Drought is a complex phenomenon that has severe impacts on the environment. Vegetation and its conditions are very sensitive to drought effects. This study aimed to monitor and assess the drought severity and its relationships to some ecological variables in ten districts of Erbil Governorate (Kurdistan Region), Iraq, throughout 20 years (1998-2017). The results revealed that droughts frequently hit Erbil throughout the study period. The Landsat time-series- based on Vegetation Condition Index (VCI) significantly correlated with precipitation, Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and latitude. Extreme VCI-based drought area percentages were recorded in 1999, 2000, 2008, and 2011 by 43.4%, 67.9%, 43.3%, and 40.0%, respectively. The highest crop yield reduction in the study area occurred mainly in 2000, 2008, and 2012 due to low precipitation rates. These results reveal the capability of the VCI for drought characteristics and highlighting relationships with some ecological variables, which provide vital information to the decision-makers, environmental, and economic sectors.
This study aims to formulate azithromycin oleogel to locally treat skin infections such as acne vulgaris and skin wound infection. Providing a form of azithromycin that can be administered topically is highly desired to prevent unwanted systemic complications including diarrhea, nausea, and abdominal pain. Additionally, it will avoid first pass metabolism, improves patient acceptance, provides an alternative in nauseated patients, decreases the dose by direct contact with the pathological site, and provides a noninvasive and convenient mode of administration. Furthermore, for treating wound infections, the gel will act as a scaffold biomaterial for wound closure besides its antibacterial effect. Herein, we propose the use of grapeseed oil-b
... Show MoreBecause of cost-effective production and abundant resources of calcium, Ca-ion batteries (CIBs) are an appropriate option to alternate Li-ion batteries (LIBs). A new category of anode materials for CIBs has emerged since the successful synthesis of carbon nanotubes, which are B and N doped derivatives of it. For high-performance CIBs, BC2N nanotube (BC2NNT) has been studied as promising anode materials. In order to comprehend electrochemical attributes, cycling stability, and adsorption behavior of BC2NNT, first-principles computations have been executed. Based on nuclear magnetic resonance computations, two types of hexagonal rings (B2C2N2 (I) and BC4N (II)) were specified that are non-aromatic. Ca has adsorption on B2C2N2 and BC4N with ad
... Show MorePandemic COVID-19 is a contagious disease affecting more than 200 countries, territories, and regions. Recently, Iraq is one of the countries that have immensely suffered from this outbreak. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is also prone to the disease. Until now, more than 23,000 confirmed cases have been recorded in the region. Since the onset of the COVID-19 in Wuhan, based on epidemiological modelling, researchers have used various models to predict the future of the epidemic and the time of peak, yielding diverse numbers in different countries. This study aims to estimate the basic reproductive number [R0] for COVID-19 in KRI, using the standard SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) epidemic model. A system of non
... Show MoreThere 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
... Show MoreIn this paper, the dynamical behavior of a three-dimensional fractional-order prey-predator model is investigated with Holling type III functional response and constant rate harvesting. It is assumed that the middle predator species consumes only the prey species, and the top predator species consumes only the middle predator species. We also prove the boundedness, the non-negativity, the uniqueness, and the existence of the solutions of the proposed model. Then, all possible equilibria are determined, and the dynamical behaviors of the proposed model around the equilibrium points are investigated. Finally, numerical simulations results are presented to confirm the theoretical results and to give a better understanding of the dynami
... Show MoreThe objective of this review was to describe the COVID-19 complications after recovery.
The researchers systematically reviewed studies that reported post-COVID-19 complications from three databases: PubMed, Google Scholar and the World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 database. The search was conducted between 21 November 2020 and 14 January 2021. Inclusion criteria were articles written in English, with primary data, reporting complications of COVID-19 after full
This review explores the Knowledge Discovery Database (KDD) approach, which supports the bioinformatics domain to progress efficiently, and illustrate their relationship with data mining. Thus, it is important to extract advantages of Data Mining (DM) strategy management such as effectively stressing its role in cost control, which is the principle of competitive intelligence, and the role of it in information management. As well as, its ability to discover hidden knowledge. However, there are many challenges such as inaccurate, hand-written data, and analyzing a large amount of variant information for extracting useful knowledge by using DM strategies. These strategies are successfully applied in several applications as data wa
... Show MoreThis paper is concerned with a Coupled Reaction-diffusion system defined in a ball with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Firstly, we studied the blow-up set showing that, under some conditions, the blow-up in this problem occurs only at a single point. Secondly, under some restricted assumptions on the reaction terms, we established the upper (lower) blow-up rate estimates. Finally, we considered the Ignition system in general dimensional space as an application to our results.
The application of the test case prioritization method is a key part of system testing intended to think it through and sort out the issues early in the development stage. Traditional prioritization techniques frequently fail to take into account the complexities of big-scale test suites, growing systems and time constraints, therefore cannot fully fix this problem. The proposed study here will deal with a meta-heuristic hybrid method that focuses on addressing the challenges of the modern time. The strategy utilizes genetic algorithms alongside a black hole as a means to create a smooth tradeoff between exploring numerous possibilities and exploiting the best one. The proposed hybrid algorithm of genetic black hole (HGBH) uses the
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