In this paper we proposed the method of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) determination of some essential trace elements in medicinal herbs and vitamin-mineral complexes at the level of 10⁰-10¹ mg/ml. To increase sensitivity and selectivity of the determination we simple and effective approach based on the extraction of metal ions from aqueous solutions with chemically modified polyurethane foam sorbents followed by direct XRF analysis. The conditions of sorption preconcentration of Co(II), Ni(II) and Zn(II) ions with modified sorbents were optimized. The proposed approach is used for the determination of trace elements in several kinds of medicinal herbs (coltsfoot leaves, nettle leaves and yarrow herb) and vitamin-mineral

Flexible pavements are subjected to three main distress types: fatigue crack, thermal crack, and permanent deformation. Under severe climate conditions, thermal cracking particularly contributes largely to a considerable scale of premature deterioration of pavement infrastructure worldwide. This challenge is especially relevant for Europe, as weather conditions vary significantly throughout the year. Hydrated lime (HL) has been recognized as an effective additive to improve the mechanical properties of asphalt concrete for pavement applications. Previous research has found that a replacement of conventional limestone dust filler using hydrated lime at 2.5% of the total weight of aggregates generated an optimum improvement in the mec

This paper presents a computer simulation model of a thermally activated roof (TAR) to cool a room using cool water from a wet cooling tower. Modeling was achieved using a simplified 1-D resistance-capacitance thermal network (RC model) for an infinite slab. Heat transfer from the cooling pipe network was treated as 2-D heat flow. Only a limited number of nodes were required to obtain reliable results. The use of 6^th order RC-thermal model produced a set of ordinary differential equations that were solved using MATLAB - R2012a. The computer program was written to cover all possible initial conditions, material properties, TAR system geometry and hourly solar radiation. The cool water supply was considered time

This paper deals with constructing mixed probability distribution from mixing exponential

Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) or Lower limb ulcers are one of the major complications caused by diabetes mellitus especially when patients fail to maintain tight glycemic control. DFU is linked to multiple risk factors along with the genetic factors and ethnicity which play a significant role in the development of DFUs through their effects on multiple aspects of the pathophysiological process. This narrative review aimed to summarize all the previous studies within the last ten years associating gene polymorphism and DFU. Polymorphism associated with vascular endothelial growth factor (rs699947), the G894T polymorphism of the endothelial nitric oxide synthase gene, interleukin-6–174 G>C gene polymorphism, heat shock protein 70 gene polymorph

In this paper we proposed a new method for selecting a smoothing parameter in kernel estimator to estimate a nonparametric regression function in the presence of missing values. The proposed method is based on work on the golden ratio and Surah AL-E-Imran in the Qur'an. Simulation experiments were conducted to study a small sample behavior. The results proved the superiority the proposed on the competition method for selecting smoothing parameter.

Background: Coated aesthetic archwires are currently the existing solutions for the esthetic problem, but the color of these archwires tends to change overtime. This study was aimed to evaluate the color stability of different types of esthetic archwires from four different companies at different time periods after immersion of two different staining drinks which are tea and Pepsi cola. Materials and methods: 48 specimens were prepared, each specimen contains 10 aesthetic archwires; and were divided according to type of solution into two groups: A (tea) &B (Pepsi cola); each group contained 24 specimens (12 specimens were immersed in the staining solution as 4 specimens for each time intervals and 12 specimens were immersed in distilled wa