This study demonstrates a beneficial effect of zinc administered during acute diarrhea on stool output, diarrheal duration, and proportion of episodes lasting more than 7 days. The effects are large enough to merit routine use of zinc during acute diarrhea in developing countries.

Parenteral use of drugs; such as opiates exert immunomodulatory effects and serve as a cofactor in the progression of HIV-1 infection, thereby potentiating HIV related neurotoxicity ultimately leading to progression of NeuroAIDS. Morphine exposure is known to induce apoptosis, down regulate cAMP response element-binding (CREB) expression and decrease in dendritic branching and spine density in cultured cells. Use of neuroprotective agent; brain derived neurotropic factor (BDNF), which protects neurons against these effects, could be of therapeutic benefit in the treatment of opiate addiction. Previous studies have shown that BDNF was not transported through the blood brain barrier (BBB) in-vivo.; and hence it is not effective in-vivo. Therefore development of a drug delivery system that can cross BBB may have significant therapeutic advantage. In the present study, we hypothesized that magnetically guided nanocarrier may provide a viable approach for targeting BDNF across the BBB. We developed a magnetic nanoparticle (MNP) based carrier bound to BDNF and evaluated its efficacy and ability to transmigrate across the BBB using an in-vitro BBB model. The end point determinations of BDNF that crossed BBB were apoptosis, CREB expression and dendritic spine density measurement. We found that transmigrated BDNF was effective in suppressing the morphine induced apoptosis, inducing CREB expression and restoring the spine density. Our results suggest that the developed nanocarrier will provide a potential therapeutic approach to treat opiate addiction, protect neurotoxicity and synaptic density degeneration.

A combined effect of doping (type and species) and size on Raman scattering from silicon (Si) nanowires (NWs) has been presented here to study interplay between quantum confinement and Fano effects. The SiNWs prepared from low doping Si wafers show only confinement effect, as evident from the asymmetry in the Raman line‐shape, irrespective of the doping type. On the other hand SiNWs prepared from wafer with high doping shows the presence of electron–phonon interaction in addition to the phonon confinement effect as revealed from the presence of asymmetry and antiresonence in the corresponding Raman spectra. This combined effect induces an extra asymmetry in the lower energy side of Raman peak for n‐type SiNWs whereas the asymmetry flips from lower energy side to the higher energy side of the Raman peak in p‐type SiNWs. Such an interplay can be represented by considering a general Fano‐Raman line‐shape equation to take care of the combined effect in SiNWs. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Quantification of the short-range order in amorphous silicon has been formulized using Raman scattering by taking into account established frameworks for studying the spectral line-shape and size dependent Raman peak shift. A theoretical line-shape function has been proposed for representing the observed Raman scattering spectrum from amorphous-Si-based on modified phonon confinement model framework. While analyzing modified phonon confinement model, the term "confinement size" used in the context of nanocrystalline Si was found analogous to the short-range order distance in a-Si thus enabling one to quantify the same using Raman scattering. Additionally, an empirical formula has been proposed using bond polarizability model for estimating the short-range order making one capable to quantify the distance of short-range order by looking at the Raman peak position alone. Both the proposals have been validated using three different data sets reported by three different research groups from a-Si samples prepared by three different methods making the analysis universal.

Size-dependent asymmetric low-frequency Raman line shapes have been observed from silicon (Si) nanostructures (NSs) due to a quantum confinement effect. The acoustic phonons in Si NSs interact with an intraband quasi-continuum to give rise to Fano interaction in the low-frequency range. The experimental asymmetric Raman line shape has been explained by developing a theoretical model that incorporates the quantum-confined phonons interacting with an intraband quasi-continuum available in Si NSs as a result of discretization of energy levels with unequal separation. We discover that a phenomenon similar to Brillouin scattering is possible at the nanoscale in the low-frequency regime and thus may be called "Fano scattering" in general. A method has been proposed to extract information about nonradiative transitions from the Fano scattering data where these nonradiative transitions are involved as an intraband quasi-continuum in modulation with discrete acoustic phonons.