Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order of Hymenoptera. The number of species still remaining to be discovered and described is extraordinarily high. Ant members function at many levels: predators and prey, as re, mutualists, and herbivores (Hölldobler and Wilson, 1990). On the other hand, the known living ants involve 17 subfamilies, 334 genera, 13.226 species and 1.966 subspecies of which are described; in Iraq, there were about 108 species was recorded (Bolton, 2017). The desert ant or Cataglyphis Förster is diagnosed from other genera by many features that include: ocelli present and distinct, anterio-ventral surface of head with long and curved hairs, antennal

المقال منشور على موقع مجلة الفورين بوليسي الأميركية (Foreign Policy) على الانترنت في 27 أيلول/سبتمبر 2019. يُشير مصطلح العزل (Impeachment) في الثقافة السياسية الأميركية إلى مجموعة الإجراءات التي يتم بموجبها عزل الرئيس من منصبه، وهذه الإجراءات هي بمثابة عملية طويلة تجري داخل الكونجرس، وتتم وفقاً لخطوات يؤدي فيها كل من مجلسيّ النواب والشيوخ دوراَ. ولا يعني القيام بهذه الإجراءات أن يتم عزل الرئيس، فقد تتم إ

Nd:YAG laser pulses of 9 nanosecond pulse duration and operating wavelength at 1.06 μm, were utilized to drill high thermal conductivity and high reflectivity aluminum and copper foils. The results showed a dependence of drilled holes characteristics on laser power density and the number of laser pulses used. Drilled depth of 74 ϻm was obtained in aluminum at 11.036×108 W/cm2 of laser power density. Due to its higher melting point, copper required higher laser power density and/or larger number of laser pulses to melt, and a maximum depth of 25 μm was reached at 13.46×108 W/cm2 using single laser pulse.

Portable devices such as smartphones, tablet PCs, and PDAs are a useful combination of hardware and software turned toward the mobile workers. While they present the ability to review documents, communicate via electronic mail,  appointments management, meetings, etc. They usually lack a variety of essential security features. To address the security concerns of sensitive data, many individuals and organizations, knowing the associated threats mitigate them through improving authentication of users, encryption of content, protection from malware, firewalls,  intrusion prevention, etc. However, no standards have been developed yet to determine whether such mobile data management systems adequately provide the fu

Viscosity is one of the most important governing parameters of the fluid flow, either in the porous media or in pipelines. So it is important to use an accurate method to calculate the oil viscosity at various operating conditions. In the literature, several empirical correlations have been proposed for predicting crude oil viscosity. However, these correlations are limited to predict the oil viscosity at specified conditions. In the present work, an extensive experimental data of oil viscosities collected from different samples of Iraqi oil reservoirs was applied to develop a new correlation to calculate the oil viscosity at various operating conditions either for dead, satura

This paper proposes a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the fine-tuning meta-heuristic algorithm (FTMA) for solving global optimization problems. In this algorithm, the solutions are fine-tuned using the fundamental steps in meta-heuristic optimization, namely, exploration, exploitation, and randomization, in such a way that if one step improves the solution, then it is unnecessary to execute the remaining steps. The performance of the proposed FTMA has been compared with that of five other optimization algorithms over ten benchmark test functions. Nine of them are well-known and already exist in the literature, while the tenth one is proposed by the authors and introduced in this article. One test trial was shown t

Energy use is second to staffing in building operating costs. Sustainable technology in the energy sector is based on utilizing renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind, glazing systems, insulation. Other areas of focus include heating, ventilation and air conditioning; novel materials and construction methods; improved sensors and monitoring systems; and advanced simulation tools that can help building designers make more energy efficient choices. The objective of this research is studying the effect of insulations on energy consumption of buildings in Iraq and identifying the amount of energy savings from application th

In this study, the performance of the adaptive optics (AO) system was analyzed through a numerical computer simulation implemented in MATLAB. Making a phase screen involved turning computer-generated random numbers into two-dimensional arrays of phase values on a sample point grid with matching statistics. Von Karman turbulence was created depending on the power spectral density. Several simulated point spread functions (PSFs) and modulation transfer functions (MTFs) for different values of the Fried coherent diameter (r_o) were used to show how rough the atmosphere was. To evaluate the effectiveness of the optical system (telescope), the Strehl ratio (S) was computed. The compensation procedure for an AO syst

Machine learning models have recently provided great promise in diagnosis of several ophthalmic disorders, including keratoconus (KCN). Keratoconus, a noninflammatory ectatic corneal disorder characterized by progressive cornea thinning, is challenging to detect as signs may be subtle. Several machine learning models have been proposed to detect KCN, however most of the models are supervised and thus require large well-annotated data. This paper proposes a new unsupervised model to detect KCN, based on adapted flower pollination algorithm (FPA) and the k-means algorithm. We will evaluate the proposed models using corneal data collected from 5430 eyes at different stages of KCN severity (1520 healthy, 331 KCN1, 1319 KCN2, 1699 KCN3 a

Alongside the development of high-speed rail, rail flaw detection is of great importance to ensure railway safety, especially for improving the speed and load of the train. Several conventional inspection methods such as visual, acoustic, and electromagnetic inspection have been introduced in the past. However, these methods have several challenges in terms of detection speed and accuracy. Combined inspection methods have emerged as a promising approach to overcome these limitations. Nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques in conjunction with artificial intelligence approaches have tremendous potential and viability because it is highly possible to improve the detection accuracy which has been proven in various conventional nondestr