Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were functionalized by hexylamine (HA) in a promising, cost-effective, rapid and microwave-assisted approach. In order to decrease defects and remove acid-treatment stage, functionalization of MWCNTs with HA was carried out in the presence of diazonium reaction. Surface functionality groups and morphology of chemically-functionalized MWCNTS were characterized by FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis (DTG), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). To reach a promising dispersibility in oil media, MWCNTs were functionalized with HA. While the cylindrical structures of MWCNTs were remained reasonably intact, characterization results consistently confirmed the sidewall-functionalization o

Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 DPP-4 inhibition has remained one of the most established ways in treating type 2 diabetes mellitus. Therefore, the development of improved DPP-4 inhibiters is consideredan essential strategy in the design of antidiabetic drugs. In the present study, a structure-based virtual approach was considered to design and evaluate new sitagliptin analogues with improved binding stability and pharmacokinetic properties. A virtual library consisting of 15,034 different compounds was created and then screened using a hierarchical Glide docking protocol (HTVS, SP, and XP). Using integrated computational analyses, the top ranked compounds were further assessed. Based on ADMET predictions, MM-GBSA binding free energy

This study aims at shedding light on the linguistic significance of collocation networks in the academic writing context. Following Firth’s principle “You shall know a word by the company it keeps.” The study intends to examine three selected nodes (i.e. research, study, and paper) shared collocations in an academic context. This is achieved by using the corpus linguistic tool; GraphColl in #LancsBox software version 5 which was announced in June 2020 in analyzing selected nodes. The study focuses on academic writing of two corpora which were designed and collected especially to serve the purpose of the study. The corpora consist of a collection of abstracts extracted from two different academic journals that publish for writ

Various speech enhancement Algorithms (SEA) have been developed in the last few decades. Each algorithm has its advantages and disadvantages because the speech signal is affected by environmental situations. Distortion of speech results in the loss of important features that make this signal challenging to understand. SEA aims to improve the intelligibility and quality of speech that different types of noise have degraded. In most applications, quality improvement is highly desirable as it can reduce listener fatigue, especially when the listener is exposed to high noise levels for extended periods (e.g., manufacturing). SEA reduces or suppresses the background noise to some degree, sometimes called noise suppression alg

The aim of this work is to design an algorithm which combines between steganography andcryptography that can hide a text in an image in a way that prevents, as much as possible, anysuspicion of the hidden textThe proposed system depends upon preparing the image data for the next step (DCT Quantization)through steganographic process and using two levels of security: the RSA algorithm and the digitalsignature, then storing the image in a JPEG format. In this case, the secret message will be looked asplaintext with digital signature while the cover is a coloured image. Then, the results of the algorithmare submitted to many criteria in order to be evaluated that prove the sufficiency of the algorithm andits activity. Thus, the proposed algorit

Patients infected with the COVID-19 virus develop severe pneumonia, which typically results in death. Radiological data show that the disease involves interstitial lung involvement, lung opacities, bilateral ground-glass opacities, and patchy opacities. This study aimed to improve COVID-19 diagnosis via radiological chest X-ray (CXR) image analysis, making a substantial contribution to the development of a mobile application that efficiently identifies COVID-19, saving medical professionals time and resources. It also allows for timely preventative interventions by using more than 18000 CXR lung images and the MobileNetV2 convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. The MobileNetV2 deep-learning model performances were evaluated

Because of vulnerable threats and attacks against database during transmission from sender to receiver, which is one of the most global security concerns of network users, a lightweight cryptosystem using Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) algorithm is proposed. This cryptosystem maintains data privacy by performing encryption of data in cipher form and transfers it over the network and again performing decryption to original data. Hens, ciphers represent encapsulating system for database tables