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High purity silica has been successfully synthesized from rice husk ash (RHA) by alkaline extraction using the reflux process followed by acidification. For this study, rice husk was burned in an electric furnace at 700°C for 5 hours to produce RHA. The RHA was refluxed using sodium hydroxide with concentrations of 1.25×10-3 M (equal to 5% NaOH) and 2.5×10-3 M (equal to 10% NaOH). The acidification process was performed using hydrochloric acid (HCl) 1 M and acetic acid (CH3COOH) 1M to produce silica gel. Then, the silica gel was heated to 120°C for 12 hours to produced silica. The characterization of silica was determined using energy-dispersive X-ray analysis, Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry, the Brunauer-Emmet-Teller method, and X-ray diffraction. The results show HCl acidification produced silica of a higher purity than that produced by CH3COOH acidification. The higher concentration of sodium hydroxide led to higher purity of silica. Based on X-ray diffraction, the silica extracted from RHA was found to be amorphous, and Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry revealed bending and stretching vibrations of Si-O and Si-O-Si. The silica extracted by HCl acidification had a surface area of 236 m 2 /g, a total pore volume of 0.54 cc/g, and an average pore diameter of 9 nm. The silica extracted by CH3COOH acidification had a surface area of 204 m 2 /g, a total pore volume of 0.43 cc/g, and an average pore diameter of 8.4 nm.

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Dengue fever is a disease spread by the DENV virus through mosquitoes. This disease is dangerous because there is no specific drug, vaccine, or antiviral against the DENV virus, insisting on drug discovery for dengue fever. RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) enzyme in DENV can be a drug target because it has an important role in the virus replication process. In this research, in silico simulations were carried out on bioflavonoid compounds, namely, Fisetin, Galangin, Hesperetin, Hesperidin, Myricetin, and Naringenin with Quercetin as control ligand. QSAR analysis showed that all ligand has the probability to be antiviral and RNA synthesis inhibitor. Docking scores showed that Myricetin, Hesperidin, and Fisetin show strong performance while Hesperidin, Hesperetin, and Naringenin showed strong performance in MM/GBSA. Only Hesperidin showed strong performance in both scorings. Further investigation by ADMET analysis was done to investigate toxicology and pharmacological properties. Our molecular dynamics study through RMSD showed that even though Quercetin does not give good scoring values in both docking score and MM/GBSA, it has robust stable interaction to RdRp. The strong performance of Hesperidin was also validated by protein-ligand contact fraction in 5 ns. Overall, we observed that Hesperidin shows good potential as a DENV-3-RdRp inhibitor in par with Quercetin, although further in vitro study should be conducted.

COVID-19 in Indonesia is considered to be entering the endemic phase, and the population is expected to live side by side with the SARS-CoV 2 viruses and their variants. In this study, procyanidin, oleic acid, methyl linoleic acid, and vitexin, four compounds from binahong leaves-tropical/subtropical plant, were examined for their interactions with the major protease (Mpro) of the SARS-CoV 2 virus. Molecular dynamics simulation shows that procyanidin and vitexin have the best docking scores of −9.132 and −8.433, respectively. Molecular dynamics simulation also shows that procyanidin and vitexin have the best Root Mean Square Displacement (RMSD) and Root Mean Square Fluctuation (RMSF) performance due to dominant hydrogen, hydrophobic, and water bridge interactions. However, further strain energy calculation obtained from ligand torsion analyses, procyanidin and vitexin do not conform as much as quercetin as ligand control even though these two ligands have good performance in terms of interaction with the target protein.

We investigate the dynamical properties of monodomain nematic liquid crystals under shear flow and magnetic fields on the basis of the Ericksen-Leslie theory. Stable and unstable states appear depending on the magnetic field and the shear rate. The trajectory of the unstable state shows tumbling motion. The phase diagram of these states is plotted as a function of the three components of the magnetic field at a constant shear rate. The phase diagram changes depending on the viscous properties of different types of nematic liquid crystals. In this nonequilibrium steady state, we calculate the correlation function of director fluctuations and the response function, and discuss the nonequilibrium fluctuations and the modified fluctuation-dissipation relation in connection with nonconservative forces due to shear flow.

The effect of a dc electric field on the response of a nematic liquid crystal under shear flow has been investigated by measuring the shear stress response to an ac electric field used as a probe. It was found that both the first-and second-order responses do not vanish at high frequencies, but have constant nonzero values. The experimental results are in good agreement with calculations based on the Ericksen-Leslie theory. The role of the Parodi relation (which is derived from the Onsager reciprocal relation) in the stress response is discussed.