Background Microorganisms and fungal growth especially Candida albicans, on soft denture lining material are the most common problem which can lead to chronic mucosal inflammation. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of zirconium nanoparticles into acrylic-based heat cured soft denture lining material against Candida albicans, and the amount of zirconium ion release of soft liner/ZrNPs composite. Furthermore, evaluate shear bond strength after ZrNPs addition to soft liner. Materials and methods: Zirconium nanoparticles were added into acrylic-based soft denture liner in various percentages (1%, and 1.5% by weight). Two hundred and fifty specimens were arranged and isolated into four groups as per the test to be done The antifu

Background: The discriminative power of the classical WHO parameters in relation to male fertility is quite low, because they only address few aspects of sperm quality and function. This has led investigators to focus their attention on the male gamete and in particular its genome.Objective: To explore which of the sperm DNA damage parameters measured by comet assay are more reliable, and their relations with the standard semen parameters.Methods: Study was done on 40 infertile men selected from couples attending the Institute of Embryo Reasearch and Infertility Treatment at Al-Kadhimiya City/ Baghdad in the period between February 2009 and May 2009, with a history of infertility of ≥1 years; and 15 healthy volunteers of proven fertili

Pulsed liquid laser ablation is considered a green method for the synthesis of nanostructures because there are no byproducts formed after the ablation. In this paper, a fiber laser of wavelength 1.064 µm, peak power of 1 mJ, pulse duration of 120 ns, and repetition rate of 20 kHz, was used to produce carbon nanostructures including carbon nanospheres and carbon nanorods from the ablation of asphalt in ethanol at ablation speeds of (100, 75, 50, 10 mm/s).  The morphology, composition and optical properties of the synthesized samples were studied experimentally using FESEM, HRTEM, EDS, and UV-vis spectrophotometer. Results showed that the band gap energy decreased with decreasing the ablation speed (increasing the ablation time), the mi

Solar cells thin films were prepared using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) as a thin film, with extract of natural pigment from local flower. A concentration of 0.1g/ml of polyvinyl alcohol solution in water was prepared for four samples, with various concentrations of plant pigment (0, 15, 25 and 50) % added to each of the four solutions separately for preparing (PVA with low concentrated dye , PVA with medium concentrated dye and PVA with high concentrated dye ) thin films respectively . Ultraviolet absorption regions were obtained by computerized UV-Visible (CECIL 2700). Optical properties including (absorbance, reflectance, absorption coefficient, energy gap and dielectric constant) via UV- Vis were tested, too.  Fourier transform infra

This research is concerned with the re-analysis of optical data (the imaginary part of the dielectric function as a function of photon energy E) of a-Si:H films prepared by Jackson et al. and Ferlauto et al. through using nonlinear regression fitting we estimated the optical energy gap and the deviation from the Tauc model by considering the parameter of energy photon-dependence of the momentum matrix element of the p as a free parameter by assuming that density of states distribution to be a square root function. It is observed for films prepared by Jackson et al. that the value of the parameter p for the photon energy range is is close to the value assumed by the Cody model and the optical gap energy is which is also close to the value

      Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.       In this research, we pr

      Products’ quality inspection is an important stage in every production route, in which the quality of the produced goods is estimated and compared with the desired specifications. With traditional inspection, the process rely on manual methods that generates various costs and large time consumption. On the contrary, today’s inspection systems that use modern techniques like computer vision, are more accurate and efficient. However, the amount of work needed to build a computer vision system based on classic techniques is relatively large, due to the issue of manually selecting and extracting features from digital images, which also produces labor costs for the system engineers.

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This paper presents a parametric audio compression scheme intended for scalable audio coding applications, and is particularly well suited for operation at low rates, in the vicinity of 5 to 32 Kbps. The model consists of two complementary components: Sines plus Noise (SN). The principal component of the system is an. overlap-add analysis-by-synthesis sinusoidal model based on conjugate matching pursuits. Perceptual information about human hearing is explicitly included into the model by psychoacoustically weighting the pursuit metric. Once analyzed, SN parameters are efficiently quantized and coded. Our informal listening tests demonstrated that our coder gave competitive performance to the-state-of-the- art HelixTM Producer Plus 9 from