In recent years, the search for economic and environmentally friendly alternatives has become a global necessity to achieve sustainability and preserve raw materials. From this concept, natural bitumen (NB) derived from sulphur springs is now one of the most promising alternative energy resources for many applications, especially in asphalt pavement construction. Its low price and abundance characterise NB since sulphur springs produce thousands of tonnes of NB annually and are used in very limited fields. Two main objectives were adopted for this work. The first objective is to examine the virgin NB properties from five sulphur springs and compare them with petroleum asphalt. The second objective is to enhance NB properties by appl

One of the recent significant but challenging research studies in computational biology and bioinformatics is to unveil protein complexes from protein-protein interaction networks (PPINs). However, the development of a reliable algorithm to detect more complexes with high quality is still ongoing in many studies. The main contribution of this paper is to improve the effectiveness of the well-known modularity density ( ) model when used as a single objective optimization function in the framework of the canonical evolutionary algorithm (EA). To this end, the design of the EA is modified with a gene ontology-based mutation operator, where the aim is to make a positive collaboration between the modularity density model and the proposed

AshShinnafiyah and AsSamawa cities suffer from significant increase in salinity of Euphrates River water compared with their counterpart's north AshShinnafiyah city which is reflected adversely on the quality of water within the study area. The study aims to find possible solutions to avoid the deterioration of Euphrates River northern AshShinnafiyah city until AsSamawa city that were
presented by total dissolved solid TDS. Twelve main hydrological and fifteen salinity measurement stations were selected to cover 117 km of the river reach within the study area during July-2011. Additional twenty three hydrological and salinity stations were adopted during March-2012, winter season to the river within the study area. After conducting t

Drought is a natural phenomenon in many arid, semi-arid, or wet regions. This showed that no region worldwide is excluded from the occurrence of drought. Extreme droughts were caused by global weather warming and climate change. Therefore, it is essential to review the studies conducted on drought to use the recommendations made by the researchers on drought.  The drought was classified into meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and economic-social. In addition, researchers described the severity of the drought by using various indices which required different input data.  The indices used by various researchers were the Joint Deficit Index (JDI), Effective Drought Index (EDI), Streamflow Drought Index (SDI), Sta

The subject of youth care of important issues in view of what constitutes the importance
to the development of societies in general and as much as enjoy young people in any society
are good psychological health and agree psychosocial be healthy to be effective to invest their
energies and their potential for the progress of that society and development of the social
aspects and economic. The universities of the most important educational institutions that
provide care for young people, they are as well as providing information and expertise
necessary to prepare young people for life and the development of mental abilities, they are
different activities that will satisfy their needs physical, psychological, social and

The present research included sampling and analysis of 41 soil samples , the samples cover various areas of Nasiriyah city (industrial,commercial,residential and agricultural ) to estimate pollution levels of lead element and determine the correlation between lead concentration and natural factors in soil which represent sedimentary organic matter content, granular gradient, clay minerals and non-clay minerals . The results of the current study showed that the average concentration of lead in the soil samples was 61.12 ppm , it was noticed an increase in the concentration of lead in environmental components in the area of this study especially in residential , industrial and commercial location and the impact of natural factors of the so

Pre-breakdown phenomenon was investigated within the two, non-mixed dielectric liquids; transformation oil and cresol. Finite element technique was used to follow the initiation and growth of plasma channels (streamer discharge) within pin-plane configuration. That was done for different spacing between the pin-electrode and the liquid-liquid interface. Streamer growth model assumed that, the streamer initiation occurs at the region of the highest value of electric field. Our study shows that the streamer initiates at the tip of the pin and growths toward the other electrode. The study shows, too, that the streamer path controlled by the difference of permittivity of the two liquids and spacing distance of the liquid-liquid interface fro