English is spoken by its native speakers in two different forms. Reduced form which marks the colloquial and rapid speech so that it is easily produced and a citation or unreduced form which is a characteristic of careful, emphasized and slow speech.

      This paper investigates Iraqi EFL university students’ production of the two forms mentioned above. The sample chosen includes twenty fourth year students, of which ten are males and the other ten are females from the Department of English of the College of Languages of the University of Duhok in Kurdistan Region of Iraq in the academic year 2020-2021.  The material tested is six connective words which represent the commonest ones in every-day co

Objective. This study aimed to evaluate and compare the force degradation of two types of elastomeric chains following different periods of immersion in zinc-containing mouthwashes. Materials and Methods. Four hundred and forty pieces of Elasto-Force and Super Elasto-Force elastomeric chains were divided into two control and eight experimental groups. The pieces were stretched to 25 mm on pins mounted on an acrylic block and stored in distilled water at 37°C. The experimental groups were immersed in four different types of mouthwash for one minute twice a day throughout the test period. Ten continuous thermocycles per day between cold and hot water baths (5–55°C) were carried out. Forces were measured at six-time intervals (in

In this work, mesoporous silica SBA-15 was prepared and functionalized with amine groups (i.e., NH2) to form NH2/SBA-15. The curcumin (CUR) was encapsulated into the surface and pore of NH2/SBA-15 to create CUR@NH2/SBA-15 as an efficient carrier in drug delivery systems (DDSs). The three samples (i.e., SBA-15, NH2/SBA-15, and CUR@NH2/SBA-15) were characterized. The study investigated the effect of the carrier dose, initial CUR concentration, pH, and contact time on the CUR loading efficiency (DLE%) via adsorption. The best DLE% for the SBA-15 and NH2/SBA-15 were found to be 45% and 89.7%, respectively. The Langmuir isotherm had a greater correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.998 for SBA-15. A pseudo-secondorder kinetic model seemed to fit well

Commercially pure titanium (cpTi) is widely used as dental implant material although it was found that titanium exhibited high modulus of elasticity and the lower corrosion tendency in oral environment. Niobium(Nb) was chosen for this study as an alternative to cpTi implant material due to its bioinert behavior and good elastic modulus and moderate cost in addition to corrosion resistance. This study was done to evaluate the effect of biomimetic coating on the surface properties of the commercially pure titanium and niobium implants by in vitro and in vivo experiments. The in vitro study was involved etching the samples of each material in HCl then soaking in 10M NaOH aqueous solution. These samples were then immersed in a 5 times concent

Background: The gene responsible for encoding the protein of cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen-4 (CTLA-4) has been found to be associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in different ethnic populations. But the association of +49A/G CTLA-4 polymorphism with susceptibility of RA among Iraqi Arab populations has not yet been determined. Methods: One hundred and seventy-eight patients were examined, 67 of them were males (mean age 54.71 ± 10.4 years), while 167 were examined for the control group, of whom 64 were males and the rest were females. CTLA-4 DNA genotyping was carried on to determine the +49 A/G (rs231775) polymorphism using a polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP). Enzyme-linked immuno