Water is the basis of the existence of all kinds of life, so obtaining it with good quality represents a challenge to human existence and development especially in the desert and remote cities because these areas contain small populations and water purification requires great materials and huge amounts of fossil fuels resulting pollution of the environment. Cheap and environmentally friendly desalination methods have been done by using solar distillations. Passive solar stills have low yields, so in this research, the problem is overcome by connecting four heat pipes which are installed on the parabolic concentrator reflector with passive solar still to increase the temperature of hot water to more than 90°C, as a resul

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

The present study aims to study the correlation between visfatin levels and metabolic syndrome in Iraqi obese adolescence (with and without metabolic syndrome) and its relation with other studied biochemical parameters. Sixty obese adolescences were depended in this study (with and without metabolic syndrome), compared with (30) non-obese children as control group. This study was done in the period from April 2020 until the end of December 2020, in the National Diabetes Centre/Mustansiriya University, Baghdad/Iraq. There were no significant differences in age, height, waist circumferences (WC), and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) in the patients' groups. In contrast, a significant increase differs (p<0.05) was recorded in the values of

The double-skin profiled composite wall (DSPCW) system, filled with concrete material, is favorable in modern structures due to its high strength and ductility. Openings may be required within this composite wall (DSPCW) for various reasons, similar to a conventional bearing wall, which can lead to a reduction in bearing capacity. Therefore, to avoid changes in the geometry, materials, and thickness of this DSPCW wall, a new internally stiffening concept has been suggested by providing embedded cold-formed steel tube (CFST) columns. For this purpose, two full-scale DSPCW specimens were tested under static axial load, one of which was fabricated with a large opening size and stiffened with two octagonal CFST columns, while the other

Transition metal complexes of Co(II) and Ni(II) with azo dye 3,5-dimethyl-2-(4-nitrophenylazo)-phenol derived from 4-nitoaniline and3,5-dimethylphenol were synthesized. Characterization of these compounds has been done on the basis of elemental analysis,electronic data, FT-IR,UV-Vis and 1 HNMR, as well as magnetic susceptibility and conductivity measurements. The nature of thecomplexes formed were studies following the mole ratio and continuous variation methods, Beer ' s law obeyed over a concentrationrange (1x10 -4 - 3x10 -4 M). High molar absorbtivity of the complex solutions were observed. From the analytical data, thestoichiomerty of the complexes has been found to be 1:2 (Metal:ligand). On the basis of physicochemical data tetrahedral

This work studies the role of serum apelin-36 and Glutathione S-transferases (GST) activity in association with the hormonal, metabolic profiles and their link to the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in healthy and patients' ladies with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). A total of fifty-four (PCOS) patients and thirty-one healthy woman as a control have been studied. The PCOS patients were subdivided on the basis of body-mass-index (BMI), into 2-subgroups (the first group was obese-PCOS with BMI ≥ 30 and the second group was non-obese PCOS MBI<30). Fasting-insulin-levels and Lipid-profile, Homeostatic-model assessment-of-insulin-resistance (HOMA-IR), follicle-stimulating-hormone (FSH), luteinizing-hormone (LH), testosterone and

Interleukin-38 (IL-38), an inflammatory cytokine discovered in recent years, has been implicated in the pathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). IL-38 is encoded by the IL1F10 (interleukin 1 family member 10) gene. Genetic variants of this gene have been associated with susceptibility to a number of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, while their association with SLE risk has not been explored. In this case–control study, two novel variants of the 5 prime untranslated region (5′UTR) of the IL1F10 gene, rs3811050 C/T and rs3811051 T/G, were investigated

Segmented regression consists of several sections separated by different points of membership, showing the heterogeneity arising from the process of separating the segments within the research sample. This research is concerned with estimating the location of the change point between segments and estimating model parameters, and proposing a robust estimation method and compare it with some other methods that used in the segmented regression. One of the traditional methods (Muggeo method) has been used to find the maximum likelihood estimator in an iterative approach for the model and the change point as well. Moreover, a robust estimation method (IRW method) has used which depends on the use of the robust M-estimator technique in