Objectives: Serratia marcescens is a gram-negative pathogen of many species. The ability of S. marcescens to form biofilms and its potent innate resistance to antimicrobials and cleaning solutions are both essential for its pathogenicity and survival. The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) on the biofilm of S. marcescens, as an alternative for antibiotic therapy. Methods: Different specimens, including ear swabs, burns, mid-stream urine, wound swabs, and sputum, were collected from patients who were brought to Al-Ramadi Hospital, Iraq. All samples were cultured, and the colonies that were obtained were detected using the VITEK® 2 compact. The ability of biofilms to develop was e
... Show MoreIncorporating waste byproducts into concrete is an innovative and promising way to minimize the environmental impact of waste material while maintaining and/or improving concrete’s mechanical characteristics and strength. The proper application of sawdust as a pozzolan in the building industry remains a significant challenge. Consequently, this study conducted an experimental evaluation of sawdust as a fill material. In particular, sawdust as a fine aggregate in concrete offers a realistic structural and economical possibility for the construction of lightweight structural systems. Failure under four-point loads was investigated for six concrete-filled steel tube (CFST) specimens. The results indicated that recycled lightweight co
... Show MoreThe interest in art for young ages is seen as an obvious breakthrough and as revealing of psychological and health feelings in addition to emotions, and it is a treatment for those who suffer from behavioral disorders. The problem arose with the following question: What is the role of artistic expression in diagnosing behavioral disorders for primary school pupils? The aim of the research is to detect the behavioral disorders in the artistic expression of the female students' paintings from the teachers' point of view. The descriptive analytical approach was adopted as it is the appropriate method for identifying and estimating the characteristics and features related to people, places and things, and analyzing situations or phenomena as a
... Show MoreIn this paper, the construction of Hermite wavelets functions and their operational matrix of integration is presented. The Hermite wavelets method is applied to solve nth order Volterra integro diferential equations (VIDE) by expanding the unknown functions, as series in terms of Hermite wavelets with unknown coefficients. Finally, two examples are given
Objective: To identify barriers to healthcare access, to assess the health literacy levels of the foreign-born Arabic speaking population in Iowa, USA and to measure their prevalence of seeking preventive healthcare services. Methods: A cross-sectional study of native Arabic speaking adults involved a focus group and an anonymous paper-based survey. The focus group and the Andersen Model were used to develop the survey questionnaire. The survey participants were customers at Arabic grocery stores, worshippers at the city mosque and patients at free University Clinic. Chi-square test was used to measure the relationship between the characteristics of survey participants and preventive healthcare services. Thematic analysis was
... Show MoreCommunity detection is an important and interesting topic for better understanding and analyzing complex network structures. Detecting hidden partitions in complex networks is proven to be an NP-hard problem that may not be accurately resolved using traditional methods. So it is solved using evolutionary computation methods and modeled in the literature as an optimization problem. In recent years, many researchers have directed their research efforts toward addressing the problem of community structure detection by developing different algorithms and making use of single-objective optimization methods. In this study, we have continued that research line by improving the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm using a
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