With the ever-increasing load and harsh climatic conditions, the major concern that has emerged is the rutting failure of flexible pavements, which often precedes the fatigue failure of flexible pavements. Stone Matrix Asphalt (SMA) is widely used to resist rutting. VG 40 bitumen is commonly preferred for its superior high-temperature performance. However, VG 40 is costlier and less available in many regions. This study evaluates chitin - a sustainable, bio-based polymer recovered from seafoo...

The increasing demand for sustainable and cost-effective pavement construction materials has accelerated the exploration of alternative pavement engineering solutions. Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP), produced from milled asphalt layers containing aged bitumen and aggregates, has emerged as an effective approach for conserving natural resources and minimizing environmental impacts associated with road construction. However, the aged binder presents in RAP undergoes oxidation and hardening ov...

Continuous miner technology was introduced in India in 2002 at the Anjan Hill Mine, and the coal seam, situated at shallow depth below hilly terrain, was extracted satisfactorily. This technology attracts the mining professionals across India as it has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing underground coal production with safety. Over the past two decades, 57 continuous miner packages have been deployed in 41 out of 186 underground mines across Indian coalfields, at depths ranging fro...

Underground extraction of multiple coal seams presents substantial strata control difficulties, particularly when the lower seam is mined using caving methods beneath weak or laminated interbur-den and panels developed in a staggered configuration. Interactions between adjacent seams can intensify ground pressure and trigger several geotechnical problems, such as roof and rib deterioration, coal bumps, floor heave, and pillar failure. This paper investigates a case of lower-seam ex-traction i...

The application of continuous miner technology in Indian coalfields has demonstrated satisfactory performance for coal extraction up to depths of approximately 300 m. Its deployment at depths exceeding 300 m in certain mines in India, such as Churcha RO underground mine of Coal India Limited, VK-7, Vakilpalli mine, and Shantikhani of Singareni Collieries Company Limited, has revealed significant strata control challenges, adversely affecting the stability of underground structures and the roo...

Sybil attacks are a major security threat in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). In this attack, a malicious vehicle creates multiple fake identities to mislead the network. Existing machine learning approaches analyze vehicles in isolation, failing to capture the spatial coordination characteristic of Sybil behavior. To address this, ST-GAT, a Spatio-Temporal Graph Attention Network, is proposed that models VANET snapshots as dynamic graphs for robust node-level classification. The proposed ...

This study investigates the boundary layer flow and heat transfer behavior of a special third-grade fluid over a shrinking sheet in the presence of a magnetic field and thermal radiation. The governing nonlinear partial differential equations are reduced to a system of coupled ordinary differential equations through Lie group analysis and appropriate similarity transformations. The resulting system is solved numerically using MATLAB’s boundary value solver to obtain similarity solutions. The ...

Dietary polyphenols are emerging as promising nutraceuticals for regulating postprandial hyperglycemia by modulating starch digestion and glucose absorption. This study investigated the inhibitory effects of naturally occurring polyphenols - tannic acid (TA) and gallic acid (GA)- towards potato starch digestion from the perspective of starch-polyphenol and enzyme-polyphenol interactions. Native potato starch was complexed with each polyphenol and characterized using X-ray Diffraction (XRD), F...

Polyphenols are naturally occurring plant-derived secondary metabolites that play a significant role in regulating postprandial blood glucose levels by modulating carbohydrate digestion and absorption. Among these, flavonoids and phenolic acids have been extensively studied for their ability to reduce glycemic response through multiple mechanisms, including inhibition of digestive enzymes, reduction of oxidative stress, and modulation of glucose transport pathways. Given the increasing preval...

The rate of penetration plays a significant role in governing the behaviour of piles installed in crushable granular soils, although the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. This study aims to investigate the influence of quasi-static penetration rates on the mechanical response of crushable sand using a rate-dependent constitutive modelling framework. A two-dimensional finite element approach is employed to simulate pile–soil interaction under controlled penetration velocities...

Heavy consumption of energy devoted to reliance on fossil fuel sources, which resulted in a detrimental impact on the environment and health. These challenges can be effectively addressed through a sustainable-driven approach that prioritizes the utilization of visible light as a renewable energy source with green chemistry protocols for the production of H2 and value-added chemicals. MOF-based semiconductors are versatile photocatalysts with tunable band structure, abundant active sites, imp...

The abnormal cleavage of Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP), and the subsequent aggregation of the cleaved fragments, i.e. beta-Amyloid Polypeptides (Aβ40/42), are linked to the pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)(1). Although molecular chaperones of the proteostasis network look after the fragments and consequent aggregates, they become inefficient with age and stress that result in the accumulation of Aβ40/42 peptides(2,3). Herein, by combining different techniques, we report the impact o...

Financial misconduct within banks shows a persistent tension between the formal adoption of governance mechanisms and their substantive capacity to prevent illicit practices. The study investigates whether corporate governance quality reduces financial misconduct in Indian banks, a context characterised by strong regulatory oversight, persistent concerns about misconduct, and the coexistence of private and public ownership. Following agency and fraud diamond theory, this study argues that gov...

The global pursuit towards net-zero has intensified the demand for corporate transparency, with environmental disclosure emerging as a cornerstone of accountability. While scholarly attention has traditionally gravitated towards high-emitting manufacturing sectors, the banking industry occupies a unique yet underexamined position in the climate arena. Banks, despite having negligible direct emissions, are substantially exposed to climate risk through their lending portfolios, i.e., Scope 3 em...

High-frequency (>500 MHz) solar Type II radio bursts are rare and are believed to be manifes-tations of coronal shocks produced by explosive solar surface phenomena, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CME). However, the exact cause of high-frequency Type II bursts remains debatable. The high-frequency burst events, observed from the limb, present a sce-nario where a comprehensive multi-wavelength and multi-vantage point approach could help to pinpoint the exact cause. We present...

On a few occasions, when the solar wind density near L1 drops by two orders of magnitude for a period exceeding 24 hours, the phenomenon is known as a disappearing solar wind (DSW) event. On 23 December 2022, Solar Orbiter (SolO) and STEREO-A (STA), positioned near 1 AU, detected such a DSW condition with an unusually low solar wind density (Np < 1 cm−3). Two days later, on 25 December 2022, Earth and Mars also encountered the similar DSW condition (Np ∼0.1-0.4 cm−3). In the present study, we...

Early and accurate disease diagnosis remains a critical bottleneck in modern healthcare due to scarcity of precise and sensitive detection methods [1]. Carbon quantum dots(CD) present finest sensing platforms due to their exceptional photostability, biocompatibility, and surface-engineering versatility [2,3]. Herein, unique surface-engineered biosensors are introduced; Zn-CD@Eu, CD@Tb and LysoDot for multiplexed detection of DPA,UA, EP, PPi, lysosomal-microviscosity; possessing excellent bioi...

Accurate and timely identification of breast cancer (BC) is crucial for effective clinical decision-making and treat-ment planning. Histopathological image analysis provides valu-able information for BC diagnosis, although manual assessment is labour-intensive and subject to differences between observers. In this work, a deep learning-based framework is developed to automatically classify breast histopathological images from the BreakHis dataset. The framework leverages an EfficientNet-based ...

Dental implants are widely used for oral rehabilitation, however their long-term success is often compromised by inadequate osseointegration and peri-implantitis. Ti–6Al–4V is a commonly used implant material due to its excellent mechanical properties, corrosion resistance, and biocompatibility. Nevertheless, bacterial colonization and the release of alloying ions may trigger inflammation and impair bone healing. This work aims to develop a functionalized titanium surface featuring strontium-...