Background. Najaf governorate was recorded as one of the most polluted Iraqi governorates with increased cancer, autoimmune, and abortion cases. Study Groups. A total of 88 adult volunteers from three test groups were divided based on their inhabitance in different geographical regions in Najaf governorate. Group 1 (G1; n, 29) inhabitants of Al‐Ansar, Al‐Abbaseyeh, and Al‐Manathera districts, Group 2 (G2; n, 27) inhabitants of 22 different scattered districts of the governorate, Group 3 (G3; n, 32) inhabitants of Kufa city and center districts in the old Najaf city. According to previous author

Background: Interleukine-2 is a multifunctional cytokine, considered a central regulator of host resistance against a variety of pathogens and has been recently demonstrated to exert an active role in the pathogenesis of periodontal diseases. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of scaling and root planning on level of IL-2 in serum and saliva of patients with chronic generalized periodontitis, in relation to clinical parameters. Materials and Methods: A total of 50 subjects were enrolled, of which 25 had chronic generalized periodontitis and 25 periodontally healthy subjects as control. The clinical parameters included: gingival index, pocket probing depth, clinical attachment level and bleeding on probing. The level of

In recent years, the positioning applications of Internet-of-Things (IoT) based systems have grown increasingly popular, and are found to be useful in tracking the daily activities of children, the elderly and vehicle tracking. It can be argued that the data obtained from GPS based systems may contain error, hence taking these factors into account, the proposed method for this study is based on the application of IoT-based positioning and the replacement of using IoT instead of GPS.  This cannot, however, be a reason for not using the GPS, and in order to enhance the reliability, a parallel combination of the modern system and traditional methods simultaneously can be applied. Although GPS signals can only be accessed in open spaces, GP

Gender and culture are among the factors that influence the process of understanding and interpreting different types of communication, especially images. The current study, which is a part of a master’s thesis, aims at investigating the role of gender and culture in interpreting and understanding the caricatures that deal with women’s issues in Arab societies. To this end, the researchers adopted Barthes’ (1957) concepts of denotation and connotation in his theory of mythologies in addition to Langacker’s (1987) theory of (Domains). The research concludes that the female subjects have better cognitive abilities in investing the signs within the selected caricatures. The other factor the study reached to is that the respondents

The ability of four local fungal isolates for extracellular laccase production has been tested with five grams 1:1(w/v) humidified sawdust as substrate in mineral salt medium. After 21 day of incubation at 25±1 ? C and using one mycelial plug (5mm), higher level of laccase activity (0.15U/ml) and specific activity (15U/mg) were observed by Pleurotus ostreatus in comparison with other fungal isolates. The results of optimum conditions for laccase production from selected isolate showed that, the maximum laccase activity (0.55U/ml) and specific activity (55U/mg) were obtained at moisture ratio 1:3 (w/v), using 3 mycelial plugs (5 mm), after 15 days incubation period at 25±1 ? C. The results of phenol degradation by crud laccase revealed th

Among many problems that reduced the performance of the network, especially Wide Area Network, congestion is one of these, which is caused when traffic request reaches or exceeds the available capacity of a route, resulting in blocking and less throughput per unit time. Congestion management attributes try to manage such cases. The work presented in this paper deals with an important issue that is the Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. QoS is the combination effect on service level, which locates the user's degree of contentment of the service. In this paper, packet schedulers (FIFO, WFQ, CQ and PQ) were implemented and evaluated under different applications with different priorities. The results show that WFQ scheduler gives acceptable r

A simple UV spectrophotometric differential derivatization method was performed for the simultaneous quantification of three aromatic amino acids of tryptophan, the polar tyrosine and phenylalanine TRP, TYR and PHE respectively. The avoidance of the time and reagents consuming steps of sample preparation or analyze separation from its bulk of interferences made the approach environmentally benign, sustainable and green. The linear calibration curves of differential second derivative were built at the optimum wavelength for each analyze (218.9, 236.1 and 222.5 nm) for PHE, TRP and TYR respectively. Quantification for each analyze was in the concentration range of (1.0– 45, 0.1–20.0 and 1.0– 50.0 μg/ml) at replicates of (n=3) with a re