A single step extraction-cleanup procedure using porous membrane-protected micro-solid phase extraction (μ-SPE) in conjunction with liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry for the extraction and determination of aflatoxins (AFs) B1, B2, G1 and G2 from food was successfully developed. After the extraction, AFs were desorbed from the μ-SPE device by ultrasonication using acetonitrile. The optimum extraction conditions were: sorbent material, C8; sorbent mass, 20 mg; extraction time, 90 min; stirring speed, 1000 rpm; sample volume, 10 mL; desorption solvent, acetonitrile; solvent volume, 350 μL and ultrasonication period, 25 min without salt addition. Under the optimum conditions, enrichment factor of 11, 9, 9 and 10 for AFG2, AFG1

The flow in a manifolds considered as an advanced problem in hydraulic engineering applications. The objectives of this study are to determine; the uniformity qn/q1 (ratio of the discharge at last outlet, qn to the discharge at first outlet, q₁) and total head losses of the flow along straight and rectangular loop manifolds with different flow conditions. The straight pipes were with 18 m and 19 m long and with of 25.4 mm (1.0 in) in diameter each. While, the rectangular close loop configuration was with length of 19 m and with diameter of 25.4 mm (1.0 in) also. Constant head in the supply tank was used and the head is 2.10 m. It is found that outlets spacing and manifold configuration are the main factors aff

The concept of the active contour model has been extensively utilized in the segmentation and analysis of images. This technology has been effectively employed in identifying the contours in object recognition, computer graphics and vision, biomedical processing of images that is normal images or medical images such as Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), X-rays, plus Ultrasound imaging. Three colleagues, Kass, Witkin and Terzopoulos developed this energy, lessening “Active Contour Models” (equally identified as Snake) back in 1987. Being curved in nature, snakes are characterized in an image field and are capable of being set in motion by external and internal forces within image data and the curve itself in that order. The present s

The Maxwell equations have been formulated for a composite slab waveguide at x-band wave propagation. The eigenvalues of the system equations are obtained by using MATLAB program. These eigenvalues are used to obtain the wave propagation constant and a number of modes inside the slabs. A good correspondence was seen between the number of modes and the cut off thickness. The parameter that affects the performance of waveguide is the slab thickness. The propagation constant is usually adopted to characterize this type of waveguide and show how the cutoff frequency of the mode in the slab is increased dramatically by decreasing the frequency.
Our study focused on lower modes, the results for the transmission coefficient are then used to

Test anxiety for intermediate level The current study aims to measure the test anxiety of research’s sample and to identify the statistical differences of test anxiety, considering two variables gender and students classes level (first and third intermediate class). To do this, a stratified random sampling of (300) student from first and third intermediate classes had selected from both the karkh and Rusafa sides of Baghdad province for the academic year 2015-2016. The author tested the whole sample by using the test anxiety scale that had tested for its validity and reliability. The results revealed that the research’s sample as a whole was suffering from test anxiety, there were a statistical differences between male and female tha

Human skin detection, which usually performed before image processing, is the method of discovering skin-colored pixels and regions that may be of human faces or limbs in videos or photos. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. A skin detector usually transforms a given pixel into a suitable color space and then uses a skin classifier to mark the pixel as a skin or a non-skin pixel. A skin classifier explains the decision boundary of the class of a skin color in the color space based on skin-colored pixels. The purpose of this research is to build a skin detection system that will distinguish between skin and non-skin pixels in colored still pictures. This performed by introducing a metric that measu

In this paper, we deal with the problem of general matching of two images one of them has experienced geometrical transformations, to find the correspondence between two images. We develop the invariant moments for traditional techniques (moments of inertia) with new approach to enhance the performance for these methods. We test various projections directional moments, to extract the difference between Block Distance Moment (BDM) and evaluate their reliability. Three adaptive strategies are shown for projections directional moments, that are raster (vertical and horizontal) projection, Fan-Bean projection and new projection procedure that is the square projection method. Our paper started with the description of a new algorithm that is low