Background: obesity is a major global health problem with more than 200 million obese men and almost 300 million obese women. Melatonin is a well-known molecule for its involvement in circadian rhythm regulation and has multiple pathological actions including control of appetite, sleep wake cycle and metabolic syndrome.

Aim: to estimate the effect of melatonin supplements on obese patients on a calorie restricted diet in comparison to patients on lifestyle measures only in the form of weight loss, waist circumference and sleep quality.

Subjects and Method: one hundred patients with body mass index > 24 were collected, fifty patients were starte

Reverse Osmosis (RO) has already proved its worth as an efficient treatment method in chemical and environmental engineering applications. Various successful RO attempts for the rejection of organic and highly toxic pollutants from wastewater can be found in the literature over the last decade. Dimethylphenol is classified as a high-toxic organic compound found ubiquitously in wastewater. It poses a real threat to humans and the environment even at low concentration. In this paper, a model based framework was developed for the simulation and optimisation of RO process for the removal of dimethylphenol from wastewater. We incorporated our earlier developed and validated process model into the Species Conserving Genetic Algorithm (SCG

The development of Web 2.0 has improved people's ability to share their opinions. These opinions serve as an important piece of knowledge for other reviewers. To figure out what the opinions is all about, an automatic system of analysis is needed. Aspect-based sentiment analysis is the most important research topic conducted to extract reviewers-opinions about certain attribute, for instance opinion-target (aspect). In aspect-based tasks, the identification of the implicit aspect such as aspects implicitly implied in a review, is the most challenging task to accomplish. However, this paper strives to identify the implicit aspects based on hierarchical algorithm incorporated with common-sense knowledge by means of dimensionality reduction.

Researchers employ behavior based malware detection models that depend on API tracking and analyzing features to identify suspected PE applications. Those malware behavior models become more efficient than the signature based malware detection systems for detecting unknown malwares. This is because a simple polymorphic or metamorphic malware can defeat signature based detection systems easily. The growing number of computer malwares and the detection of malware have been the concern for security researchers for a large period of time. The use of logic formulae to model the malware behaviors is one of the most encouraging recent developments in malware research, which provides alternatives to classic virus detection methods. To address the l

Energy efficiency is a significant aspect in designing robust routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A reliable routing protocol has to be energy efficient and adaptive to the network size. To achieve high energy conservation and data aggregation, there are two major techniques, clusters and chains. In clustering technique, sensor networks are often divided into non-overlapping subsets called clusters. In chain technique, sensor nodes will be connected with the closest two neighbors, starting with the farthest node from the base station till the closest node to the base station. Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages which motivate some researchers to come up with a hybrid routing algorit

Copula modeling is widely used in modern statistics. The boundary bias problem is one of the problems faced when estimating by nonparametric methods, as kernel estimators are the most common in nonparametric estimation. In this paper, the copula density function was estimated using the probit transformation nonparametric method in order to get rid of the boundary bias problem that the kernel estimators suffer from. Using simulation for three nonparametric methods to estimate the copula density function and we proposed a new method that is better than the rest of the methods by five types of copulas with different sample sizes and different levels of correlation between the copula variables and the different parameters for the function. The

Rock mechanical properties are critical parameters for many development techniques related to tight reservoirs, such as hydraulic fracturing design and detecting failure criteria in wellbore instability assessment. When direct measurements of mechanical properties are not available, it is helpful to find sufficient correlations to estimate these parameters. This study summarized experimentally derived correlations for estimating the shear velocity, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, and compressive strength. Also, a useful correlation is introduced to convert dynamic elastic properties from log data to static elastic properties. Most of the derived equations in this paper show good fitting to measured data, while some equations show scatters

In this paper, an approach for object tracking that is inspired from human oculomotor system is proposed and verified experimentally. The developed approach divided into two phases, fast tracking or saccadic phase and smooth pursuit phase. In the first phase, the field of the view is segmented into four regions that are analogue to retinal periphery in the oculomotor system. When the object of interest is entering these regions, the developed vision system responds by changing the values of the pan and tilt angles to allow the object lies in the fovea area and then the second phase will activate. A fuzzy logic method is implemented in the saccadic phase as an intelligent decision maker to select the values of the pan and tilt angle based