The Potential Amoebicidal Effect of Some Milk forms as an Inhibitor for Entamoeba histolytica Viability Isolated from Diarrhea

Milk includes numerous compounds such as lacto-peroxidase, lactoferrin, immunoglobulin G, secretory immunoglobulin A, and Lysozymes The invasive trophozoites of E. histolytica are capable to inhabit host tissues and provoke diseases such as intestinal colitis. The objective of the study was to compare different forms of milk’s effect on E. histolytica trophopzoite by measuring protein concentration in vitro using a spectrophotometer and number of trophozoite by microscopy. For this purpose, E. histolytica trophozoites were exposed to several types of milk (human, sheep, cattle, goats, and formula) at concentrations of 6, 12, 18, and 24% for each type after 8, 16, and 24 hours of incubation. According to the findings, sheep and goat milk had lower total protein concentrations after 8 hours than other types of milk when compared to the control group. After 16 hours of incubation, raise the milk concentration to 24%   leading to a reduction in the formula milk\u27s total protein concentration to 5g/l. after 8 and 16 hours of incubation, sheep milk and cattle have significantly lower total protein concentrations (24% vs. 8%), respectively. The action of formula and human milk is increased by 24-hour incubation. Increase the trophozoite inhibition percentage compared to metronidazole in human milk, which was followed by sheep and cattle milk with respective values of 60.9%, 56.1%, and 46.3% respectively. Human milk, goat and formula milk had the greatest inhibitory activity after incubation 24hrs. at 24%.the extent of amoebicidal activity of milk was shown to depend on incubation period and concentration of milk

Petrophysical Evaluation and Reservoir Characterization of the Zubair Formation in the Luhais and Rachi oil fields, Southern Iraq

The Barremian succession in the present study is represented by the Zubair Formation which the most significant sandstone reservoir in Iraq.The area of study is located in the Southern part of Iraq at the Luhaisand Rachi oil fields, within the Mesopotamian basin. The thickness of the Zubair Formation is about 450 m in the studied area. It is divided into three lithofacies:- The upper unit is composed mostly of shale layers, the middle unit is consists of thick layers of sandstone rocks and the lower ones is consists mainly of Shale with less sandstone layers. These units are characterized by three types of petrophysical features according to total porosity/effective porosity: - High-moderate effective porosity rocks (type I), moderate effective porosity rocks (type II) and low-non pores rocks (type III). The upper unit of theZubair Formation at the Luhais oil field is characterized by two horizons. The first is showing high resistivity-high gamma ray which represents the upper part; while the lower ones is shown low resistivity-low gamma ray. There are two good reservoir horizones with high oil saturation (low water saturation) in this unit at the Rachi oil field and Lu-3 borehole, while at the Lu-12 is appeared as one uncontaneoushorizon. The middle is characterized by two subzones in the southwestern part of Luhais oil field (Lu-12). The upper one characterized by high- moderate effective porosity while the lower one characterized by moderate effective porosity because of presence a low volume of shale. This unit is dominated by low resistivity-low gamma ray with three susbended bands of high resistivity-low gamma ray, these appeared in both studied oil fields. The high percentage of water saturation in this unit caused the lack of clarity of the oil saturation, which appears in narrow bands The lower unit is represented the shale – dominated member of Zubair Formation, with low to non-pores rocks. This appeared in all studied wells. There are limit presences for the high- moderate effective porosity of rock within the sand bands lithofacies appears in these wells. This unit is characterized by alternative the high resistivity-high gamma ray horizon with the low resistivity-low gamma ray horizon as four cycles. There are two good reservoir horizons with high oil saturation (low water saturation) in this unit with a distribution similar to that found in the upper part. From the reservoir geology which represent by property modelling, preparing data, construction of three-dimension clump and scale up for the studied oil fields. The Rachi oil field is appeared the better hydrocarbon saturation compared to Luhais oil field, although the Luhais oil field (Lu-3 and Lu-12) is the best of pertophysicalproperties. This indicates that the Rachi oil field was affected by the structural position as indicated by the model, while the model did not show any structural properties in the field of Lahis. Therefore, the structural and/or stratigraphic positions have the greatest influence on the hydrocarbon accumulation, regardless of petrophysical properties

An innovative approach to the development of a portable unit for analytical flame characterization in a microgravity environment

The availability of manned laboratory facilities in space offers wonderful opportunities and challenges in microgravity combustion science and technology. In turn, the fundamentals of microgravity combustion science can be studied via spectroscopic characterization of free radicals generated in flames. The laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) technique is a noninvasive method of considerable utility in combustion physics and chemistry suitable for monitoring not only specific species and their kinetics, but it is also important for imaging of flames. This makes LIF one of the most important tools for microgravity combustion science. Flame characterization under microgravity conditions using LIF is expected to be more informative than other methods aimed at searching for effects like pumping phenomenon that can be modeled via ground level experiments. A primary goal of our work consisted in working out an innovative approach to devising an LIF-based analytical unit suitable for in-space flame characterization. It was decided to follow two approaches in tandem: (1) use the existing laboratory (non-portable) equipment and determine the optimal set of parameters for flames that can be used as analytical criteria for flame characterization under microgravity conditions; and (2) use state-of-the-art developments in laser technology and concentrate some effort in devising a layout for the portable analytical equipment. This paper presents an up-to-date summary of the results of our experiments aimed at the creation of the portable device for combustion studies in a microgravity environment, which is based on a portable UV tunable solid-state laser for excitation of free radicals normally present in flames in detectable amounts. A systematic approach has allowed us to make a convenient choice of species under investigation, as well as the proper tunable laser system, and also enabled us to carry out LIF experiments on free radicals using a solid-state laser tunable in the UV

Phytoremediation: Halophytes as Promising Heavy Metal Hyperaccumulators

The continued accumulation of trace and heavy metals in the environment presents a significant danger to biota health, including humans, which is undoubtedly undermining global environmental sustainability initiatives. Consequently, the need for efficient remediation technologies becomes imperative. Phytoremediation is one of the most viable options in this regard. Hundreds of plants in laboratory experiments demonstrate the potential to remediate varying concentrations of heavy metals; however, the remediation capacity of most of these plants proved unsatisfactory under field conditions. The identification and selection of plants with higher metal uptake capacity or hyperaccumulators are one of the limitations of this technology. Additionally, the mechanism of heavy metal uptake by plants remains to be sufficiently documented. The halophyte plants are famous for their adaptation to harsh environmental conditions, and hence could be the most suitable candidates for heavy metal hyperaccumulation. The state of Qatar in the Gulf region encompasses rich resources of halophytes that have the potential for future investment toward human and environmental health. This chapter, therefore, gives an overview of phytoremediation, with emphasis on halophytes as suitable heavy metal hyperaccumulators for improved remediation of heavy metal–contaminated areas

Text documents clustering using modified multi-verse optimizer

In this study, a multi-verse optimizer (MVO) is utilised for the text document clus- tering (TDC) problem. TDC is treated as a discrete optimization problem, and an objective function based on the Euclidean distance is applied as similarity measure. TDC is tackled by the division of the documents into clusters; documents belonging to the same cluster are similar, whereas those belonging to different clusters are dissimilar. MVO, which is a recent metaheuristic optimization algorithm established for continuous optimization problems, can intelligently navigate different areas in the search space and search deeply in each area using a particular learning mechanism. The proposed algorithm is called MVOTDC, and it adopts the convergence behaviour of MVO operators to deal with discrete, rather than continuous, optimization problems. For evaluating MVOTDC, a comprehensive comparative study is conducted on six text document datasets with various numbers of documents and clusters. The quality of the final results is assessed using precision, recall, F-measure, entropy accuracy, and purity measures. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method performs competitively in comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms. Statistical analysis is also conducted and shows that MVOTDC can produce significant results in comparison with three well-established methods

CTJ: Input-Output Based Relation Combinatorial Testing Strategy Using Jaya Algorithm

            ويكاد يكون من المستحيل اختبار كل مجموعة من المدخلات نظرًا لأن تنفيذ حالات الاختبار يتطلب وقتا طويلا للغاية. الأختبار الاندماجي هو السبيل لتخطي عقبات الاختبار الشامل من خلال أختبار كل قيم المدخلات لكل المعاملات المركبة المتعددة طرق الترتيب.   يمكن تقسيم الاختبار التجميعي إلى ثلاثة أنواع هي تفاعل القوة الموحد ، والتفاعل المتغير والقوة ، والعلاقة القائمة على المدخلات والمخرجات . ان الطريقة الاخيرة الانفة الذكر تختزل الفحص الاندماجي الى مجموعة ضمن اختيار الشخص الفاحص. معظم الابحاث في الاختبار الاندماجي طبقت في تفاعل القوة الموحدة وقوة التفاعل المتغيرة ، ومع ذلك ، هناك اهتمام قليل جدا بالعلاقة بين المدخلات والمخرجات. لذا تم اقتراح خوارزمية جايا في هذا البحث  كخوارزمية مثلي لانشاء جدول الفحص الاندماجي باستراتيجية تعتمد على العلاقة بين المدخلات والمخرجات. نتيجة تطبيق خوارزمية جايا في الاختبار الاندماجي القائم على المدخلات والمخرجات مقبولة لأنها تنتج العدد الأمثل تقريبًا لحالات الاختبار في نطاق زمني مقبول.Software testing is a vital part of the software development life cycle. In many cases, the system under test has more than one input making the testing efforts for every exhaustive combination impossible (i.e. the time of execution of the test case can be outrageously long). Combinatorial testing offers an alternative to exhaustive testing via considering the interaction of input values for every t-way combination between parameters. Combinatorial testing can be divided into three types which are uniform strength interaction, variable strength interaction and input-output based relation (IOR). IOR combinatorial testing only tests for the important combinations selected by the tester. Most of the researches in combinatorial testing applied the uniform and the variable interaction strength, however, there is still a lack of work addressing IOR. In this paper, a Jaya algorithm is proposed as an optimization algorithm engine to construct a test list based on IOR in the proposed combinatorial test list generator strategy into a tool called CTJ. The result of applying the Jaya algorithm in input-output based combinatorial testing is acceptable since it produces a nearly optimum number of test cases in a satisfactory time range

Effect of different drying techniques on the volatile compounds, morphological characteristics and thermal stability of Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni leaf

Purpose: To examine the volatile compounds, thermal stability and morphological characteristics of stevia (Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni) leaves after sun, oven and microwave drying.Methods: Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry with a spectral analysis manager was used to separate the volatile compounds. Dried stevia leaf powder was characterized morphologically by scanning electron microscopy while thermal properties were determined by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC).Results: The plant material contained large amounts of spathulenol and caryophyllene oxide. The main compounds were 1-docosanol and hexanoic acid; trans-β-ionone, 5-methylundecane, 2,5,6-trimethyldecane, (+) spathulenol, propanoic acid and 1-chlorononadecane. The surface of the dried leaf powder varied with the treatment applied. Following microwave drying, the particles were even, regular, and compact while the sun- and oven dried particles resembled angular bricks. All samples exhibited a strong endothermic response, indicating stability up to 150 °C; from 150 to 200 °C, thermal decomposition occurred.Conclusion: Drying method has a significant effect on the structure, thermal stability and volatile compounds contents of stevia leaves. All drying methods examined in this study have potential applications in the preparation of stevia as a functional ingredient for the food and pharmaceutical industries.Keywords: Differential scanning calorimetry, Drying techniques, Stevia rebaudiana, Pharmaceuticals, Scanning electron microscopy, Volatile compound

Recent Advances in Nanoparticles Enhanced Oil Recovery: Rheology, Interfacial Tension, Oil Recovery, and Wettability Alteration

Chemically enhanced oil recovery methods are utilized to increase the oil recovery by improving the mobility ratio, altering the wettability, and/or lowering the interfacial tension between water and oil. Surfactants and polymers have been used for this purpose for the last few decades. Recently, nanoparticles have attracted the attention due to their unique properties. A large number of nanoparticles have been investigated for enhanced oil recovery applications either alone or in combination with surfactants and/or polymers. This review discusses the various types of nanoparticles that have been utilized in enhanced oil recovery. The review highlights the impact of nanoparticles on wettability alteration, interfacial tension, and rheology. The review also covers the factors affecting the oil recovery using nanoparticles and current challenges in field implementation