Background: Mobile phones are approximately widely used everywhere like in hospital wards, clinics and universities as well as biomedical laboratories. They have become very important tool in students’ life. In contrast, these tools carry many harmful bacteria which are responsible for infectious diseases in human because they serve as a reservoir for different pathogens. Current study was aimed to isolate bacteria from students’ mobile phones at the Institute of Medical Technology/Al-Mansour/The Middle Technical University, Baghdad, Iraq. Also, the study investigated microbial resistance to many antimicrobial agents as well as the appropriate remedial measures. Method: Four hundred and fifty swabs from mobile phones were collected from 450 students (271 males and 179 females). Their age range was (17-30) years. Swabs were collected from students during March 2018. Results: Out of the 450 swabs, 150(33.33%) swabs were positive. The percentages of the isolated bacteria according to gender were 53.33%(80 isolates) from males’ mobile phones and 46.66%(70 isolates) from females’ mobile phones. The most frequent Gram-positive bacteria isolated were Staphylococcus aureus (50%) followed by S. epidermidis (20%), whereas Gram-negative bacteria isolated were Escherichia coli (6.0%), Proteus mirabilis (2.66%), Proteus vulgaris (2.66%) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (2.66%). The isolated bacteria showed variable antimicrobial sensitivity patterns for different antibiotics. Most S. aureus isolates were resistant to Cefotaxime, Gentamycin, Amoxicillin, Ciprofloxacin and Augmentin, whereas other isolated species showed the highest resistance to many antibiotics of interest. The isolates of Micrococcus spp. were sensitive to all the studied antibiotics except Tetracycline and Fucidic acid. Conclusion: The present findings indicated that contaminated students’ mobile phones could serve as reservoirs of bacterial agents. Also, most of the latter were resistant to many commonly prescribed antimicrobial agents.
This study investigated the impact of lime stabilization on the fate and transformation of AgNPs. It also evaluated the changes in the population and diversity of the five most relevant bacterial phyla in soil after applying lime-stabilized sludge containing AgNPs. The study was performed by spiking an environmentally relevant concentration of AgNPs (2 mg AgNPs/g TS) in sludge, applying lime stabilization to increase pH to above 12 for two hours, and applying lime-treated sludge to soil samples. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) were used to investigate the morphological and compositional changes of AgNPs during lime stabilization. After the application of lime stabilized sludge to
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In this study, the effect of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) section and compressive strength of concrete in composite beams under static and low velocity impact loads was examined. Modeling was performed and the obtained results were compared with the test results and their compatibility was evaluated. Experimental tests of four composite beams were carried out, where two of them are control specimen with 20 MPa compressive strength of concrete deck slab and 50 MPa for other. Bending characteristics were affected by the strength of concrete under impact loading case, as it increased maximum impact force and damping time at a ratio of 59% and reduced the damping ratio by 47% compared to the reference hybrid beam. Under stat
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The advancement of digital technology has increased the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in our daily life. However, locating sensor nodes is a challenging task in WSNs. Sensing data without an accurate location is worthless, especially in critical applications. The pioneering technique in range-free localization schemes is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) method, which utilizes network connectivity to estimate sensor location without additional hardware. This study presents a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art SMC localization schemes. We present the schemes as a thematic taxonomy of localization operation in SMC. Moreover, the critical characteristics of each existing scheme are analyzed to identify its advantages
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<p><span>This research deals with the feasibility of a mobile robot to navigate and discover its location at unknown environments, and then constructing maps of these navigated environments for future usage. In this work, we proposed a modified Extended Kalman Filter- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKF-SLAM) technique which was implemented for different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks. Then, the detectable landmarks will play an important role in controlling the overall navigation process and EKF-SLAM technique’s performance. MATLAB simulation results of the EKF-SLAM technique come with better performance as compared with an odometry approach performance in terms of measuring the
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