments are reaching the targeted life stage...

BACKGROUND Phlebotomine sand flies are blood-sucking insects transmitting Leishmania parasites. In bitten hosts, sand fly saliva elicits specific immune response and the humoral immunity was shown to reflect the intensity of sand fly exposure. Thus, anti-saliva antibodies were suggested as the potential risk marker of Leishmania transmission. In this study, we examined the long-term kinetics an...

A replicated pattern of habitat-associated morphology among different lineages may represent adaptive convergence. Deviation from the replicated (shared) pattern of diversification reflects unique (e.g. species specific) effects resulting from siteor species-specific selection, intrinsic factors (e.g. G matrix differences) or chance historical events (e.g. genetic drift). For two distantly-rela...

The genetic divergence caused by genetic drift and/or selection is suggested to affect the vectorial capacity and insecticide susceptibility of sand flies, as well as other arthropods. In the present study, cytochrome b (cyt b) gene sequences were determined in 13 species circulating in Peru to establish a basis for analysis of the genetic structure, and the intraspecific genetic diversity was ...