Background: The aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) is a ligand-activated transcription factor historically recognized for its role in the regulation of toxicity mediated by environmental chemicals. Recent research points to AhR's critical participation in male reproductive physiology, particularly in spermatogenesis, hormone signaling, and the maintenance of sperm quality. Both endogenous ligands (e.g., dietary and gut microbiota-derived metabolites) and exogenous pollutants (e.g., dioxins and benzo-α-pyrene) influence AhR-mediated pathways, making it a key link between environmental exposures and male fertility. Results: This review highlights AhR's influence on the male reproductive system, emphasizing the role of endogenous AhR ligands an

The clayey soils have the capability to swell and shrink with the variation in moisture content. Soil stabilization is a well-known technique, which is implemented to improve the geotechnical properties of soils. The massive quantities of waste materials are resulting from modern industry methods create disposal hazards in addition to environmental problems. The steel industry has a waste that can be used with low strength and weak engineering properties soils. This study is carried out to evaluate the effect of steel slag (SS) as a by-product of the geotechnical properties of clayey soil. A series of laboratory tests were conducted on natural and stabilized soils. SS was added by 0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20% to the soil.

Automatic speaker recognition may achieve remarkable performance in matched training and test conditions. Conversely, results drop significantly in incompatible noisy conditions. Furthermore, feature extraction significantly affects performance. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients MFCCs are most commonly used in this field of study. The literature has reported that the conditions for training and testing are highly correlated. Taken together, these facts support strong recommendations for using MFCC features in similar environmental conditions (train/test) for speaker recognition. However, with noise and reverberation present, MFCC performance is not reliable. To address this, we propose a new feature 'entrocy' for accurate and robu

In this paper, we propose an approach to estimate the induced potential, which is generated by swift heavy ions traversing a ZnO thin film, via an energy loss function (ELF). This induced potential is related to the projectile charge density, ρq(k) and is described by the extended Drude dielectric function. At zero momentum transfer, the resulting ELF exhibits good agreement with the previously reported results. The ELF, obtained by the extended Drude model, displays a realistic behavior over the Bethe ridge. It is observed that the induced potential relies on the heavy ion velocity and charge state q. Further, the numerical results show that the induced potential for neutral H, as projectile, dominates when the heavy ion velocity is less

ABSTRACT: Objectives: To study the level of knowledge , attitude and practice of primary health care providers about herbs , and their relation with certain demographic variables Methods : A cross sectional study was conducted using questionnaire administered to Health Care providers at ten Primary Health Care Centers in Baghdad. Results: Four handed participants were recruited, the most common source of knowledge in the medical group were books , while the paramedical group were getting their knowledge mostly from media, attitude of the medical group was neutral (53%) while among paramedical group attitude was positive (65%), the most common purposes for using herbs were energy boosting and preventive. Conclusion: healthcare providers in B

A vocative expression can be defined as an expression of direct address where the participant identity is set forth explicitly within a sentence. This study aims at showing how the vocative particles are used in literally texts, namely in the short story “The Garden Party" written by Kathryn Mansfield and identifying the forms of these vocative particles as used by the characters along with the functions of these vocative particles. For the analysis of vocative forms, the researcher used Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) model. Functionally, the data were analyzed based on Quirk et al. (1985) model. However, the results of this study shows that the characters in “The Garden Party” short story used various forms of vocative particles and