Background: The miswak is a teeth cleaning twig made from a twig of the Salvadora persica tree (known as arak in Arabic).A traditional alternative to the modern toothbrush, it has a long, well-documented history and is reputed for its medicinal benefits. It also features prominently in Islamic hygienical jurisprudence. Materials and methods: Twenty maxillary first premolars were treated with the selected solutions which included siwak water extract (5%, 10%) and sodium fluoride 0.05% for 2minutes once daily for 20 days interval, deionized water was used as control negative. Then the concentration of the dissolved calcium ion in the etching solution of 2N HCL was measured. Results: The least amount of the dissolved calcium ion was registere

The process of accurate localization of the basic components of human faces (i.e., eyebrows, eyes, nose, mouth, etc.) from images is an important step in face processing techniques like face tracking, facial expression recognition or face recognition. However, it is a challenging task due to the variations in scale, orientation, pose, facial expressions, partial occlusions and lighting conditions. In the current paper, a scheme includes the method of three-hierarchal stages for facial components extraction is presented; it works regardless of illumination variance. Adaptive linear contrast enhancement methods like gamma correction and contrast stretching are used to simulate the variance in light condition among images. As testing material

          The primary objective of this paper is to improve a biometric authentication and classification model using the ear as a distinct part of the face since it is unchanged with time and unaffected by facial expressions. The proposed model is a new scenario for enhancing ear recognition accuracy via modifying the AdaBoost algorithm to optimize adaptive learning. To overcome the limitation of image illumination, occlusion, and problems of image registration, the Scale-invariant feature transform technique was used to extract features. Various consecutive phases were used to improve classification accuracy. These phases are image acquisition, preprocessing, filtering, smoothing, and feature extraction. To assess the proposed

Enhancement of heat transfer in the tube heat exchanger is studied experimentally by using discrete twisted tapes. Three different positions were selected for inserting turbulators along tube section (horizontal position by α= 0⁰, inclined position by α= 45 ⁰ and vertical position by α= 90⁰). The space between turbulators was fixed by distributing 5 pieces of these turbulators with pitch ratio    PR = (0.44). Also, the factor of constant heat flux was applied as a boundary condition around the tube test section for all experiments of this investigation, while the flow rates were selected as a variable factor (Reynolds number values vary from 5000 to 15000). The results s

Removal of solar brown and direct black dyes by coagulation with two aluminum based
coagulants was conducted. The main objective is to examine the efficiency of these
coagulants in the treatment of dye polluted water discharged from Al-Kadhymia Textile
Company (Baghdad-Iraq). The performance of these coagulants was investigated through
jar test by comparing dye percent removal at different wastewater pH, coagulant dose,
and initial dye concentration. Results show that alum works better than PAC under acidic
media (5-6) and PAC works better under basic media (7-8) in the removal of both solar
brown and direct black dyes. Higher doses of PAC were required to achieve the
maximum removal efficiency under optimum pH co

Industrial wastewater containing nickel, lead, and copper can be produced by many industries. The reverse osmosis (RO) membrane technologies are very efficient for the treatment of industrial wastewater containing nickel, lead, and copper ions to reduce water consumption and preserving the environment. Synthetic industrial wastewater samples containing Ni(II), Pb(II), and Cu(II) ions at various concentrations (50 to 200 ppm), pressures (1 to 4 bar), temperatures (10 to 40 ^oC), pH (2 to 5.5), and flow rates (10 to 40 L/hr), were prepared and subjected to treatment by RO system in the laboratory. The results showed that high removal efficiency of the heavy metals could be achieved by RO process (98.5%, 97.5% and 96% for Ni(II),

Two galaxies have been chosen, spiral galaxy NGC 5005 and elliptical galaxy NGC 4278 to study their photometric properties by using surface photometric techniques with griz-Filters. Observations are obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The data reduction of all images have done, like bias and flat field, by SDSS pipeline. The overall structure of the two galaxies (a bulge, a disk), together with isophotal contour maps, surface brightness profiles and a bulge/disk decomposition of the galaxy images were performed, although the disk position angle, ellipticity and inclination of the galaxies have been estimated.