This study comprised three traverses extending parallel through the Northern, Central and Southern Mahmudiya districts, and perpendicular to the course of the Euphrates River. They were identified to collect (15) soil samples and some water samples as distributed within the land cover classes of the study area. Those classes were determined by visual interpretation and supervised classification for Landsat (TM) images obtained in August/2007. The digital classification was based on Maximum Likelihood method using six spectral bands excluding the thermal band. Chemical and physical laboratory analysis for the soil characteristics was performed to determine the types of land degradation in the study area.
The results showed that the hig

The study was conducted in the poultry field, College of Agriculture, Al-Muthanna University from 1/3/2018 to 6/4/2018 to determine the effect of commercial Ascomax powder produced from seaweed (Ascophyllum nodocum) on some productive performance of broilers. A total of 400, one day, Ross 308 broiler chicks were used for 35 days. The chicks were randomly distributed to 4 treatments, four replicates per treatment (25 chick / replicate). The treatments were as follows: T1: (control treatment), while T2, T3 and T4 added diet by Ascomax powder by 1, 1.5 and 2 g per 1 kg of the basal diet, respectively. The results of the study showed a significant superiority (P <0.05) for the added Ascomax powder treatments compared to the treatment of control

Al-Si alloys which are widely used in engineering applications due to their outstanding properties can be modified for more enhancements in their properties. Current work investigated the ability of these alloys to be modified by casting them through the addition of nanoparticles. So, Multi-wall carbon nanotubes (CNT) and titanium carbide ceramic particles (TIC) with size of (20 nm) were added with different amounts started from (0.5 up to 3%) weight  to cast alloy A356 that was considered to be the base metal matrix, then stirred with different speeds of (270, 800, 1500, 2150) rpm at 520 °C for one minute. The results showed change in microstructure’ shape of the casted alloys from the dendritic to spherical gra

Background: Sprite coding is a very effective technique for clarifying the background video object. The sprite generation is an open issue because of the foreground objects which prevent the precision of camera motion estimation and blurs the created sprite. Objective: In this paper, a quick and basic static method for sprite area detection in video data is presented. Two statistical methods are applied; the mean and standard deviation of every pixel (over all group of video frame) to determine whether the pixel is a piece of the selected static sprite range or not. A binary map array is built for demonstrating the allocated sprite (as 1) while the non-sprite (as 0) pixels valued. Likewise, holes and gaps filling strategy was utilized to re

There is a great deal of systems dealing with image processing that are being used and developed on a daily basis. Those systems need the deployment of some basic operations such as detecting the Regions of Interest and matching those regions, in addition to the description of their properties. Those operations play a significant role in decision making which is necessary for the next operations depending on the assigned task. In order to accomplish those tasks, various algorithms have been introduced throughout years. One of the most popular algorithms is the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). The efficiency of this algorithm is its performance in the process of detection and property description, and that is due to the fact that

Drug solubility and dissolution remain a significant challenge in pharmaceutical formulations. This study aimed to formulate and evaluate repanglinide (RPG) nanosuspension-based buccal fast-dissolving films (BDFs) for dissolution enhancement. RPG nanosuspension was prepared by the antisolvent-precipitation method using multiple hydrophilic polymers, including soluplus®, polyvinyl alcohol, polyvinyl pyrrolidine, poloxamers, and hydroxyl propyl methyl cellulose. The nanosuspension was then directly loaded into BDFs using the solvent casting technique. Twelve formulas were prepared with a particle size range of 81.6-1389 nm and PDI 0.002-1 for the different polymers. Nanosuspensions prepared with soluplus showed a favored mean particle size o

Position control of servo motor systems is a challenging task because of inevitable factors such as uncertainties, nonlinearities, parametric variations, and external perturbations. In this article, to alleviate the above issues, a practical adaptive fast terminal sliding mode control (PAFTSMC) is proposed for better tracking performance of the servo motor system by using a state observer and bidirectional adaptive law. First, a smooth-tangent-hyperbolic-function-based practical fast terminal sliding mode control (PFTSM) surface is designed to ensure not only fast finite time tracking error convergence but also chattering reduction. Second, the PAFTSMC is proposed for the servo motor, in which a two-way adaptive law is designed to further s

A silent film from Baghdad about love, war and poetry... _________________________ A new poetry book by the Iraqi poet Abdul Zahra Zaki has been published by Moment Books & Publications in an exclusively Digital Edition, entitled "Silent Film", and which subtitled "Poems of Blood, Bullets and Car Bombs", translated from the Arabic into English by Dr Adhraa A. Naser. This book is not trying to explain war, but simply to present it the way it is; the destruction it causes and the pain it leaves behind. For all who has changed forever because of war this book speaks the words of the killed and the killer. Zaki introduced the book with a line from his masterpiece The Hand Discovers describing the waves of bodies that stormed the country after t