Fallujah in the Cuneiform Texts and Classical Sources

Fallujah is an Iraqi town with a long history, located on the eastern bank of Euphrates. It is a part of the historical city of Anbar whose ruins lie 5km north-west of the modern-day Fallujah. This area had a strategic importance in Mesopotamia because of its position on the overland and river trade routes. It represented the vital artery of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, offering access to Syria and the Mediterranean coasts. The city was even the site of a conflict between the Babylonians and Assyrians. This paper focuses on the history of the region, located within an area called Sokhy or Sokho, which is extends from al Qaim district (Khandano) in the west-north to the town of Fallujah in the east-south. The name of Fallujah is mentioned as Pallukat in the texts of the modern Babylonian and Assyrian ages. It is derived from the Akkadian term Palagu which means ‘the little river’ in the Semitic languages. These appellations correspond with Fallujah’s position on the left bank of Euphrates. Keywords: Anbar, Sokhy, Fallujah, Classic sources, cuneiform text

Assessing abdominal aorta narrowing using computational fluid dynamics

This paper investigates the effect of developing arterial blockage at the abdominal aorta on the blood pressure waves at an externally accessible location suitable for invasive measurements such as the brachial and the femoral arteries. Arterial blockages are created surgically within the abdominal aorta of healthy Wistar rats to create narrowing resemblance conditions. Blood pressure is measured using a catheter inserted into the right femoral artery. Measurements are taken at the baseline healthy condition as well as at four different severities (20, 50, 80 and 100 %) of arterial blockage. In vivo and in vitro measurements of the lumen diameter and wall thickness are taken using magnetic resonance imaging and microscopic techniques, respectively. These data are used to validate a 3D computational fluid dynamics model which is developed to generalize the outcomes of this work and to determine the arterial stress and strain under the blockage conditions. This work indicates that an arterial blockage in excess of 20 % of the lumen diameter significantly influences the pressure wave and reduces the systolic blood pressure at the right femoral artery. High wall shear stresses and low circumferential strains are also generated at the blockage site

Internalization: Acute apoptosis of breast cancer cells using Herceptin-Immobilized gold nanoparticles

Herceptin, the monoclonal antibody, was successfully immobilized on gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to improve their precise interactions with breast cancer cells (SK-BR3). The mean size of the GNPs (29 nm), as determined by dynamic light scattering, enlarged to 82 nm after herceptin immobilization. The in vitro cell culture experiment indicated that human skin cells (FB) proliferated well in the presence of herceptin-conjugated GNP (GNP-Her), while most of the breast cancer cells (SK-BR3) had died. To elucidate the mechanism of cell death, the interaction of breast cancer cells with GNP-Her was tracked by confocal laser scanning microscopy. Consequently, GNP-Her was found to be bound precisely to the membrane of the breast cancer cell, which became almost saturated after 6 hours incubation. This shows that the progression signal of SK-BR3 cells is retarded completely by the precise binding of antibody to the human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 receptor of the breast cancer cell membrane, causing cell death

Vibration of circumferentially stepped-thickness piezoelectric cylindrical shells

In this work, thickness variations are introduced around the circumference of a piezoelectric cylindrical shell. The aim is to investigate the vibration characteristics of the shells and the effect of these step-thickness variations on the mode shape of vibration. These thickness variations require stress distribution analysis as well to avoid failure of the cylindrical shell. To this aim, two configurations of stepped-thickness shells with two and three circumferential thickness variations are investigated using FEA software, ANSYS. The results show that these steps assist in localizing vibration in the thin sections and excite mode shapes having the same circumferential wave number as the number of thickness variations. This can be a suitable approach to control and forcibly excite certain vibration mode shapes, which might be required for some applications

Frequency response of lung

Respiratory disorders are common in both developed and developing countries. Many of these disorders are directly connected to the constrictions in the airways of the human respiratory system. Asthma and bronchitis are typical examples that arise from the constriction of airways. Asthma is a respiratory disease that is characterised by chronic inflammation, hypersensitivity, and obstruction of the airways. During an asthma attack contraction of airway smooth muscle and mucous production cause a reduction of the bronchial diameter, significantly changing the airflow resistance in and out of the lungs

Further studies on the repeated loading of piles in sand.

The work presented in this thesis concerns the behaviour of isolated piles subjected to repeated loading and placed at various depths in a medium dense sand upon which either static or cyclic surcharge acted. The piles, which were of laboratory scale, were instrumented by strain gauged load cells located along the inner surfaces of the pile shafts. The behaviour of tension as well as compression piles was examined. It was found that the behaviour of the pile was governed to a large extent by the repeated load level, the number of load cycles and the initial boundary stress conditions existing along the pile shaft. In compression, the pile life-span decreased when the embedment depth increased while the reverse trend was observed,for tension piles. The movement of both tension and compression piles decreased when the surcharge pressure was increased or was cycled, and it was of a minimum value when the upper repeated load acted in-phase with the higher surcharge pressure. For tests performed with static surcharge pressure, repeated loading was found to decrease the bearing capacity and the pulling resistance of the pile. The higher percentage of reduction was recorded for the tension pile. In contrast, after cyclic surcharge tests the pile capacity always increased. At any depth of embedment or surcharge pressure,' as the nun-her of load cycles was increased the shaft load of a compression pile increased up to a peak value then decreased gradually until it reached a limiting value. This limiting value increased when the load level, the pile depth or the surcharge pressure was increased and it was independent of the pile loading history. iii For a tension pile the shaft load decreased progressively as the number of cycles increased until failure occurred

Deep learning inspired feature engineering for classifying tremor severity

Bio-signals pattern recognition systems can be impacted by several factors with a potential to limit their associated performance and clinical translation. Among these factors, selecting the optimum feature extraction method, that can effectively exploit the interaction between the temporal and spatial information, is the most prominent. Despite the potential of deep learning (DL) models for extracting temporal, spatial, or temporal-spatial information, they are typically restricted by their need for a large amount of training data. The deep wavelet scattering transform (WST) is a relatively recent advancement within the DL literature to replace expensive convolution neural networks models with computationally less demanding methods. However, while some studies have used WST to extract features from biological signals, it has not been investigated before for electromyogram (EMG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) signals feature extraction. To investigate the hypothesis of the usefulness of WST for processing EMG and EEG signals, this study used a tremor dataset collected by the authors from people with tremor disorders. Specifically, the proposed work achieved three goals: (a) study the performance of extracting features from low-density EMG signals (8 channels), using the WST approach, (b) study the effect of extracting the features from high-density EEG signals (33 channels), using WST and study its robustness against changing the spatial and temporal aspects of classification accuracy, and (c) classify tremor severity using the WST method and compare the results with other well-known feature extraction approaches. The classification error rates were significantly reduced (maximum of nearly 12 %) compared with other feature sets