ABSTRACT Various energy sources are utilized at present with a challenge of energy storage in many cases. The existing rechargeable storage batteries which include sodium-ion and lithium-ion have some limitations in their gravimetric capacities. This can be improved by incorporating Vanadium disulphide (VS2) due to its metallic properties at ground state. In this work we investigate the adsorption of lithium ions on the VS2 layered material. Research shows that intercalating lithium ions on a...
ABSTRACT The demand for agricultural land is driving the conversion of moist Kenyan savannah into agroecosystems (grazing fields and croplands) and together with altered rainfall patterns, is likely modifying soil moisture, soil respiration and carbon store in the ecosystem. Nevertheless, the carbon dynamics of moist savannas plus of the converted ecosystems are poorly understood yet planning for sustainable use of the ecosystem need to be based on scientific knowledge. While previous studie...
Abstract ICT tools are continuously changing business processes while the Zimbabwe’s public health sector still lags behind. The commercial industry has completely evolved because of eCommerce business models but an e-Health strategy has not yet been implemented in the health sector. The need for a tool to track the areas in the country with critical shortages of public health care professionals and ease manipulation of health practitioner’s data stirred the development of the National H...
ABSTRACT Chipinge Town Council Building Inspection system is an online software that manages, queries and inspection of stands to the Chipinge residents. The system allow clients to book, request for inspection, receiving the response online whilst the housing director is able to assign Inspectors tasks and there is generally improvement on the interaction between the clients and the Town Council through online communication that is facilitated by sending and receiving queries. The system wa...
ABSTRACT Of all the uses of African plants, the aspect of medical use has probably attracted the most attention and has also been the most complex and varied. Nearly 70,000 species of higher plants have been used for medical purposes world wide. Medicinal plants form the key component to traditional medicine which remains the major source of health care for over 70% of the Kenyan population. Over 90% of the population use medicinal plants at one time or another. The increasing need to develop...
Abstract Preliminary validation of the extracts for bioactivity revealed that the n-hexane, DCM and MeOH extracts of the stem bark of L. eriocalyx were active against P. falciparum, A. gambie larvae, B. anthracis, and A. niger. This formed the the basis of fractionation of these crude extracts whereby lupeol (27), quercetin (65), apigenin (68) friedelin (133), -sitosterol (134), lupenone (135), -sitosterol-3-O-glucoside (136), chrysin (137) morinhydrate (138), quercetin-3-O-glucoside (1...
ABSTRACT Malaria rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are a great achievement to the implementation of parasite based diagnosis before treatment. They use a nitrocellulose strip coated with antibodies that target the Plasmodium antigens; histidine rich protein II (HRP2), lactose dehydrogenase (LDH), and aldolase. A major drawback of the method is that the majority of RDTs do not have positive control materials to test different batches of RDTs at the point of care. Dried Plasmodium-infected samples ...
ABSTRACT Tamarindus indica l leaves extract was evaluated against six bacterial strains (2 Gram-positive and 4 Gram-negative) known to cause food spoilage. Functional groups of Tamarindus indica l leaves were evaluated using the Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. The leaves were extracted by the Soxhlet extraction using aqueous and organic solvents (acetone, ethanol and methanol). Stock solution of the extracts was prepared by dissolving 0.8g of each extract in 2ml dimethyl sul...
ABSTRACT Oral contraceptive agents (OCA) have been in use for well over two decades with a total of 150 to 200 million women all over the world using the pills as means of birth control. Aside from their gynecologic influences, the hormones have been shown to affect metabolic and nutritional processes. Concern over the nutritional status of Nigerian females consuming OCA prompted this research using animal model. Pour vitamins were investigated along with four birth control pills Ovral, Norde...
ABSTRACT Avocado plants (Persea americana Mill.) belongs to the family lauraceae. Avocado fruit has high amounts of fats and proteins, high dietary fibre, vitamins and potassium. It is known to be the most nutritious of all the fruits. The most devastating pathogen of avocado plants is a fungal species, Phytophthora cinnamomi which cause avocado root rot. The fungus is the most widely distributed of Phytophthora species. It affects growth and physiology of plants and even leading to death of ...
ABSTRACT Zesa Holdings employees are following long-winded expense approval processes which are delaying reimbursements. Reimbursement cycles are running into quite a lot of weeks, and sometimes even months before approvals and there is absence of proper feedback to claimants during approval workflows. The current paper-based solution for expense claim approvals has problems doing with missing claim forms and signature forgery. At the same time some employees are exaggerating field trip expe...
ABSTRACT There has been a significant growth in research in the field of financial mathematics since the derivation of the standard Black-Scholes-Merton Partial Differential Equation by Black and Scholes, and Merton in 1973. The derivation was done under the assumption that the market is liquid and frictionless (no restrictions on trade and no transaction costs). The nonlinear equation ut + 1 2σ2S2uSS(1 + 2ρSuSS) = 0 for modeling illiquid markets has only been solved analytically using a po...
ABSTRACT The research aspired to estimate the potential damage a future flood can cause in Gokwe North District. The study made use of both quantitative and qualitative techniques to acquire data. This approach integrated GIS, remote sensing, semi-structured interviews and field observations in collecting data. Two Landsat images (path 171 row 72) for two different years (2005 and 2015) were accessed from U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Explorer database. To analyse the LULC changes in the ...
ABSTRACT Tuberculosis (TB) causes substantial human morbidity and mortality globally. About 10.4 million TB cases and 1.4 million deaths worldwide were reported in 2015. Kenya is among the 22 countries with highest TB burden. Microscopy is routinely used for Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacilli (Mtb) detection; however its sensitivity has been reported to be as low as 60% posing a problem for case detection. Rifampicin (RIF) is one of the major drugs for first line TB treatment; however, most p...
Abstract Sturm-Liouville operators and Jacobi matrices have so far been developed in parallel for many years. A result in one eld usually leads to a result in the other. However not much in terms of spectral theory has been done in the discrete setting compared to the continuous version especially in higher order operators. Thus, we have investigated the deciency indices of fourth order dierence operator generated by a fourth order dierence equation and located the absolutely continuous spect...