A split cassette attachment for recording all the reflections on the upper level Weissenberg photographs either as elongated or as contracted spots

A split-cassette arrangement has been incorporated in the Weissenberg camera for recording all reflections on the upper level photographs either as elongated or as contracted spots. This arrangement employs two semicylindrical cassettes which are separated by a horizontal plane. These half-cassettes are translated in opposite directions. A suitable split-cassette attachment has been constructed for the Unicam Weissenberg goniometer S-35 The subject of 'displaced-film' Weissenberg photograph is also discussed.

Classification of road damage due to earthquakes

Earthquakes cause massive road damage which in turn causes adverse effects on the society. Previous studies have quantified the damage caused to residential and commercial buildings; however, not many studies have been conducted to quantify road damage caused by earthquakes. In this study, an attempt has been made to propose a new scale to classify and quantify the road damage due to earthquakes based on the data collected from major earthquakes in the past. The proposed classification for road damage due to earthquake is called as road damage scale (RDS). Earthquake details such as magnitude, distance of road damage from the epicenter, focal depth, and photographs of damaged roads have been collected from various sources with reported modified Mercalli intensity (MMI). The widely used MMI scale is found to be inadequate to clearly define the road damage. The proposed RDS is applied to various reported road damage and reclassified as per RDS. The correlation between RDS and earthquake parameters of magnitude, epicenter distance, hypocenter distance, and combination of magnitude with epicenter and hypocenter distance has been studied using available data. It is observed that the proposed RDS correlates well with the available earthquake data when compared with the MMI scale. Among several correlations, correlation between RDS and combination of magnitude and epicenter distance is appropriate. Summary of these correlations, their limitations, and the applicability of the proposed scale to forecast road damages and to carry out vulnerability analysis in urban areas is presented in the paper.

Successful data recovery from oscillation photographs containing strong polycrystalline diffraction rings from an unknown small-molecule contaminant: preliminary structure solution of Salmonella typhimurium pyridoxal kinase (PdxK)

Pyridoxal kinase (PdxK; EC 2.7.1.35) belongs to the phosphotransferase family of enzymes and catalyzes the conversion of the three active forms of vitamin B-6, pyridoxine, pyridoxal and pyridoxamine, to their phosphorylated forms and thereby plays a key role in pyridoxal 5 `-phosphate salvage. In the present study, pyridoxal kinase from Salmonella typhimurium was cloned and overexpressed in Escherichia coli, purified using Ni-NTA affinity chromatography and crystallized. X-ray diffraction data were collected to 2.6 angstrom resolution at 100 K. The crystal belonged to the primitive orthorhombic space group P2(1)2(1)2(1), with unitcell parameters a = 65.11, b = 72.89, c = 107.52 angstrom. The data quality obtained by routine processing was poor owing to the presence of strong diffraction rings caused by a polycrystalline material of an unknown small molecule in all oscillation images. Excluding the reflections close to powder/polycrystalline rings provided data of sufficient quality for structure determination. A preliminary structure solution has been obtained by molecular replacement with the Phaser program in the CCP4 suite using E. coli pyridoxal kinase (PDB entry 2ddm) as the phasing model. Further refinement and analysis of the structure are likely to provide valuable insights into catalysis by pyridoxal kinases.

Entropy Constrained Exemplar-based Image Inpainting

Image inpainting is the process of filling the unwanted region in an image marked by the user. It is used for restoring old paintings and photographs, removal of red eyes from pictures, etc. In this paper, we propose an efficient inpainting algorithm which takes care of false edge propagation. We use the classical exemplar based technique to find out the priority term for each patch. To ensure that the edge content of the nearest neighbor patch found by minimizing L-2 distance between patches, we impose an additional constraint that the entropy of the patches be similar. Entropy of the patch acts as a good measure of edge content. Additionally, we fill the image by considering overlapping patches to ensure smoothness in the output. We use structural similarity index as the measure of similarity between ground truth and inpainted image. The results of the proposed approach on a number of examples on real and synthetic images show the effectiveness of our algorithm in removing objects and thin scratches or text written on image. It is also shown that the proposed approach is robust to the shape of the manually selected target. Our results compare favorably to those obtained by existing techniques