Water is the basis of the existence of all kinds of life, so obtaining it with good quality represents a challenge to human existence and development especially in the desert and remote cities because these areas contain small populations and water purification requires great materials and huge amounts of fossil fuels resulting pollution of the environment. Cheap and environmentally friendly desalination methods have been done by using solar distillations. Passive solar stills have low yields, so in this research, the problem is overcome by connecting four heat pipes which are installed on the parabolic concentrator reflector with passive solar still to increase the temperature of hot water to more than 90°C, as a resul

Background: Cell adhesion molecules are protein entities that are located on the cell surface. The vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) expression is related to type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) with dyslipidemia. Objectives: To determine the levels of VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 in T2DM patients with dyslipidemia and to explore the relationship between VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 and the development of dyslipidemia in T2DM patients. Patients and methods: The study included 150 individuals with an age range of (35-55) years. Patients with diabetes for more than 5 years were excluded. Fifty healthy individuals constituted Group 1 (G1), fifty patients with T2DM constituted Group 2 (G2), and fifty T2DM p

Concrete filled steel tube (CFST) columns are being popular in civil engineering due to their superior structural characteristics. This paper investigates enhancement in axial behavior of CFST columns by adding steel fibers to plain concrete that infill steel tubes. Four specimens were prepared: two square columns (100*100 mm) and two circular columns (100 mm in diameter). All columns were 60 cm in length. Plain concrete mix and concrete reinforced with steel fibers were used to infill steel tube columns. Ultimate axial load capacity, ductility and failure mode are discussed in this study. The results showed that the ultimate axial load capacity of CFST columns reinforced with steel fibers increased by 28% and 20 % for circular and square c

 Inflammatory bowel disease includes both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic, progressive relapsing disease of gastrointestinal tract that require long-term treatment or maintenance therapy. Taking patient’s beliefs about the prescribed medication in consideration had been shown to be an important factor that affects compliance of the patient in whom having positive beliefs is a prerequisite for better compliance. The aim of the current study was to investigate and assess beliefs about medicines among a sample of Iraqi patients with inflammatory bowel disease and to determine possible association between these beliefs and some patient-specific factors.

This study is a cross-sectional study carried out o

Detection of early clinical keratoconus (KCN) is a challenging task, even for expert clinicians. In this study, we propose a deep learning (DL) model to address this challenge. We first used Xception and InceptionResNetV2 DL architectures to extract features from three different corneal maps collected from 1371 eyes examined in an eye clinic in Egypt. We then fused features using Xception and InceptionResNetV2 to detect subclinical forms of KCN more accurately and robustly. We obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of 0.99 and an accuracy range of 97–100% to distinguish normal eyes from eyes with subclinical and established KCN. We further validated the model based on an independent dataset with

In this work, varying compositions of SiO₂ micro filler were added
with the Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) and samples have been prepared
using film casting technique. The results have been analyzed and
compared for PVC samples with (1 wt%, 3 wt%, 5 wt% and 10 wt%)
SiO2 micro filler. Mechanical characteristics such as tensile strength,
elongation at break and Young`s modulus were measured for all the
samples, where the tensile strength was increased from 8.39 Mpa for
purified PVC to 16 Mpa for 3% SiO₂/PVC composite. Also, thermal
conductivity measurement values illustrated that composite materials
have a good thermal insulation at 10 wt. %, thermal conductivity was
decreased from 0.1684 W/m.