Beyond the immediate content of speech, the voice can provide rich information about a speaker's demographics, including age and gender. Estimating a speaker's age and gender offers a wide range of applications, spanning from voice forensic analysis to personalized advertising, healthcare monitoring, and human-computer interaction. However, pinpointing precise age remains intricate due to age ambiguity. Specifically, utterances from individuals at adjacent ages are frequently indistinguishable. Addressing this, we propose a novel, end-to-end approach that deploys Mozilla's Common Voice dataset to transform raw audio into high-quality feature representations using Wav2Vec2.0 embeddings. These are then channeled into our self-attentio

Background: There is a pronounced controversy regarding the dental and mental consequences of thumb sucking habit, which is a familiar nonnutritive pattern of sucking. Commonly, this behavior is harmless, yet those who sustain this pattern may have dental alterations and emotional difficulties. Children’s intelligence level influences their capabilities to judge, evaluate and handle priorities and/or problems profoundly and precisely. Thumb sucking habit might be a manner of liberating the psychological tenseness among several children. Objective: The purpose of this study is to assess the prevalence of thumb sucking habit and its relation to the eruption of permanent teeth and IQ among children aged 6-7 years old. Subjects and methods: I

A simple, environmental friendly and selective sample preparation technique employing porous membrane protected micro-solid phase extraction (μ-SPE) loaded with molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) for the determination of ochratoxin A (OTA) is described. After the extraction, the analyte was desorbed using ultrasonication and was analyzed using high performance liquid chromatography. Under the optimized conditions, the detection limits of OTA for coffee, grape juice and urine were 0.06 ng g−1, 0.02 and 0.02 ng mL−1, respectively while the quantification limits were 0.19 ng g−1, 0.06 and 0.08 ng mL−1, respectively. The recoveries of OTA from coffee spiked at 1, 25 and 50 ng g−1, grape juice and urine samples at 1, 25 and 50 ng mL

Aphelenchus avenae was isolated from the wheat crown in Summel distract- Duhok, Kurdistan region-Iraq infected by a crown rot disease which is caused by Fusarium spp;    wheat's crown culturing on Potato Dextrose Agar (PDA) and incubating at 25°C A. avenae was found associated with fungal culture which meant that fungal nematode was parasitic on crown rot fungi on wheat crown, this species was described for the first time in Iraq.

Fungal Nematode incubated with Fusarium graminearum, F. oxysporum and Verticillium dahliae reproduce in both solid and liquid media, best results of nematode reproduction were recorded on F. graminearum followed by F. oxy

In this study, Al2O3 thin films were prepared by dc reactive sputtering technique using different gas mixtures of argon and oxygen gases (90:10, 70:30, 50:50, 30:70, and 10:90). These films were characterized to introduce their surface morphology and elemental composition as functions of the oxygen content in the gas mixture. The gas mixing ratio plays a crucial role in controlling the nanoscale morphology of the prepared thin films. The [Al]/[O] ratio varies non-linearly with the Ar:O2​ mixing ratio. Increasing the oxygen content leads to a progressive decrease in surface roughness, resulting in smoother and more uniform films with finer granular features. These results presented herein are useful to optimize the sputtering process to ac

Background: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic and systemic autoimmune disease that is characterized by severe synovial inflammation, cartilage erosion, bone loss, and generalized vasculopathy. Although the immunologic mechanism of RA is still unclear, it is now thought to be a primarily Th17-driven disease. Along with other factors, IL-23 stimulates the expansion of Th17 cells from naive CD4+ T cells.

Objective: The objective of this study is to assess the circulating levels of interleukin (IL)-23 in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and determine the correlation between plasma/serum IL-23 levels and disease activity. So, we performed a systematic review with meta-analysis comparing

This research was aimed to study the exposure of Razzazah Lake  to major hydrological changes in recent years as a result of natural climatic changes  and  drought, high evaporation in lake due to stop discharge from Habbaniyah Lake  by Al- majera channel. During 2019, we collected surface water samples at three locations, and three samples from groundwater, in addition one samples from each location Imam Ali Drop and Sewage water  of Karbala. The Results  show that the heavy isotopes in lake and groundwater well are enriched during the warm period, and depleted during the cold period. Chemically, The dominant cations and anions in Al-Razzaza lake water are mainly of in Order  Ca > Na > Mg and  Cl>SO4 and the water

Graphene oxide GO was functionalized with 4-amino, 3-substituted 1H, 1, 2, 4 Triazole 5(4H) thion (ASTT) to obtain GOT. GOT characterized by FT-IR, XRD.via modification of the working electrode of the SPCE with the prepared nanomaterial (GOT) the effect of scan rate and pH on the determination of Amoxilline (AMOX) was studied using cyclic voltammetry. AMOX show various responses at pH ranging from 2 to 7 and also was observed sharp increase in the oxidation peaks in the pH 3. The formal potential (midpoint) for AMOX was highly pH-dependent. From the effect of scan rate, surface coverage concentration Γ of electroactive species the values of the electron transfer coefficient and the electron transfer constant rate ket was obtained as 5.39×

Background: Ulcerative colitis disease is a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the gastrointestinal tract. In regulation of this inflammatory process, Interleukin-6, C-reactive proteins and albumin have a major role. Overproduction of IL-6 by immunocompetent cells contributes to activate the liver to produce CRP, transudation of plasma albumin and development of the inflammatory condition. Elevated levels of IL-6 in saliva could be expected, because the saliva-producing cells are part of the digestive system. The purpose of this study was to assess salivary IL-6, CRP and albumin in ulcerative colitis patients in relation to oral findings. Materials and methods: Forty eight saliva specimens collected from three groups of subjects (s