Stunting and Underweight among Adolescent Girls of Indigenous Communities in Telangana, India: A Cross-Sectional Study.

India's indigenous groups remain vulnerable to malnutrition, despite economic progress, reflecting the reliance on traditional agriculture and the problems of poverty and inadequate education and sanitation. This mixed-methods study analyzed the incidence, causes and determinants of chronic malnutrition, measured through stunting, thinness and underweight among adolescent indigenous girls in Telangana. Using 2017 data on 695 girls aged 11-18 years from 2542 households, the analysis showed that 13% had normal nutritional status, while 87% were stunted, underweight or thin.

Optochemical organization in a spatially modulated incandescent field: a single-step route to black and bright polymer lattices.

We report that incandescent beams patterned with amplitude depressions (dips) suffer instability in a photopolymerizable system and organize into lattices of black and bright self-trapped beams propagating respectively, through self-induced black and bright waveguides. Such optochemically organized lattices emerge when beams embedded with a hexagonal or square array of dips initiate free-radical polymerization and corresponding changes in refractive index (Δn) along their propagation paths. Under these nonlinear conditions, the dips evolve into a hexagonal or square lattice of black beams, while their bright interstitial regions become unstable and divide spontaneously into multiple filaments of light.

A black beam borne by an incandescent field self-traps in a photopolymerizing medium.

We report that a self-trapped black optical beam that is spatially and temporally incoherent forms spontaneously in a nascent photopolymerization system. The black beam inscribes a permanent cylindrical channel, which prevents the propagation of visible light even under passive conditions (in the absence of polymerization). The finding opens a powerful new mechanism to manipulate light signals from incoherent sources such as LEDs through selective suppression of light propagation.

Self-trapping of spatially and temporally incoherent white light in a photochemical medium.

We report that a beam of spatially and temporally incoherent white light self-traps by initiating free-radical polymerization in an organosiloxane medium. Refractive index changes due to polymerization lead to the formation of a narrow channel waveguide that traps and guides the entire multimode, broadband beam without diffraction. The response time of the system, which is determined by the inherently slow rate of free-radical polymerization, exceeds by several orders of magnitude the femtosecond-scale random phase fluctuations that characterize white light.

Effect of apolipoprotein A-IV genotype and dietary fat on cholesterol absorption in humans.

We investigated the effect of the A-IV-2 allele, which encodes a Q360H substitution in apolipoprotein (apo) A-IV, and dietary fat on cholesterol absorption in humans. In three separate studies we compared fractional intestinal cholesterol absorption between groups of subjects heterozygous for the A-IV-2 allele (1/2) and homozygous for the common allele (1/1) receiving high cholesterol ( approximately 800 mg/day) diets with different fatty acid compositions. All subjects had the apoE 3/3 genotype.