In this study, gold nanoparticles were synthesized in a single step biosynthetic method using aqueous leaves extract of thymus vulgaris L. It acts as a reducing and capping agent. The characterizations of nanoparticles were carried out using UV-Visible spectra, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and FTIR. The surface plasmon resonance of the as-prepared gold nanoparticles (GNPs) showed the surface plasmon resonance centered at 550[Formula: see text]nm. The XRD pattern showed that the strong four intense peaks indicated the crystalline nature and the face centered cubic structure of the gold nanoparticles. The average crystallite size of the AuNPs was 14.93[Formula: see text]nm. Field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) was used to s

Background: Mesh infection after hernia repair is a devastating complication. Preoperative prediction of high risk patients may be useful to avoid infections. This study aims at evaluating risk factors for mesh related wound infection in our setting.
Patients and methods: This prospective cohort analysis study included 120 patients underwent ventral hernioplasty with polypropylene mesh from October 2009 to February 2013 at Baghdad Teaching Hospital. Clinical data analyzed to determine risk factors of mesh related wound infection.
Results: After one year follow up for each of 120; 21 patients (17.5%) developed mesh related wound infection. Predictors of infection were: age ≥ 45 years, BMI≥35 kg/m2, diabetes mellitus, past histor

Perennial biofuel and cover crops systems are important for enhancing soil health and can provide numerous soil, agricultural, and environmental benefits. The study objective was to investigate the effects of cover crops and biofuel crops on soil hydraulic properties relative to traditional management for claypan soils. The study site included selected management practices: cover crop (CC) and no cover crop (NC) with corn/soybean rotation, switchgrass (SW), and miscanthus (MI). The CC mixture consisted of cereal rye, hairy vetch, and Austrian winter pea. The research site was located at Bradford Research Center in Missouri, USA, and was implemented on a Mexico silt loam. Intact soil cores (76‐mm diam. by 76‐mm long) were taken from the

Leading edge serration is now a well-established and effective passive control device for the reduction of turbulence–leading edge interaction noise, and for the suppression of boundary layer separation at high angle of attack. It is envisaged that leading edge blowing could produce the same mechanisms as those produced by a serrated leading edge to enhance the aeroacoustics and aerodynamic performances of aerofoil. Aeroacoustically, injection of mass airflow from the leading edge (against the incoming turbulent flow) can be an effective mechanism to decrease the turbulence intensity, and/or alter the stagnation point. According to classical theory on the aerofoil leading edge noise, there is a potential for the leading edge blowi

In The Bluest Eye (1970), the American-African writer, Toni Morrison explores how
Western standards of ideal beauty are created and propagated with and among the black
community. The novel not only portrays the lives of those whose dark skinned and Negroid
features blight their lives; it also shows how the standard of white beauty, when imposed on
black youth, can drastically damage one’s self-love and esteem which usually occurs when
beauty goes unrecognized. Morrison in this novel focuses on the damage that the black
women characters suffer through the construction of femininity in a racialised society where
whiteness is used as a standard of beauty.

The diplomatic bag is one of the important means of communication used by the diplomatic mission to communicate with the government of the sending country and its consulates, as well as the missions in other countries. The diplomatic bag was granted absolute immunity against opening, seizing and inspection in order to effectively perform the function entrusted to it. The practical reality revealed the exploitation of the diplomatic bag to smuggle drugs and shipments of weapons and explosives that harmed the national security of the receiving country. The International Law Committee avoided the matter and reconciled the interest of the immunity of the diplomatic bag with the interest of the state in preserving national security and sovere

    Identification of complex communities in biological networks is a critical and ongoing challenge since lots of network-related problems correspond to the subgraph isomorphism problem known in the literature as NP-hard. Several optimization algorithms have been dedicated and applied to solve this problem. The main challenge regarding the application of optimization algorithms, specifically to handle large-scale complex networks, is their relatively long execution time. Thus, this paper proposes a parallel extension of the PSO algorithm to detect communities in complex biological networks. The main contribution of this study is summarized in three- fold; Firstly, a modified PSO algorithm with a local search operator is proposed

In this study, we investigate the run length properties for the EWMA charts with time - varying control limits, and fast initial Response (FIR), for monitoring the mean of a normal process with a known standard deviation , by using non - homogeneous markov chain approach.

The source and channel coding for wireless data transmission can reduce
distortion, complexity and delay in multimedia services. In this paper, a joint sourcechannel
coding is proposed for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing -
interleave division multiple access (OFDM-IDMA) systems to transmit the
compressed images over noisy channels. OFDM-IDMA combines advantages of
both OFDM and IDMA, where OFDM removes inter symbol interference (ISI)
problems and IDMA removes multiple access interference (MAI). Convolutional
coding is used as a channel coding, while the hybrid compression method is used as
a source coding scheme. The hybrid compression scheme is based on wavelet
transform, bit plane slicing, polynomi