Socio-scientific issues provide a great platform to both engage students in scientific topics and assess their understanding of scientific concepts. Nancy R. Singer, Amy Lannin, Maha Kareem, William Romine, and Katie Kline report on the STEM Literacy Project, a three-year National Science Foundation grant that aimed to improve STEM teachers’ knowledge and integration of literacy in their classrooms. They describe teachers’ professional learning, scenario-based assessments and other strategies they incorporated in their STEM classrooms, and how writing enables students to understand real-world issues.

With growing global demand for hydrocarbons and decreasing conventional reserves, the gas industry is shifting its focus in the direction of unconventional reservoirs. Tight gas reservoirs have typically been deemed uneconomical due to their low permeability which is understood to be below 0.1mD, requiring advanced drilling techniques and stimulation to enhance hydrocarbons. However, the first step in determining the economic viability of the reservoir is to see how much gas is initially in place. Numerical simulation has been regarded across the industry as the most accurate form of gas estimation, however, is extremely costly and time consuming. The aim of this study is to provide a framework for a simple analytical method to esti

In this paper, a miniaturized 2 × 2 electro-optic plasmonic Mach– Zehnder switch (MZS) based on metal–polymer–silicon hybrid waveguide is presented. Adiabatic tapers are designed to couple the light between the plasmonic phase shifter, implemented in each of the MZS arms, and the 3-dB input/output directional couplers. For 6 µm-long hybrid plasmonic waveguide supported by JRD1 polymer (r33= 390 pm/V), a π-phase shift voltage of 2 V is obtained. The switch is designed for 1550 nm operation wavelength using COMSOL software and characterizes by 2.3 dB insertion loss, 9.9 fJ/bit power consumption, and 640 GHz operation bandwidth

The objective of this study is to apply Artificial Neural Network for heat transfer analysis of shell-and-tube heat exchangers widely used in power plants and refineries. Practical data was obtained by using industrial heat exchanger operating in power generation department of Dura refinery. The commonly used Back Propagation (BP) algorithm was used to train and test networks by divided the data to three samples (training, validation and testing data) to give more approach data with actual case. Inputs of the neural network include inlet water temperature, inlet air temperature and mass flow rate of air. Two outputs (exit water temperature to cooling tower and exit air temperature to second stage of air compressor) were taken in ANN.

Background: As a multifactorial disorder, temporomandibular joint (TMD) is difficult to diagnose, and multiple factors affect the joint and cause the temporomandibular disorder. Standardization of clinical diagnosis of TMD should be used to reach a definite clinical diagnosis; the condylar bone may degenerate in accordance with these disorders. Aims: Evaluate the correlation between the clinical diagnosis and degenerative condylar change (flattening, sclerosis, erosion, and osteophyte). Materials and Methods: A prospective study with a study group of 97 TMD patients (total of 194 joints) aged 20 to 50. Patients were sent to cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) to assess the degenerative condylar change. Results: No association was found bet

The rise of edge-cloud continuum computing is a result of the growing significance of edge computing, which has become a complementary or substitute option for traditional cloud services. The convergence of networking and computers presents a notable challenge due to their distinct historical development. Task scheduling is a major challenge in the context of edge-cloud continuum computing. The selection of the execution location of tasks, is crucial in meeting the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of applications. An efficient scheduling strategy for distributing workloads among virtual machines in the edge-cloud continuum data center is mandatory to ensure the fulfilment of QoS requirements for both customer and service provider. E

Background: Odontogenic tumors are a diverse group of lesions with a variety of clinical behavior and histopathologic subtypes, from hamartomatous and benign to malignant. The study aimed to examine the clinical and pathological features of odontogenic tumors in Baghdad over the last 11 years (2011–2021). Materials and Methods: The present retrospective study analyzed all formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded tissue blocks of patients diagnosed with an odontogenic tumor that were retrieved from archives at a teaching hospital/College of Dentistry in Baghdad University, Iraq, between 2011 and 2021. The diagnosis of each case was confirmed by examining the hematoxylin and eosin stained sections by two expert pathologists. Data from pati

Research on the automated extraction of essential data from an electrocardiography (ECG) recording has been a significant topic for a long time. The main focus of digital processing processes is to measure fiducial points that determine the beginning and end of the P, QRS, and T waves based on their waveform properties. The presence of unavoidable noise during ECG data collection and inherent physiological differences among individuals make it challenging to accurately identify these reference points, resulting in suboptimal performance. This is done through several primary stages that rely on the idea of preliminary processing of the ECG electrical signal through a set of steps (preparing raw data and converting them into files tha

In this paper, a simulation of the electrical performance for Pentacene-based top-contact bottom-gate (TCBG) Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFET) model with Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) and silicon nitride (Si3N4) as gate dielectrics was studied. The effects of gate dielectrics thickness on the device performance were investigated. The thickness of the two gate dielectric materials was in the range of 100-200nm to maintain a large current density and stable performance. MATLAB simulation demonstrated for model simulation results in terms of output and transfer characteristics for drain current and the transconductance. The layer thickness of 200nm may result in gate leakage current points to the requirement of optimizing the t