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.

Recommendation systems are now being used to address the problem of excess information in several sectors such as entertainment, social networking, and e-commerce. Although conventional methods to recommendation systems have achieved significant success in providing item suggestions, they still face many challenges, including the cold start problem and data sparsity. Numerous recommendation models have been created in order to address these difficulties. Nevertheless, including user or item-specific information has the potential to enhance the performance of recommendations. The ConvFM model is a novel convolutional neural network architecture that combines the capabilities of deep learning for feature extraction with the effectiveness o

The security of message information has drawn more attention nowadays, so; cryptography has been used extensively. This research aims to generate secured cipher keys from retina information to increase the level of security. The proposed technique utilizes cryptography based on retina information. The main contribution is the original procedure used to generate three types of keys in one system from the retina vessel's end position and improve the technique of three systems, each with one key. The distances between the center of the diagonals of the retina image and the retina vessel's end (diagonal center-end (DCE)) represent the first key. The distances between the center of the radius of the retina and the retina vessel's end (ra

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is one of the principal nosocomial causative agents. This bacterium has the capability to resist wide range of antibiotics and it is responsible for many diseases like skin, nose and wounds infection. In this study, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD)-PCR was applied with ten random primers to examine the molecular diversity among methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates in the hospitals and to investigate the genetic distance between them. 90 Isolates were collected from clinical specimens from Iraqi hospitals for a total of 90 isolates. Only 10 strains (11.11%) were found to be MRSA. From these 10 primers, only 9 gave clear amplification products. 91 fragment l

Tench is a cyprinid fish that has undergone human-induced translocations. The natural populations of the species are on the decline due to habitat loss and spawning grounds degradation. The genetic diversity of seven natural populations was investigated to establish the genetic knowledge base for successful conservation efforts and for selective breeding. Twelve microsatellite markers, the sequencing of a 615 bp section of mtDNA (Cytb) and PCR-RFLP analysis of two nuclear markers (Act) and (RpS7) were used to analyze the genetic variation and structure among 175 individuals. All microsatellite loci were found to have moderate levels of polymorphism. The pairwise Fst values between population pairings were moderate; the populations w

Introduction: Carrier-based gutta-percha is an effective method of root canal obturation creating a 3-dimensional filling; however, retrieval of the plastic carrier is relatively difficult, particularly with smaller sizes. The purpose of this study was to develop composite carriers consisting of polyethylene (PE), hydroxyapatite (HA), and strontium oxide (SrO) for carrier-based root canal obturation. Methods: Composite fibers of HA, PE, and SrO were fabricated in the shape of a carrier for delivering gutta-percha (GP) using a melt-extrusion process. The fibers were characterized using infrared spectroscopy and the thermal properties determined using differential scanning calorimetry. The elastic modulus and tensile strength tests were dete

Background: The high reactivity of hydrogen peroxide used in bleaching agents have raised important questions on their potential adverse effects on physical properties of restorative materials. The purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate the effect of in-office bleaching agents on the microhardness of a new Silorane-based restorative material in comparison to methacrylate-based restorative material. Materials and method: Forty specimens of Filtek™ P90 (3M ESPE,USA) and Filtek™ Supreme XT (3M ESPE, USA) of (8mm diameter and 3m height) were prepared. All specimens were polished with Sof-Lex disks (3M ESPE, USA). All samples were rinsed and stored in incubator 37˚C for 24 hours in DDW. Ten sample of each material were subjected to