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

A mixture of algae biomass (Chrysophyta, Cyanophyta, and Chlorophyte) has been investigated for its possible adsorption removal of cationic dyes (methylene blue, MB). Effect of pH (1-8), biosorbent dosage (0.2-2 g/100ml), agitated speed (100-300), particle size (1304-89μm), temperature (20-40˚C), initial dye concentration (20-300 mg/L), and sorption–desorption were investigated to assess the algal-dye sorption mechanism. Different pre-treatments, alkali, protonation, and CaCl2 have been experienced in order to enhance the adsorption capacity as well as the stability of the algal biomass. Equilibrium isotherm data were analyzed using Langmuir, Freundlich, and Temkin models. The maximum dye-sorption capacity was 26.65 mg/g at pH= 5, 25

Wind energy is considered one of the most important sources of renewable energy in the world, because it contributes to reducing the negative effects on the environment. The most important types of wind turbines are horizontal and vertical axis wind turbines. This work presents the full details of design for vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) and how to find the optimal values of necessary factors. Additionally, the results shed light on the efficiency and performance of the VAWT under different working conditions. It was taken into consideration the variety of surrounding environmental conditions (such as density and viscosity of fluid, number of elements of the blade, etc.) to simulate the working of vertical wind turbines under di

This study was focused on biotreatment of soil which polluted by petroleum compounds (Diesel) which caused serious environmental problems. One of the most effective and promising ways to treat diesel-contaminated soil is bioremediation. It is a choice that offers the potential to destroy harmful pollutants using biological activity. Four bacterial strains were isolated from diesel contaminated soil samples. The isolates were identified by the Vitek 2 system, as Sphingomonas paucimobilis, Pentoae species, Staphylococcus aureus, and Enterobacter cloacae. The potential of biological surfactant production was tested using the Sigma 703D stand-alone tensiometer showed that these isolates are biological surfactant producers. The bet

Catalytic microwave-assisted pyrolysis of biomass is gaining popularity as an alternative to fossil fuels due to health, environmental, climate, and economic issues. This study conducted a catalytic pyrolysis process of the Albizia plant's branches using an Iraqi clay catalyst (bentonite) focusing on the variables including the biomass-particle size, experimental time, microwave power level, and the catalyst-to-biomass ratio. The physical and chemical properties of the resulting biofuel were analyzed presented by HHV, acidity, density, viscosity, GC-MS, FTIR for bio-oil and SEM, EDX, BET, HHV, FTIR for biochar. The study revealed that addition of bentonite as a catalyst led to enhanced production of biogas produced from 5% to 45% an

Mammals are under threat worldwide due to deforestation, hunting, and other human activities. In Iraq, a total of 93 species of wild mammals have been recorded including species with global conservation concern. Bamo Mountain is situated within the Zagros Mountains in northern Iraq which is a suitable habitat for wild mammals. Due to scarcity of the field survey efforts and cryptic behavior, monitoring of the wild mammals fauna in Zagros Mountain seems challenging. Therefore, we used a camera trap which seems to be an ideal way to determine species diversity of wild mammals in Bamo Mountain. Moreover, interviews with local villagers were performed. The mammalian diversity of Bamo Mountain is not fully explored but seemed threatened by lo

 This paper adapted the neural network for the estimating of the direction of arrival (DOA). It uses an unsupervised adaptive neural network with GHA algorithm to extract the principal components that in turn, are used by Capon method to estimate the DOA, where by the PCA neural network we take signal subspace only and use it in Capon (i.e. we will ignore the noise subspace, and take the signal subspace only).

In this paper we investigate the automatic recognition of emotion in text. We propose a new method for emotion recognition based on the PPM (PPM is short for Prediction by Partial Matching) character-based text compression scheme in order to recognize Ekman’s six basic emotions (Anger, Disgust, Fear, Happiness, Sadness, Surprise). Experimental results with three datasets show that the new method is very effective when compared with traditional word-based text classification methods. We have also found that our method works best if the sizes of text in all classes used for training are similar, and that performance significantly improves with increased data.