Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a disease caused by Leishmania tropica parasite. Current treatments for this parasite are undesirable because of their toxicity, resistance, and high cost. Macrophages are key players against pathogens. Nitric oxide (NO), a molecule produce by immune cells, controls intracellular killing of pathogens during infection. Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) demonstrated broad-spectrum activity against various types of infectious diseases. It has the ability to stimulate oxygen species production.  This study aims to analyze the macrophages activation through NO production and estimate the cytotoxicity based on the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release upon exposure to L. tropica and

Selective recovery of atropine from Datura innoxia seeds was studied. Applying pertraction in a rotating film contactor (RFC) the alkaloid was successfully recovered from native aqueous extracts obtained from the plant seeds. Decane as a liquid membrane and sulfuric acid as a stripping agent were used. Pertraction from native liquid extracts provided also a good atropine refinement, since the most of co-extracted from the plant species remained in the feed or membrane solution. Solid–liquid extraction of atropine from Datura innoxia seeds was coupled with RF-pertraction in order to purify simultaneously the extract obtained from the plant. Applying the integrated process, proposed in this study, a product containing 92.6% atropine was

Embedding an identifying data into digital media such as video, audio or image is known as digital watermarking. In this paper, a non-blind watermarking algorithm based on Berkeley Wavelet Transform is proposed. Firstly, the embedded image is scrambled by using Arnold transform for higher security, and then the embedding process is applied in transform domain of the host image. The experimental results show that this algorithm is invisible and has good robustness for some common image processing operations.

   A microbubble air flotation technique was used to remove chromium ions from simulated wastewater (e.g. water used for electroplating, textiles, paints and pigments, and tanning leather). Experimental parameters were investigated to analyze the flotation process and determine the removal efficiency. These parameters included the location of the sampling port from the bottom of the column, where the diffuser is located to the top of flotation column (30, 60, and 90 cm), the type of surfactant (anionic, SDS, or cationic, CTAB) and its concentration (5, 10, 15, and 20 mg/L), the pH of the initial solution (3, 5, 7, 9, and 11), the initial contaminant concentration (10, 20, 30, and 40 mg/L), the gas flow rate (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5 L/mi

A cantilevered piezoelectric beam with a tip mass at its free end is a common energy harvester configuration. This paper introduces a new principle of designing such a harvester which increases the generated voltage without changing the natural frequency of the harvester: The attraction force between two permanent magnets is used to add stiffness to the system. This magnetic stiffening counters the effect of the tip mass on the natural frequency. Three setups incorporating piezoelectric bimorph cantilevers of the same type in different mechanical configurations are compared theoretically and experimentally to investigate the feasibility of this principle. Theoretical and experimental results show that magnetically stiffe

An experimental study on a KIA pride (SAIPA 131) car model with scale of 1:14 in the wind tunnel was made beside the real car tests. Some of the modifications to passive flow control which are (vortex generator, spoiler and slice diffuser) were added to the car to reduce the drag force which its undesirable characteristic that increase fuel consumption and exhaust toxic gases. Two types of calculations were used to determine the drag force acting on the car body. Firstly, is by the integrating the values of pressure recorded along the pressure taps (for the wind tunnel and the real car testing), secondly, is by using one component balance device (wind tunnel testing) to measure the force. The results show that, the avera

A number of compression schemes were put forward to achieve high compression factors with high image quality at a low computational time. In this paper, a combined transform coding scheme is proposed which is based on discrete wavelet (DWT) and discrete cosine (DCT) transforms with an added new enhancement method, which is the sliding run length encoding (SRLE) technique, to further improve compression. The advantages of the wavelet and the discrete cosine transforms were utilized to encode the image. This first step involves transforming the color components of the image from RGB to YUV planes to acquire the advantage of the existing spectral correlation and consequently gaining more compression. DWT is then applied to the Y, U and V col

In this work, results from an optical technique (laser speckle technique) for measuring surface roughness was done by using statistical properties of speckle pattern from the point of view of computer image texture analysis. Four calibration relationships were used to cover wide range of measurement with the same laser speckle technique. The first one is based on intensity contrast of the speckle, the second is based on analysis of speckle binary image,  the third is on size of speckle pattern spot, and the latest one is based on characterization of the energy feature of the gray level co-occurrence matrices for the speckle pattern. By these calibration relationships surface roughness of an object surface can be evaluated within the

This paper presents an application of a Higher Order Shear Deformation Theory (HOST 12) to problem
of free vibration of simply supported symmetric and antisymmetric angle-ply composite laminated plates.
The theoretical model HOST12 presented incorporates laminate deformations which account for the effects
of transverse shear deformation, transverse normal strain/stress and a nonlinear variation of in-plane
displacements with respect to the thickness coordinate – thus modeling the warping of transverse crosssections more accurately and eliminating the need for shear correction coefficients. Solutions are obtained in
closed-form using Navier’s technique by solving the eigenvalue equation. Plates with varying number of