Several adipokines are produced and secreted from adipose tissue, such as retinol binding protein-4, which triggers metabolic syndromes and insulin resistance. Retinol binding protein-4 transfers vitamin A or retinol in the blood. Higher levels of retinol binding protein-4 are interrelated with progress of metabolic disease, comprising obesity, metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes mellitus. The present study investigates the role of retinol-binding protein-4 levels in type 2 diabetic Iraqi patients with metabolic syndrome. Sixty type 2 diabetic patients aged 40–53 years were examined. Of these 30 patients has metabolic syndrome and 30 without metabolic syndrome. The patients sampled were from the National Diabetes Center/ Mustansiriyah

Sub-threshold operation has received a lot of attention in limited performance applications.However, energy optimization of sub-threshold circuits should be performed with the concern of the performance limitation of such circuit. In this paper, a dual size design is proposed for energy minimization of sub-threshold CMOS circuits. The optimal downsizing factor is determined and assigned for some gates on the off-critical paths to minimize the energy at the maximum allowable performance. This assignment is performed using the proposed slack based genetic algorithm which is a heuristic-mixed evolutionary algorithm. Some gates are heuristically assigned to the original and the downsized design based on their slack time determined by static tim

<span lang="EN-US">Iraqi people have been without energy for nearly two decades, even though their geographic position provides a high intensity of radiation appropriate for the construction of solar plants capable of producing significant quantities of electricity. Also, the annual sunny hours in Iraq are between 3,600 to 4,300 hours which makes it perfect to use the photovoltaics arrays to generate electricity with very high efficiency compared to many countries, especially in Europe. This paper shows the amount of electric energy generated by the meter square of crystalline silicon in the photovoltaic (PV) array that already installed in 18 states in Iraq for each month of the year. The results of the meter-square of PV arr

The global rise in temperature and the desert climatic conditions prevalent in Middle Eastern countries have exacerbated rutting distress in heavily trafficked highways. Conventional asphalt binders with a high-temperature performance grade (PG 70) have proven inadequate under such extreme conditions, necessitating the development of modified binders with enhanced high-temperature performance. While polymer modification using styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS), an elastomeric polymer, and ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA), a plastomeric polymer, has been widely studied, limited research provides a direct comparison of their effectiveness at both the binder and mixture levels under extremely high-temperature conditions. This study addresses this gap

The implementation of decentralization in Iraq was asymmetrical, leading to different forms and paces of implementation. Comparing four cases of Basra, Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Sulaymaniyah indicate that these cases differ in their political stability and autonomy in a way that led to a different forms of decentralization. This paper argues that the higher the level of political autonomy from the federal government, the more efficient the governance model, and the more efficient the governance model, the more legitimate the system (trust), and the more legitimate a system, the more accountable elected officials. Therefore, it recommends reforming the institutional setup of decentralization by having districts, instead of provinces, as the bu

The implementation of decentralization in Iraq was asymmetrical, leading to different forms and paces of implementation. Comparing four cases of Basra, Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Sulaymaniyah indicate that these cases differ in their political stability and autonomy in a way that led to a different forms of decentralization. This paper argues that the higher the level of political autonomy from the federal government, the more efficient the governance model, and the more efficient the governance model, the more legitimate the system (trust), and the more legitimate a system, the more accountable elected officials. Therefore, it recommends reforming the institutional setup of decentralization by having districts, instead of provinces, as t

Alumina thin films have significant applications in the areas of optoelectronics, optics, electrical insulators, sensors and tribology. The novel aspect of this work is that the homogeneous alumina thin films were prepared in several stages to generate a plasma jet. In this paper, aluminium nanoparticles suspended in vinyl alcohol were prepared using exploding wire plasma. TEM analysis was used to determine the size and shape of particles in aluminium and vinyl alcohol suspensions; the TEM images showed that the particle size is 17.2 nm. Aluminium/poly vinyl alcohol (Al/PVA) thin films were prepared using this suspension on quartz substrate by plasma jet technique at room temperature with an argon gas flow rate of 1 L/min. The Al/PV