The cyanobacterial neurotoxinβ-N-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA) is considered to be an “excitotoxin,” and its suggested mechanism of action is killing neurons. Long-term exposure to L-BMAA is believed to lead to neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Objectives of this study were to determine the presumptive median lethal dose (LD₅₀), the Lowest-Observed-Adverse-Effect Level (LOAEL), and histopathologic lesions caused by the naturally occurring BMAA isomer, L-BMAA, in mice. Seventy NIH Swiss Outbred mice (35 male and 35 female) were used. Treatment group mice

A vocative expression can be defined as an expression of direct address where the participant identity is set forth explicitly within a sentence. This study aims at showing how the vocative particles are used in literally texts, namely in the short story “The Garden Party" written by Kathryn Mansfield and identifying the forms of these vocative particles as used by the characters along with the functions of these vocative particles. For the analysis of vocative forms, the researcher used Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) model. Functionally, the data were analyzed based on Quirk et al. (1985) model. However, the results of this study shows that the characters in “The Garden Party” short story used various forms of vocative particles and

Routing protocols are responsible for providing reliable communication between the source and destination nodes. The performance of these protocols in the ad hoc network family is influenced by several factors such as mobility model, traffic load, transmission range, and the number of mobile nodes which represents a great issue. Several simulation studies have explored routing protocol with performance parameters, but few relate to various protocols concerning routing and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. This paper presents a simulation-based comparison of proactive, reactive, and multipath routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Specifically, the performance of AODV, DSDV, and AOMDV protocols are evaluated and analyz

Background: Osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) is a rare congenital condition that results in bone fragility, recurrent fractures, and various extra-skeletal manifestations. Currently, intravenous bisphosphonate is the mainstay of medical treatment in OI. Objective: To identify the effect of current management strategies on Iraqi children diagnosed with OI. Methods: A retrospective study enrolled OI patients who were registered in Central Child Teaching Hospital, Baghdad, Iraq, from January 2015 to December 2022. We enrolled confirmed OI cases (either clinically and/or radiologically) who received cyclic pamidronate therapy for at least 3 cycles. They neither received other types of bisphosphonates nor underwent surgical intervention. Res

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (m-MIMO) is considered as an essential technique to meet the high data rate requirements of future sixth generation (6G) wireless communications networks. The vast majority of m-MIMO research has assumed that the channels are uncorrelated. However, this assumption seems highly idealistic. Therefore, this study investigates the m-MIMO performance when the channels are correlated and the base station employs different antenna array topologies, namely the uniform linear array (ULA) and uniform rectangular array (URA). In addition, this study develops analyses of the mean square error (MSE) and the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoder under imperfect channel state information (CSI) and a realist