EFFECT OF DIETARY BLENDED ORGANIC ACID ON GROWTH, DIGESTIBILITY AND IMMUNITY OF AFRICAN CATFISH (Clarias garipenus)

The present experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of acidifiers on growth performance and immunity of the African catfish C. gariepinus. This experiment was carried out in the wet lab of Fish Production Branch, Department of Animal Production, Faculty of Agriculture, Ain Shams University. A total of 120 fish were selected as healthy catfish which had a uniform size and average weight of 94.93 ± 0.89 g. A thirty of catfish were used in each treatment divided into three replicates as (10 fish/ quadrate tank). Four experimental diets were formulated at 35 % crude protein with different levels of organic acid blend (OAB); diet was supplemented with 0, 2, 4 and 6 ml of organic acid per kilogram diet. Growth parameters, apparent digestibility of crude protein and ether extract were measured. The chemical proximate analysis for whole-body of fish was conducted at the end of the experimental period. Hematological parameters of fish and liver function enzymes were also measured. The fish group fed on 0.6 % organic acids blend showed the highest significance (P < 0.05) increase in total weight gain (438 ± 14.24 g), specific growth rate, best feed conversion ratio, feed efficiency ratio and highest protein efficiency than the rest of experimental groups. The highest apparent digestibility for crude protein were achieved in the third fish group which fed diet supplemented with acidifiers at 4 ml / kg diet and have significant difference (P < 0.05) with other groups. Data obtained in hepatosomatic index % showed no significant difference among different treatment refers to the health status of liver. However, ALAT  and ASAT recorded high values in the higher group of OAB-treated fish indicating that liver could be affected. Hematological parameters were in normal range except for PCV, Hb, RBCs, and WBCs count which were decreased in the high dose of treated fish. Finally, it could be concluded that using of acidifiers as feed additives at lower doses can enhance growth, productivity and immunity of the African catfish (C. gariepinus)

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF A SINGLE-PHASE INDUCTION MOTOR WITH NON-UNIFORM STATOR SLOTS BASED ON MAGNET SOFTWARE AND AUTOCAD

The current study uses the finite element technique to investigate a single-phase induction motor with non-uniform stator slots. A 0.5 hp, four poles, 36 stator slots, and 48 rotor slots have non-uniform stator slots were analyzed based on magnet Finite Element Method software with using AutoCAD in modeling stator due to its unsymmetrical slots, The suggested study attempts to evaluate all motor design modifications. The values of currents and torque received from the FEM analysis for the test motor were compared with motor nameplate data with a good agreement

SCSA: Evaluating skyline queries in incomplete data

Skyline queries have been extensively incorporated in various contemporary database applications. The list includes but is not limited to multi-criteria decision-making systems, decision support systems, and recommendation systems. Due to its great benefits and wide application range, many skyline algorithms have already been proposed in numerous data settings. Nonetheless, most researchers presume the completion of data meaning that all data item values are available. Since this assumption cannot be sustained in a large number of real-world database applications, the existing algorithms are rather inadequate to be directly applied on a database with incomplete data. In such cases, processing skyline queries on incomplete data incur exhaustive pairwise comparisons between data items, which may lead to loss of the transitivity property of the skyline technique. Losing the transitivity property may in turn give rise to the problem of cyclic dominance. In order to address these issues, we propose a new skyline algorithm called Sorting-based Cluster Skyline Algorithm (SCSA) that combines the sorting and partitioning techniques and simplifies the skyline computation on an incomplete dataset. These two techniques help boost the skyline process and avoid many unnecessary pairwise comparisons between data items to prune the dominated data items. The comprehensive experiments carried out on both synthetic and real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach as compared to the currently used approaches

Effect of Coffea arabica L on antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is considered an opportunistic bacteria that causes many risks and because of its resistance to antibiotics, the virulence of this bacteria has increased. To get rid of the problem of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, effective medicinal plants were used to get rid of pathogenic bacteria so during this study, 200 samples were collected from patients with wounds and burn from Al-Sadiq Teaching Hospital in Babylon Governorate, distributed to 130 burn samples and 70 wound samples. The samples were cultured with specific and differential media. Where 30(15%) samples of P. aeruginosa were obtained and the diagnosis was confirmed by microscopy and biochemical tests and confirmed by VITEK-2 Compact. The sensitivity test showed its resistance to many antibiotics piperacillin 15/30 (50%) , piperacillin - tazobactam (4/30(13.3%), ceftazidime and cefepimewere each one (25/30(83.3%), Aztreonam 8/30(26.6%), Imipenem5/30(16.6%), Gentamicin 12/ 30(40%) 30, Tobramycin9/30( 30%), Amikacin 6/30(20%), ciprofloxacin 13/30(43.3%), ofloxacin 5/30(16.6%). Because of the role of alternative medicine in combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the effectiveness of the coffee plant was measured against antibiotic-resistant P. aeruginosa was sensitive to the coffee aqueous extract, Coffea arabica Linn. (Rubiaceae (.The properties of the active substances in coffee were determined using characteristic techniques UV-Visible Spectra analysis, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). The study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the Arabica coffee plant as a bacterial antibiotic to challenge the problem of pathogenic bacterial resistance to the used antibiotics

Modification of Prepared (Al 2024/Alumina/Mn) Composite by Laser Surface SiC Clad Layer

The present work shows the cladding process of silicon carbide on the substrate of prepared composite (Al 2024/Alumina/Mn) by using a laser beam (pulsed Nd-YAG). To obtain the desired results, the best laser parameters were chosen. The parameters of the laser beam that have chief affected during the experiments in this work are peak power (1.9)kW, work frequency (8)Hz and pulse duration (5.3)ms, the preplaced powder technique favorite during a cladding process and the results in this work were proved by SEM, micro-hardness, EDS, and chemical corrosion tests. The results of the experimental work have shown that a micro-hardness increased about (28%) times for Aluminum/Alumina composite by silicon carbide cladding compared with the original value of micro-hardness, and thickness of the cladding layer was about (34μm). The resistance of corrosion was enhanced with about (35%) for the Aluminum/Alumina composite with SiC cladding

Dietary and Lifestyle Factors Associated with Dyspepsia among Pre-clinical Medical Students in Ajman, United Arab Emirates

Introduction: Dyspepsia is a common gastrointestinal diseases worldwide with a prevalence ranging from 7 to 40%. Dyspepsia, more commonly known as heartburn or indigestion, is defined as one or more of the following symptoms: postprandial fullness, early satiation (the inability to finish a normal size meal), or epigastric pain or burning for at least 3 months in the past year. Dyspepsia has been studied extensively, but little is known of factors associated with dyspepsia among medical students.Objectives: The purpose of this study was to analyze the prevalence of dyspepsia and to evaluate the association between lifestyle and dietary factors associated with dyspepsia among pre-clinical medical students in Ajman, United Arab Emirates.Methods: A cross-sectional survey study was conducted among pre-clinical medical students at Gulf Medical University, Ajman and collected basic demographic data, dyspepsia prevalence, dietary factors, and lifestyle factors. Data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS software. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the participant characteristics. Chi-square tests were used to test the association between dietary and lifestyle factors and dyspepsia. Logistic regression was used to measure the association of predictors (dietary and lifestyle factors) on the odds of having dyspepsia, independently. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the full association of predictors on the odds of having dyspepsia.Results: The resulting sample was 176 pre-clinical medical students, with a mean age of 20.67 ± 2.57 years. A total of 77 (43.8%) respondents reported having dyspepsia while 99 (56.2%) did not. There was a significant association between smoking and dyspepsia (p&lt;0.05), as well as a marginally significant association between inadequate sleep and dyspepsia (p&lt;0.10). There was no significant association with alcohol or analgesic use on dyspesia. Dietary habits showed no association with dyspepsia.Conclusion: Dyspepsia was reported by 43.8% of the repondents. These findings emphasize the importance of improving lifestyle and dietary factors associated with dyspepsia and raising awareness of reducing risk factors associated with dyspepsia. Further studies are needed on dyspepsia in a larger cohort of students in order to fully understand the complexity of this problem and be able to generalize the findings to other cohorts

Immune-based strategies for treatment and prevention of hepatitis C virus infection

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection affects about 3% of the world’s population. Currently, the gold standard therapy does not work in a high percentage of patients and with all genotypes. In addition, it is costly, is associated with many side-effects. So, more convenient therapeutic strategies have been sought. These include, direct acting antivirals (DAAs), and immune-based therapy. Four DAA molecules have recently been approved by FDA.  Immune-based therapy aims at augmenting host immunity, thus prevention of infection or clearance of the virus with subsequent recovery can occur. Boosting T cell responses and activating humoral immune reactions have been targeted in the development of novel combating tools. The most intensively studied immune-therapeutic strategies are: 1) vaccines; either therapeutic or prophylactic, 2) dendritic cell immunotherapy, 3) antagonists of T cell inhibitory factors, 4) anti-HCV neutralizing antibodies, 4) cytokines and chemokines, 5) agonists for TLRs, and 6) caspase inhibitors

Role of Procalcitonin As an Inflammatory Marker in a Sample of Egyptian Children with Simple Obesity

BACKGROUND: Obesity is a multifactorial disease, associated with metabolic disorders and chronic low-grade inflammation. Procalcitonin (PCT) is well known as a biomarker of infection, and systemic inflammation. Recently, it has potential as a marker for chronic low-grade inflammation.AIM: This study aims to evaluate the role of serum PCT as an inflammatory biomarker in the diagnosis of obesity-related low-grade inflammation.METHOD: In this case-control study, 50 obese and 35 normal weight children and adolescents aged 5–15 years were enrolled. Anthropometric parameters were measured in all subjects. Blood samples were collected for measurement of lipid profile, blood glucose, insulin, high sensitivity-CRP (Hs-CRP) and serum procalcitonin. Serum (PCT) levels were assessed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.RESULTS: Obese participants had higher concentrations of serum PCT, total cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL-c, glucose and Hs-CRP than control group. On correlation analysis, procalcitonin had significant positive correlation with (BMI) z-score (P = 0.02), insulin (P = 0.00), insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) (P = 0.006), Hs-CRP (P = 0.02), total cholesterol (P = 0.04) and triglycerides (P = 0.00) in obese group.CONCLUSION: The increased serum procalcitonin concentrations were closely related to measures of adiposity, Hs-CRP and insulin resistance, suggesting that PCT may be an excellent biomarker for obesity-related chronic low-grade inflammation in children and adolescents

An overview of query processing on crowdsourced databases

Crowd-sourcing is a powerful solution to correctly answer expensive and unanswered queries in the database. This includes queries on a database with uncertain and incomplete data. The crowd-sourcing attempts to exploit human abilities to process these difficult tasks and workers helped to provide accurate results utilizing the available data in the crowd. The crowd-sourcing database systems (CSDB) combined the ability of the crowd with the relational database by using some variant of the relational database with minor changes. This paper surveys and examines the leading studies conducted on the area of query processing for both traditional and preference queries in crowd-sourcing databases. The focus is given on highlights the strengths and the weakness of each approach. A detailed discussion for the current and future trends research relevant to query processing in the area of crow-sourced databases is also demonstrated

Effect of Vocal Anesthesia on Adult Dental Patients during Covid-19 pandemic period

BACKGROUND: Pain is as a major concern with dental patients. The dentist-patient interaction can reveal the presence of anxiety and fear, which may result in rise of pain. This study aimed to assess vocabulary communication as support to dental anesthesia on the adult dental patient. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a prospective, randomized clinical study, conducted from February 2020 through March 2021. Two hundred individuals (112 males, 88 females) of the age range (16 to 84 years) were separated into two groups for testing the level of pain during dental local anesthesia, with vocal communication and without vocal communication. RESULTS: While the control group showed no difference between males and females, there was a difference between the sexes in the experimental group with past dental visits, VAS and injection type having less anxiety (p=0.0001) while with education/VAS having (p£0.01) as appear in sex to age (p£0.05). There was no difference when data were compared by age, or type of anesthesia (inferior alveolar nerve block or infiltration technique). CONCLUSION: Dental anxiety can be alleviated by talking to the patients before the procedure, which could reduce the amount of pain