PREPARATION AND OPTICAL PROPERTIES OF SeS THIN FILMS SEMICONDUCTING CHALCOGENIDE GLASSES

Se 1-x S x glassy films have been prepared in the thin films form with x in the range 0.0-0.4 and thickness in the range 500-600 nm by thermal vacuum evaporation technique. The amorphous structure of the films was confirmed by XRD measurements. The surface morphology and the thickness of the films were studied by SEM. The optical properties of the films were studied by transmittance method, it was found that the optical constants of the films are sensitive to composition. The refractive index was determined and the data was discussed in the Wemple and DiDomenico model for single effective oscillator. The resultant oscillator energy and strength were then calculated and found to be increased as the composition increases. A blue shift in the absorption edge was observed by increasing the sulfur content and the band gap increases from 1.85 to 2.03 eV as the composition increases from 0.0 to 0.4

Performance Study on Extractive Text Summarization Using BERT Models

The task of summarization can be categorized into two methods, extractive and abstractive. Extractive summarization selects the salient sentences from the original document to form a summary while abstractive summarization interprets the original document and generates the summary in its own words. The task of generating a summary, whether extractive or abstractive, has been studied with different approaches in the literature, including statistical-, graph-, and deep learning-based approaches. Deep learning has achieved promising performances in comparison to the classical approaches, and with the advancement of different neural architectures such as the attention network (commonly known as the transformer), there are potential areas of improvement for the summarization task. The introduction of transformer architecture and its encoder model “BERT” produced an improved performance in downstream tasks in NLP. BERT is a bidirectional encoder representation from a transformer modeled as a stack of encoders. There are different sizes for BERT, such as BERT-base with 12 encoders and BERT-larger with 24 encoders, but we focus on the BERT-base for the purpose of this study. The objective of this paper is to produce a study on the performance of variants of BERT-based models on text summarization through a series of experiments, and propose “SqueezeBERTSum”, a trained summarization model fine-tuned with the SqueezeBERT encoder variant, which achieved competitive ROUGE scores retaining the BERTSum baseline model performance by 98%, with 49% fewer trainable parameters

World Scientific Publishing Company Machine Translation of English Noun Phrases into Arabic

The present work reports our attempt in automating the translation of English noun phrase (NP) into Arabic. Translating NP is a very important task toward sentence translation since NPs form the majority of textual content of the scientific and technical documents. The system is implemented in Prolog and the parser is written in DCG formalism. The paper also describes our experience with the developed MT system and reports results of its application on real titles of theses from the computer science domain

Silver nanoparticles synthesized by probiotic bacteria and antibacterial role in resistant bacteria

Abstract Many dangerous bacteria have become highly resistant to traditional antibiotics, which is a huge public health concern. This study investigated the use of silver nanoparticles biosynthesized in a culture filtrate of Lactobacillus acidophilus as antimicrobials. UV–visual spectrophotometry, Fourier-transform-infrared spectroscopy, X-ray power diffraction, and scanning electron microscopy have all validated the findings. The biosynthesized nanoparticles ranged in size from 33 to 90 nm. The cytotoxicity of the nanosilver generated was then investigated using nine 200 g BW rats separated into three groups. When compared to the control group, the treated rats showed little signs of toxicity; parameters of physiological function, including alanine transaminase, aspartate aminotransferase, albumin, creatinine, and urea were significantly different in treated and non-treated animals. Moreover, the antibacterial role of the generated silver nanoparticles was examined in multi-drug resistant (MDR) pathogenic bacteria, Proteus vulgaris, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Klebsiella pneumoniae, revealing high antibacterial activity against the examined bacteria. For more demonstration of the effect of the nanosilver on transcription and gene regulation of treated and non-treated bacteria differential display droplet digital-PCR was used, and the results revealed that several genes were up- and down-regulated. Some genes were selected for DNA sequencing and according to the sequence analysis, these genes were mecA, beta-lactam, and unidentified protein genes, and these have been deposited in the GenBank Database with the following accession numbers: Staphylococcus MZ748472 and Klebsiella MZ748473. We conclude that silver nanoparticles biosynthesized by L. acidophilus are environmentally friendly and have antibacterial activities against MDR pathogenic bacteria

Deep Insights into the Radiation Shielding Features of Heavy Minerals in Their Native Status: Implications for Their Physical, Mineralogical, Geochemical, and Morphological Properties

Barite and hematite are the most common heavy-weight minerals applied as aggregates in radiation shielding concrete (RSC). Therefore, to limit the cement consumption and reduce the CO2 emissions accompanying its production, the aim of this study is to use Egyptian barite and hematite minerals in their native status and evaluate their attenuation efficiency against fast neutrons and γ-rays. This was implemented through the measurement of their radiation attenuation against fast neutrons and γ-rays in the energy ranges of 0.80–11 and 0.40–8.30 MeV, respectively, employing a Pu-Be source and a stilbene scintillator. Theoretical calculations were prepared using the NXcom program to validate the fast neutron attenuation measurements. Furthermore, the implications of the physical, mineralogical, geochemical, and morphological characteristics of these heavy-weight minerals with respect to their attenuation efficiencies were considered. We found that barite has superior radiation attenuation efficiency for fast neutrons and γ-rays compared to hematite by 9.17 and 51% for fast neutrons and γ-rays, respectively. This was ascribed to the superior physical, mineralogical, geochemical, and morphological properties of the former relative to those of the latter. Furthermore, a satisfactory agreement between the experimental and theoretical results was achieved, with a deviation of 16 and 19.25% for the barite and hematite samples, respectively. Eventually, barite and hematite can be successful candidates for their use as sustainable alternatives to common RSC

Deep Insights into the Radiation Shielding Features of Heavy Minerals in Their Native Status: Implications for Their Physical, Mineralogical, Geochemical, and Morphological Properties

Barite and hematite are the most common heavy-weight minerals applied as aggregates in radiation shielding concrete (RSC). Therefore, to limit the cement consumption and reduce the CO2 emissions accompanying its production, the aim of this study is to use Egyptian barite and hematite minerals in their native status and evaluate their attenuation efficiency against fast neutrons and γ-rays. This was implemented through the measurement of their radiation attenuation against fast neutrons and γ-rays in the energy ranges of 0.80–11 and 0.40–8.30 MeV, respectively, employing a Pu-Be source and a stilbene scintillator. Theoretical calculations were prepared using the NXcom program to validate the fast neutron attenuation measurements. Furthermore, the implications of the physical, mineralogical, geochemical, and morphological characteristics of these heavy-weight minerals with respect to their attenuation efficiencies were considered. We found that barite has superior radiation attenuation efficiency for fast neutrons and γ-rays compared to hematite by 9.17 and 51% for fast neutrons and γ-rays, respectively. This was ascribed to the superior physical, mineralogical, geochemical, and morphological properties of the former relative to those of the latter. Furthermore, a satisfactory agreement between the experimental and theoretical results was achieved, with a deviation of 16 and 19.25% for the barite and hematite samples, respectively. Eventually, barite and hematite can be successful candidates for their use as sustainable alternatives to common RSC