The increasing drinking water demand in many countries leads to an increase in the use of desalination plants, which are considered a great solution for water treatment processes. Reverse osmosis (RO) and electro-dialysis (ED) systems are the most popular membrane processes used to desalinate water at high salinity. Both systems work by separating the ionic contaminates and disposing of them as a brine solution, but ED uses electrical current as a driving force while RO uses osmotic pressure. A direct comparison of reverse osmosis and electro-dialysis systems is needed to highlight process development similarities and variances. This work aims to provide an overview of previous studies on reverse osmosis and electro-dial

Dandruff and seborrheic dermatitis (SD) are common skin disorders affecting the scalp and extending to other body sites in the case of SD. They are associated with pruritus and scaling, causing an esthetical disturbance in the population affected.   Treatment of such conditions involves using a variety of drugs for long terms, thus optimizing drug formulation is essential to improve therapeutic efficacy and patient compliance. Conventional topical formulations like shampoos and creams have been widely used but their use is associated with disadvantages. To overcome such effects, novel topical nanotechnology-based formulations are currently under investigation. In the following article, we highlight recently published formulatio

The present study aimed to assess the impact of seed Rhizobia treatment and potyvirus inoculation on bacterial nodulation and nitrogen fixation in cowpeas. The plants were infected with the virus two weeks post-germination. Nodules were present on the roots of plants treated with Rhizobia; however, almost no nodules were detected on untreated plants. The average number of nodules per plant on virus-inoculated plants was significantly lower than the average number per noninoculated plant. The virus caused a substantial decrease in the weight of nodules also. The study revealed that the presence of Rhizobia resulted in a significant rise in nitrogen content in the foliage. Specifically, the nitrogen percentage increased from 1.29% in plants n

Objective Advantageous properties of silicone elastomer made it one of the favorable materials in maxillofacial prosthesis construction, but these properties may change after months of usage or after pigments addition. This study aimed to define the optimum concentration for a mixture of two types of intrinsic pigments that added to VST-50 maxillofacial silicone material and study their effects on mechanical properties before and after artificial aging. Methods After the pilot study was conducted, 0.1% by weight of rayon flocking and 0. 2% by weight of burnt sienna intrinsic pigment concentration was selected because of improvement in tested mechanical properties of VST-50 maxillofacial silicone. A total of one hundred and eighty samples we

In this paper, thermal performance of a zig-zig solar air heater (ZZSAH) with and without using steel wire mesh on the absorber plate of the collector is experimentally investigated. The experimental work includes four inclination angles of the collector 20^o, 30^o, 45^o, and 60^o and four air mass flow rates of 0.03, 0.04, 0.06, and 0.08 kg/s under varieties of operating conditions of a geographic location of  Baghdad. New correlation equations of Nusselt number are obtained from experimental results for both types of collectors where the effect of varying of the inclination angle of collector taken into consideration in the experiment. The correlations show good agreement wi

A simple setup of random number generator is proposed. The random number generation is based on the shot-noise fluctuations in a p-i-n photodiode. These fluctuations that are defined as shot noise are based on a stationary random process whose statistical properties reflect Poisson statistics associated with photon streams. It has its origin in the quantum nature of light and it is related to vacuum fluctuations. Two photodiodes were used and their shot noise fluctuations were subtracted. The difference was applied to a comparator to obtain the random sequence.