The main purpose of this investigation is to evaluate the concentrations of six essential metals (Na+, Mg2+, K+, Ca2+, Fe2+ and Zn2+) in saffron and a farm soil using the neutron activation analysis (NAA) as a nuclear spectrometry method. The stratified random sampling method was used here. The NAA results showed the well uptake of Mg2+, K+, Ca2+, Fe2+, and Zn2+ in saffron, which is lower than the toxicity range. Based on the contamination factor and geoaccumulation index, soil contamination levels were determined uncontaminated by Zn, moderately contaminated by Na+ and Fe2+, and strongly contaminated by Ca2+, K+, and Mg2+. Results of the contamination degree and pollution load index indicated moderately/strongly soil contamination and a moderate geometric mean of the contamination index. The Na+ enrichment factor (EF) showed a minimal man-made impact on sodium enrichment. Saffron cultivation has likely caused more accumulations of Mg2+, K+, Ca2+, and Fe2+, as well as a considerable deficiency of Zn2+ in the soil, based on EFs. The biological concentration factor showed a significant zinc accumulation by the corm of saffron. There was well translocation from corm to all the aerial tissues for K+. Also, sodium adsorption ratio, exchangeable sodium percentage, pH, and electrical conductivity evaluated the non-salinity level of soil in all saffron farms.
We present a case of congenital of flexor pollicis longus agenesis without thenar hypoplasia in a 12-year-old girl with no history of trauma. Two-staged corrective surgery was planned. In the first stage, the flexor pulley was reconstructed using silicone followed by the second stage 3 months later when flexor pollicis longus reconstruction was performed using tendon transfer of the flexor digitorum superficialis. The patient completed post-operative physiotherapy and the result of the surgical treatment in both functional and cosmetic aspects was, in the authors’ opinion, excellent.
Experimental and numerical studies have been conducted on the effects of bed roughness elements such as cubic and T-section elements that are regularly half-channel arrayed on one side of the river on turbulent flow characteristics and bed erosion downstream of the roughness elements. The experimental study has been done for two types of bed roughness elements (cubic and T-section shape) to study the effect of these elements on the velocity profile downstream the elements with respect to different water flow discharges and water depths. A comparison between the cubic and T-section artificial bed roughness showed that the velocity profile downstream the T-section increased in smooth side from the river and decrease in the rough side
... Show MoreGroupwise non-rigid image alignment is a difficult non-linear optimization problem involving many parameters and often large datasets. Previous methods have explored various metrics and optimization strategies. Good results have been previously achieved with simple metrics, requiring complex optimization, often with many unintuitive parameters that require careful tuning for each dataset. In this chapter, the problem is restructured to use a simpler, iterative optimization algorithm, with very few free parameters. The warps are refined using an iterative Levenberg-Marquardt minimization to the mean, based on updating the locations of a small number of points and incorporating a stiffness constraint. This optimization approach is eff
... Show MoreIn this paper, a description of a design for new DES block cipher, namely DES64X and DES128X. The goals of this design, a part of its security level, are large implementation flexibility on various operating systems as well as high performances. The high level structure is based on the principle of DES and Feistel schema, and proposes the design of an efficient key-schedule algorithm which will output pseudorandomsequences of subkeys. The main goal is to reach the highest possible flexibility, in terms of round numbers, key size, and block size. A comparison of the proposed systems on 32-bit, 64-bit operating system, using 32-bit and 64-bit Java Virtual Machine (JVM), showed that the latter has much better performance than the former.
... Show MoreThe need for wireless sensing technology has rapidly increased recently, specifically the usage of electromagnetic waves which becoming more required as a source of information. Silicon carbide (SiC) Nano particles has been used in this study, the material under test (MUT) was exposed directly to a microwave field to examine the electromagnetic behavior. The permittivity and permeability were investigated with different filler materials to approach best and optimal electromagnetic absorbing characteristics to assist engineers to monitor structure-based composite for defects evaluation that may occur during operation conditions or through manufacturing process. XRD, FESEM and both complex permittivity and permeability were measured f
... Show MoreAn effective two-body density operator for point nucleon system
folded with the tenser force correlations( TC's), is produced and used
to derive an explicit form for ground state two-body charge density
distributions (2BCDD's) applicable for 25Mg, 27Al and 29Si nuclei. It is
found that the inclusion of the two-body TC's has the feature of
increasing the central part of the 2BCDD's significantly and reducing
the tail part of them slightly, i.e. it tends to increase the probability of
transferring the protons from the surface of the nucleus towards its
centeral region and consequently makes the nucleus to be more rigid
than the case when there is no TC's and also leads to decrease the
1/ 2
r 2 of the nucleu
To promote sustainable steel-concrete composite structures, it is essential to develop special shear connectors that facilitate accelerated construction and deconstruction. A lockbolt demountable shear connector (LBDSC) was recently proposed. While the LBDSC has been evaluated using horizontal and vertical (standard) push-out tests, it is essential to further assess the disassembly mechanism and the positive flexural performance of prefabricated demountable composite beams (PDCBs) under both serviceability and ultimate limit states. Two full-scale test specimens of PDCBs with LBDSC were designed with partial shear connections and assessed using a three or four-point load beam setup under both cyclic and static monotonic loading conditions.
... Show MoreThis study relates to synthesis of bentonite-supported iron/copper nanoparticles through the biosynthesis method using eucalyptus plant leaf extract, which were then named E-Fe/Cu@B-NPs. The synthesised E-Fe/Cu@B-NPs were examined by a set of experiments involving a heterogeneous Fenton-like process that removed direct blue 15 (DB15) dye from wastewater. The resultant E-Fe/Cu@B-NPs were characterised by scanning electron microscopy, Brunauer–Emmet–Teller analysis, zeta potential analysis, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and atomic force microscopy. The operating parameters in batch experiments were optimised using Box–Behnken design. These parameters were pH, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2
... Show MoreThe species of Opilio kakunini Snegovaya, Cokendolpher & Mozaffarian, 2018 was recorded for the first time in Iraq; as well as to four species belonging to this order which were recorded previously. In this paper, we added a new species to the checklist of Iraqi opilionid fauna with a description of the most important characteristics, along with genitalia, for both males and females are presented with digital photographs. Specimens of males and females were collected from Al- Rifai district northern of Dhi-Qar Province, southern of Iraq.