Acinetobacter baumannii (A. baumannii ) is considered a critical healthcare problem for patients in intensive care units due to its high ability to be multidrug-resistant to most commercially available antibiotics. The aim of this study is to develop a colorimetric assay to quantitatively detect the target DNA of A. baumannii based on unmodified gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) from different clinical samples (burns, surgical wounds, sputum, blood and urine). A total of thirty-six A. baumannii clinical isolates were collected from five Iraqi hospitals in Erbil and Mosul provinces within the period from September 2020 to January 2021. Bacterial isolation and biochemical identification of isolates

As a consequence of a terrorist attack, people may experience posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and lack of feeling secure in relationships. This longitudinal study aimed to examine the prevalence of PTSD symptoms over time, the relationship between adult attachment styles and PTSD, as well as their association with degree of exposure, and finally to consider the distribution and the trajectory of attachment styles. The sample consisted of 235 students (M=125, F=110) who were exposed to different levels of trauma intensity in response to a bombing attack. Participants were recruited and assessed approximately 1 month and 5 months after the attack using a battery of questionnaires. Findings revealed, as expected, that 79.5% of the part

Autonomous systems are these systems which power themselves from the available ambient energies in addition to their duties. In the next few years, autonomous systems will pervade society and they will find their ways into different applications related to health, security, comfort and entertainment. Piezoelectric harvesters are possible energy converters which can be used to convert the available ambient vibration energy into electrical energy. In this contribution, an energy harvesting cantilever array with magnetic tuning including three piezoelectric bimorphs is investigated theoretically and experimentally. Other than harvester designs proposed before, this array is easy to manufacture and insensitive to manufacturi

Nystatin is the drug of choice for treatment of cutaneous fungal infections with main disadvantage that is the need for multiple applications to achieve complete eradication which may reduce patient compliance. Microparticles offer a solution for such issue as they are one of sustained release preparations that achieve slow release of drug over an extended period of time. The objectives of this study were to fabricate nystatin-loaded chitosan microparticles with the ultimate goal of prolonging drug release and to analyze the influence of polymer concentration on various properties of microparticles. Microparticles were prepared by chemical cross-linking method using glutaraldehyde as cross-linking agent. Five formulas, namely N1C1, N1C2,

There are still areas around the world suffer from severe shortage of freshwater supplies. Desalination technologies are not widely used due to their high energy usage, cost, and environmental damaging effects. In this study, a mathematical model of single-bed adsorption desalination system using silica gel-water as working pair is developed and validated via earlier experiments. A very good match between the model predictions and the experimental results is recorded. The objective is to reveal the factors affecting the productivity of fresh water and cooling effect in the solar adsorption system. The proposed model is setup for solving within the commercially-available software (Engineering Equation Solver). It is implemented to so

The long-term monitoring of land movements represents the most successful application of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), particularly the Global Positioning System. However, the application of long term monitoring of land movements depends on the availability of homogenous and consistent daily position time series of stations over a period of time. Such time series can be produced very efficiently by using Precise Point Positioning and Double Difference techniques based on particular sophisticated GNSS processing softwares. Nonetheless, these rely on the availability of GNSS products which are precise satellite orbit and clock, and Earth orientation parameters. Unfortunately, several changes and modifications have been mad

Pareto distribution is used in many economic, financial and social applications. This distribution is used for the study of income and wealth and the study of settlement in cities and villages and the study of the sizes of oil wells as well as in the field of communication through the speed of downloading files from the Internet according to their sizes. This distribution is used in mechanical engineering as one of the distributions of models of failure, stress and durability. Given the practical importance of this distribution on the one hand, and the scarcity of sources and statistical research that deal with it, this research touched on some statistical characteristics such as derivation of its mathematical function , probability density

In this research, the focus was placed on estimating the parameters of the Hypoexponential distribution function using the maximum likelihood method and genetic algorithm. More than one standard, including MSE, has been adopted for comparison by Using the simulation method