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Bacillus thuringiensis var. kenyae (B.t.k.) is a microbial insecticide effective against lepidopteran pest species. Acute oral toxicity in rats and acute dermal toxicity, ocular irritation, skin irritation in rabbits were studied for the wettable powder formulation of B.t.k. In addition, toxicity of the wettable powder formulation was also studied in fresh water fish (Gambussia affinis). The results of these studies indicate that this wettable powder formulation of B.t.k. is nontoxic and nonirritant to rats, rabbits, and fish.

Summary In opportunistic networks (OppNets), which are characterized by intermittent end‐to‐end connections, the messages are routed in a store‐carry‐and‐forward fashion using the locally inferred knowledge about the behavior of nodes. As such, most OppNets routing protocols use social metrics that are dependent on the nodes' past information. But the participation of nodes in the message forwarding process is not guaranteed without incentivizing them because most nodes are reluctant in sharing their private resources for public uses. In this paper, some socially derived psychological attributes of a node are introduced to ensure their trustworthy participation in the message forwarding process, leading to the design of an altruism‐dependent trust‐based data forwarding mechanism for OppNets (called ATDTN). In this protocol, each node is associated with a dynamically changing altruism value representing its trust in the network, which is used to determine its status with regard to its participation in message forwarding. Through trace‐driven simulations using the ONE simulator, it is shown that ATDTN outperforms IronMan and SimBet protocols for routing in OppNets (respectively, 18% and 48% improvement), in terms of delivery ratio, end‐to‐end delay, overhead count, and average number of hops, under varying buffer size and time‐to‐live.

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Cloud Computing plays a momentous role for the speedy computation and provides resources to the user on-demand. The conventional single cloud has assorted number of confrontations and they are named as vendor lock-in, resource un-availability, latency, etc. To resolve these conflicts, multi cloud computing is utilized to provide heterogeneous services to the cloud users on demand. Task scheduling is a mechanism used to assign user requests to the cloud server. The proposed PIMTSA algorithm works well for the independent batch of tasks in the static environment. The algorithm is constituted to miniaturize the makespan of the multi cloud systems. It is designed for the batch mode offline multi cloud systems. The priority based approach works to cater the needs of the cloud user. High priority and low priority tasks are the two different priority levels defined by the user. High priority tasks are given more importance and are executed in the high speed VM with minimum completion time. But, the High priority tasks with maximum execution time are given more priority. After the execution of the high priority tasks, the low priority tasks with minimum execution time are allocated to VMs with minimum completion time in the clouds. This algorithm provides a high reliable and scalable computing service to the user with minimum time. In future this work can be extended for dynamic multi cloud environment.

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Background: Anemia is an important comorbidity in under-five children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). The data on evaluation of SAM are limited. Aim: This study was done for analysis of incidence and types of anemia prevalent in SAM children. Materials and Methods: It was a hospital-based prospective observational study conducted from July 2017 to December 2018. A total of 260 children of age <5 years and who were confirmed cases of SAM were included in the study. A detailed demography and data regarding anemia and related variables hemoglobin, mean corpuscular volume, peripheral smear, serum ferritin, Vitamin B 12 , and folic acid levels, were recorded and analyzed. The data were entered into MS-Excel sheet and analysis was performed using SPSS version 21.0. Results: About 95% of anemia prevalence was found among children with SAM and most cases were of nutritional anemia (81.79%). About 54.33% of the children had mild anemia, with 79.75% had iron deficiency as the most common cause, followed by Vitamin B 12 and folic acid deficiency. Conclusion: The high prevalence of anemia suggests that it may contribute as a causal factor for hospitalization in severely malnourished children. We recommend future measures for prevention and control of anemia, including increased coverage of nutritional supplementation and fortification programs.

The acute and persistent toxicity experiments was conducted in the Insectary of Agricultural College and Research Institute (ACandRI), Maduari, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. Two field experiments were conducted at farmer’s field at Jadhi Goundanpatti, Attur Block, Dindigul district, Tamil Nadu. The incidence of M. vitrata (Geyer) has been increasing for the last few years and the larvae bore inside the flower buds, flowers and the green pods and cause upto 40-70 per cent damage. A new biological insecticide molecule, spinetoram 12 SC was evaluated for acute toxicity on laboratory reared M. vitrata population, and persistence on pigeonpea leaves at laboratory conditions; and effect on M. vitrata on pigeonpea at field conditions during 2012-13 and 2013-2014 seasons. Acute toxicity studies revealed that LC50‘s of spinetoram on third instar larvae after 24, 48 and 72 hours after treatment were 4.30, 1.95 and 1.46 ppm respectively. In persistence studies, Persistence was upto 11 DAT for spinetoram 12 SC 27 g a.i./ha, spinosad 45 SC 78 g, emamectin benzoate 5 SG at 11 g a.i./ha, and monocrotophos 36 SL at 500 g; and 14 DAT for spinetoram 12 SC 36 and 45 g a.i./ha. There was a reduction in the mortality of M. vitrata larvae as the time increased and there was no mortality at 21 DAT. Results indicated that spinetoram 12 SC was significantly effective at 36 and 45 g a.i./ha when sprayed thrice at 15 days interval and minimized the incidence of leaf feeder, M. vitrata on pigeonpea plants.