A mounted specimen of a mustelid animal deposited in the Kurdistan Museum of Natural History, Salahaddin University, Erbil proved to be Mustela erminea (Linnaeus, 1758) and represents a new record for the mammalian fauna of Iraq. Its measurements and some biological noted are provided. Also, two passerine birds; the Red-headed bunting, Emberiza bruniceps Brandt, 1841(Family, Emberizidae) and the Variable wheatear, Oenanthe picata (Blyth, 1847) (Family, Muscicapidae) were recorded for the first time in Iraq. Furthermore, the tree frog Hyla savignyi Audouin, 1829 was found in two locations north east of Iraq with spotted dorsum and having interesting behavior in having the capabil

The economic dimensions of environmental issues are complex and unclear in many cases, there is a kind of confusion in the real relationship between economic growth and environmental regulations. Many of the negative environmental impacts are accompanied by human activities and urban and industrial development in the city, and that many of the projects that did not take into account the environmental factors during the planning and implementation of them can be detrimental, as well as natural environments, archeological sites, historical or scientific value, aesthetic or educational. It also describes the Global Environment Outlook that if current trends continue, population growth, economic growth and consumption patterns, the p

Purpose: This study aims to shed the light on allusions to real lab rats in Dashner’s trilogy: The Maze Runner (2009), The Scorch Trails (2010), and The Death Cure (2011).  It also aims to trace the historical documents and chronicles essential to reveal the justifications behind the vague political and scientific crimes.  Methodology: The researchers have used the literary analytical approach to study and analyze selected prominent aspects from each novel; such as the concept of lab rats and genocide crimes in The Maze Runner; references to weather experiments, the climate change conspiracy, gas chambers, and the Holocaust in The Scorch Trails; and finally, the man-made diseases and biological weapons in The Death Cure. Results

Purpose: This study aims to shed the light on allusions to real lab rats in Dashner’s trilogy: The Maze Runner (2009), The Scorch Trails (2010), and The Death Cure (2011).  It also aims to trace the historical documents and chronicles essential to reveal the justifications behind the vague political and scientific crimes.  Methodology: The researchers have used the literary analytical approach to study and analyze selected prominent aspects from each novel; such as the concept of lab rats and genocide crimes in The Maze Runner; references to weather experiments, the climate change conspiracy, gas chambers, and the Holocaust in The Scorch Trails; and finally, the man-made diseases and biological weapons in The Death Cure. Results

Osteoarthritis is the most prevalent arthritic disease and a leading cause of disability. The pathogenesis of osteoarthritis involves multiple etiologies, including variable degree of synovial inflammation. Metformin and pioglitazone could potentially reduce the levels and activity of inflammatory mediators. This may consider as a new therapeutic approach added to the current used drugs in an attempt to decrease the pain, inflammation, and improve daily activity and quality of life in patients with knee osteoarthritis.

This study designed to evaluate the clinical utility of using metformin or pioglitazone as anti-inflammatory agents in combination with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) of selective type of cyclooxygen

Biological drugs have an active substance that is made by a living organism or derived from a living organism. They are one of the important therapy options used in a wide range of diseases especially life-threatening diseases. Biological therapy opens new opportunities for treating different diseases for which drug therapy is minimal, but they have considerable differences in the safety consequences in comparison with non-biological drugs. The aim of the current study was to assess the post-marketing safety profile of biological drugs used in Iraqi hospitals by the analysis of the reported adverse drug reactions regarding their severity, seriousness, preventability, expectedness, and outcome. It is a retrospective study of the individu

Face Identification is an important research topic in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition and has become a very active research area in recent decades. Recently multiwavelet-based neural networks (multiwavenets) have been used for function approximation and recognition, but to our best knowledge it has not been used for face Identification. This paper presents a novel approach for the Identification of human faces using Back-Propagation Adaptive Multiwavenet. The proposed multiwavenet has a structure similar to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with three layers, but the activation function of hidden layer is replaced with multiscaling functions. In experiments performed on the ORL face database it achieved a

Background: This study aimed to determine the gender of a sample of Iraqi adults using the mesio-distal width of mandibular canines, inter-canine width and standard mandibular canine index, and to determine the percentage of dimorphism as an aid in forensic dentistry. Materials and methods: The sample included 200 sets of study models belong to 200 subjects (100 males and 100 females) with an age ranged between 17-23 years. The mesio-distal crown dimension was measured manually, from the contact points for the mandibular canines (both sides), in addition to the inter-canine width using digital vernier. Descriptive statistics were obtained for the measurements for both genders; paired sample t-test was used to evaluate the side difference of

Face Identification is an important research topic in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition and has become a very active research area in recent decades. Recently multiwavelet-based neural networks (multiwavenets) have been used for function approximation and recognition, but to our best knowledge it has not been used for face Identification. This paper presents a novel approach for the Identification of human faces using Back-Propagation Adaptive Multiwavenet. The proposed multiwavenet has a structure similar to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network with three layers, but the activation function of hidden layer is replaced with multiscaling functions. In experiments performed on the ORL face database it achieved a

Functional dyspepsia is one of the most common gastrointestinal symptoms and attributed to various causes including Helicobacter pylori infection. AIM OF THE STUDY: To correlate Helicobacter pylori infection to functional dyspepsia and to identify the possible risk factors for this infection. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Fifty patients who were referred to the endoscopy unit for dyspepsia symptoms, secondary gastric causes of dyspepsia were excluded during endoscopy, gastric biopsies were taken for histopathological study and for bedside urease test for detection of Helicobacter pylori infection. RESULTS: 62% of non-ulcer dyspeptic patients were infected with Helicobacter pylori, 74.2% of the patients were above 30 years old, female gender patient