Background: It's believed that HBD-3 is involved in the tissue remodeling process of articular cartilage. Also, HBD-3 has anti-inflammatory properties. Objectives: The purpose of this study is to assay human beta-defensine-3 (HBD-3) in serum from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients and investigate its correlation with proinflammatory cytokines. Methods: In this case-control study, fifty-eight RA patients were aged 20–65 years, and 29 age-matched healthy subjects (HS) had no inflammatory rheumatic diseases. The disease activity score-28 joint erythrocyte sedimentation rate (DAS28-ESR) was used to measure RA activity. CRP, ACPA, HBD-3, TNF-α, and IL-1β were assessed using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay technique (ELISA). Res

In this paper the effect of engagement length, number of teeth, amount of applied load, wave propagation time, number of cycles, and initial crack length on the principal stress distribution, velocity of crack propagation, and cyclic crack growth rate in a spline coupling subjected to cyclic torsional impact have been investigated analytically and experimentally. It was found that the stresses induced due to cyclic impact loading are higher than the stresses induced due to impact loading with high percentage depends on the number of cycles and total loading time. Also increasing the engagement length and the number of teeth reduces the principal stresses (40%) and
(25%) respectively for increasing the engagement length from (0.15 to 0

Background: The study aimed to investigate the effect of different techniques of en masse retraction on the vertical and sagittal position, axial inclination, rate of space closure, and type of movement of maxillary central incisor. Materials and methods: A typodont simulation system was used (CL II division 2 malocclusion). Three groups were used group 1(N=10, T-loop), group 2(N=10, Time-Saving loop), and group 3(N=10, Microimplant). Photographs were taken before and after retraction and measurements were made using Autodesk AutoCAD© software 2010. Kruskal-Wallis one-way analyses of variance and Mann-Whitney U test (p?0.05) were used. Results: The rate of space closure showed no significant difference among the three groups (p?0.05), whi

The present study took up the different ways to cultivate the species Epipremnum aureum by two habitat water and soil and comber the anatomical features of the root, stem, and leaf. The results showed amazing significant anatomical features to the ecosystem. The root and stem anatomy showing decrease in all characters that studied but the leaf anatomy showing increase of palisade, spongy tissue thickness, midrib thickness, number of vessels in the xylem also the long and width of stomata of the soilless plants than soil ones. The upper epidermis empty from the stomata for the two treatment and the stoma diffuse in the lower epidermis, the type of it paracytic type. Also the total of flavonoids in the plant that were growth in soil reached 1

Simulation of free convection heat transfer in a square enclosure induced by heated thin plate is represented numerically. All  the enclosure walls have constant temperature lower than the plate’s temperature. The flow is assumed to be two-dimensional. The discretized equations were solved stream function, vorticity, and energy equations by finite difference method using explicit technique and Successive Over- Relaxation method. The study was performed for different values of Rayleigh number ranging from 10³ to 10⁵ for different angle position of heated thin plate(0°, 45°, 90°). Air was chosen as a working fluid (Pr = 0.71). Aspect ratio of center of plate to the parallel left wall A₂

Single Point Incremental Forming (SPIF) is a forming technique of sheet material based on layered manufacturing principles. The sheet part is locally deformed through horizontal slices. The moving locus of forming tool (called as toolpath) in these slices constructed to the finished part was performed by the CNC technology. The toolpath was created directly from CAD model of final product. The forming tool is a Ball-end forming tool, which was moved along the toolpath while the edges of sheet material were clamped rigidly on fixture.

This paper presented an investigation study of thinning distribution of a conical shapes carried out by incremental forming and the validation of finite element method to evaluate the limits of the p

The evacuated tube solar collector ETC is studied intensively and extensively by experimental and
theoretical works, in order to investigate its performance and enhancement of heat transfer, for Baghdad climate
from April 2011 till the end of March 2012. Experimental work is carried out on a well instrumented collector
consists of 16 evacuated tubes of aspect ratio 38.6 and thermally insulated tank of volume 112L. The relation
between convective heat transfer and natural circulation inside the tube is estimated, collector efficiency, effect of
tube tilt angles, incidence angle modifier, The solar heating system is investigated under different loads pattern (i.e
closed and open flow) to evaluate the heat loss coefficient

This study investigates the influence of fear, refuge, and migration in a predator–prey model, where the interactions between the species follow an asymmetric function response. In contrast to some other findings, we propose that prey develop an anti-predator response in response to a concentration of predators, which in turn increases the fear factor of the predators. The conditions under which all ecologically meaningful equilibrium points exist are discussed in detail. The local and global dynamics of the model are determined at all equilibrium points. The model admits several interesting results by changing the rate of fear of predators and predator aggregate sensitivity. Numerical simulations have been performed to verify our theoret