Elastic liposomes (EL) are some of the most versatile deformable vesicular carriers that comprise physiologically biocompatible lipids and surfactants for the delivery of numerous challenging molecules and have marked advantages over other colloidal systems. They have been investigated for a wide range of applications in pharmaceutical technology through topical, transdermal, nasal, and oral routes for efficient and effective drug delivery. Increased drug encapsulation efficiency, enhanced drug permeation and penetration into or across the skin, and ultradeformability have led to widespread interest in ELs to modulate drug release, permeation, and drug action more efficiently than conventional drug-release vehicles. This review provides insights into the versatile role that ELs play in the delivery of numerous drugs and biomolecules by improving drug release, permeation, and penetration across the skin as well as stability. Furthermore, it provides future directions that should ensure the widespread use of ELs across all medical fields.

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Every organization is interested in improving the work performance of its employees. Also, quality of work life (QWL) has become of paramount importance for the smooth functioning of an organization. The present research study, thus, attempts to assess the impact of QWL on Work Performance and its dimensions—task performance, contextual performance and counter-productive work behaviour (CWB) among the employees of Himachal Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (HPPCL). The data was collected from a sample of 270 HPPCL employees, selected by using convenience sampling technique. Results of this study show that the QWL experienced by the employees of HPPCL has a significant and positive impact on their task, contextual and overall work performance, and a significant, weak and negative impact on their CWB. Results also reveal that the employees often performed their duties satisfactorily. However, they have been found to have a significant involvement in CWB, which has also been found to deteriorate their overall work performance. Thus, CWB is an area of concern for the organization. The study also discusses its various implications for the concerned organization, viz. improving overall work performance of its employees (emphasizing on enhancing their task and contextual performance and reducing their CWB) by adopting various measures to improve their QWL.

Digital coherent superposition (DCS) provides an approach to combat fiber nonlinearities by trading off the spectrum efficiency. In analogy, we extend the concept of DCS to the optical OFDM subcarrier pairs with Hermitian symmetry to combat the linear and nonlinear phase noise. At the transmitter, we simply use a real-valued OFDM signal to drive a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) intensity modulator biased at the null point and the so-generated OFDM signal is Hermitian in the frequency domain. At receiver, after the conventional OFDM signal processing, we conduct DCS of the optical OFDM subcarrier pairs, which requires only conjugation and summation. We show that the inter-carrier-interference (ICI) due to phase noise can be reduced because of the Hermitain symmetry. In a simulation, this method improves the tolerance to the laser phase noise. In a nonlinear WDM transmission experiment, this method also achieves better performance under the influence of cross phase modulation (XPM).

These findings suggest that curcumin reduces the hypertrophic marker gene expression by inhibiting nuclear localization and DNA binding activity of GATA-4. Thus it has a great anti-hypertrophic potential.