A new record for Abutilon theophrasti is recorded for the first time in the flora of Libya. This widespread agricultural weed was collected from El-Hamra region (El-Qabel) in the Nafusa Mountain south of Tripoli. To facilitate further identification and future detection, a full description, habitat information, distribution map and distribution data are provided. A brief discussion about the most important threats posed by this species is presented.

Colour image watermarking has become one of the most important algorithms for copyright protection. The following paper will present an innovative scheme for watermarking blind colour images using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) and the Hessenberg decomposition as its basis. First, two-level DWT followed by FWHT are used to decompose the host image’s red channel. Next, the FWHT coefficients are split into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. Then, each selected block is decomposed using Hessenberg decomposition, where the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix H is quantified to embed the watermark information. Peak signalto-noise ratio, normalized cross-correlation and structural similarity index measure are used to evaluate the feasibility and the robustness. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed watermarking scheme is highly invisible with PSNR> 40 dB, for several watermarked colour images, with a capacity of 4096 bits and execution time of 0.7415 s. The proposed watermarking scheme is also highly resistant to both common image processing and geometrical attacks such as filtering, JPEG2000, noise adding, cropping, scaling, blurring and sharpening, and others

Leishmania pyrimidine salvage is replete with opportunities for therapeutic intervention with enzyme inhibitors or antimetabolites. Their uptake into cells depends upon specific transporters; therefore it is essential to establish whether various Leishmania species possess similar pyrimidine transporters capable of drug uptake. Here, we report a comprehensive characterization of pyrimidine transport in L. major and L. mexicana. In both species, two transporters for uridine/adenosine were detected, one of which also transported uracil and the antimetabolites 5-fluoruracil (5-FU) and 5F,2'deoxyuridine (5F,2'dUrd), and was designated uridine-uracil transporter 1 (UUT1); the other transporter mediated uptake of adenosine, uridine, 5F,2'dUrd and thymidine and was designated Nucleoside Transporter 1 (NT1). To verify the reported L. donovani model of two NT1-like genes encoding uridine/adenosine transporters, and an NT2 gene encoding an inosine transporter, we cloned the corresponding L. major and L. mexicana genes, expressing each in T. brucei. Consistent with the L. donovani reports, the NT1-like genes of either species mediated the adenosine-sensitive uptake of [3H]-uridine but not of [3H]-inosine. Conversely, the NT2-like genes mediated uptake of [3H]-inosine but not [3H]-uridine. Among pyrimidine antimetabolites tested, 5-FU and 5F,2'dUrd were the most effective antileishmanials; resistance to both analogs was induced in L. major and L. mexicana. In each case it was found that the resistant cells had lost the transport capacity for the inducing drug. Metabolomics analysis found that the mechanism of action of 5-FU and 5F-2'dUrd was similar in both Leishmania species, with major changes in deoxynucleotide metabolism. We conclude that the pyrimidine salvage system is highly conserved in Leishmania species - essential information for the development of pyrimidine-based chemotherapy.

Abstract—Early detection of malignant melanoma skin cancer is crucial for treating the disease and saving lives. Many computerized techniques have been reported in the literature to diagnose and classify the disease with satisfactory skin cancer detection performance. However, reducing the false detection rate is still challenging and preoccupying because false positives trigger the alarm and require intervention by an expert pathologist for further examination and screening. In this paper, an automatic skin cancer diagno- sis system that combines different textural and color features is proposed. New textural and color features are used in a bag-of-features approach for efficient and accurate detection. We particularly claim that the Histogram of Gradients (HG) and the Histogram of Lines (HL) are more suitable for the analysis and clas- sification of dermoscopic and standard skin images than the conventional Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) and the Histogram of Oriented Lines (HOL), respectively. The HG and HL are bagged separately us- ing a codebook for each and then combined with other bagged color vector angles and Zernike moments to exploit the color information. The overall system has been assessed through intensive experiments using different classifiers on a dermoscopic image dataset and another standard dataset. Experimental results have shown the superiority of the proposed system over state-of-the-art techniques.

The current paper proposes a novel scheme for non-blind watermarking of images, making use of discrete wavelet transform (DWT), discrete time Fourier transform (DTFT), as well as singular value decomposition, or SVD. During the process of embedding, 1-level DWT is used to decompose the host image into its various frequency sub-bands. After this, the high-frequency sub band receives an application of DTFT. This is followed then by SVD, after which the watermark becomes embedded into the now-transformed host image's singular matrix. Then, the inverses of 1-level DWT, DTFT and SVD are applied in order to obtain a watermarked final image. This paper evaluates the performance of the proposed method of watermarking against a number of attacks, including sharpening, salt and pepper noise, AWGN, gamma correction, histogram equalisation, flipping and cropping. Results obtained during experiments have found that the scheme as proposed does provide high levels of robustness and imperceptibility against various signal processing attacks.

Abstract-A series of polyelectrolyte hydrogels ranging from 92-98wt% were synthesized by copolymerization of acrylamide,

AAM with 2-acrylamido-2-methyl propane sulphonic acid, AMPS using 0.001g APS as initiator in the presence of 30wt% H2O

and 1.0wt% ethylene glycol dimethacrylate,EDMA as cross-linking agent. The final copolymers was obtained in the form of

glassy and transparent roads at room temperature, these roads were soaked in water for two days to remove unreacted

monomers. The swelling behavior of the hydrogels was studied in distilled water and salt solutions of 1.5 mol/l each of NaCl

and KCl. The Swelling in water shows decreasing values of q, LE, Ø1, EWC% and increasing polymer volume fraction, Ø2 by

increasing acrylamide, due to increasing hydrophobicity and decreasing the hydrophilicity. The swelling in salt solutions

shows a decreasing in the values of ESSNa%, WCNa%, SCNa%, ESSK%, WCK% and SCK% by increasing acrylamid

monomer in the feed due to increasing the hydrophobicity and decreasing the ionized ionic groups (SO3H). The increasing

values of ESSNa%, WCNa% and SCNa% compared with the values of ESSK%, WCK% and SCK% respectively, is due to

the higher charge density of sodium ion than that of potassium ion.

Six Hakea species varying greatly in seed size were selected for cotyledon damage experiments. The

growth of seedlings with cotyledons partially or completely removed was monitored over 90 days. All

seedlings perished by the fifth week when both cotyledons were removed irrespective of seed size.

Partial removal of cotyledons caused a significant delay in the emergence of the first leaf, and reduction

in root and shoot growth of the large-seeded species. The growth of seedlings of small-seeded species

was less impacted by cotyledon damage. The rate of survival, root and shoot lengths and dry biomass

of the seedlings were determined after 90 days. When seedlings were treated with balanced nutrient

solutions following removal of the cotyledons, survival was 95–98%, but 0% when supplied with

nutrient solutions lacking N or P or with water only. The addition of a balanced nutrient solution failed

to restore complete growth of any species, but the rate of root elongation for the small-seeded species

was maintained. Cotyledons provide nutrients to support early growth of Hakea seedlings, but other

physiological roles for the cotyledons are also implicated. In conclusion, small-seeded Hakea species can

tolerate cotyledons loss better than large-seeded species.

Abstract—With a rapidly increasing incidence of melanoma

skin cancer, there is a need for decision support systems to

detect it in its early stages, which would lead to better decisions

in treating it successfully. However, developing such systems is

still a challenging task for researchers. Several Computer Aided-

Diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed in the last two

decades to increase the accuracy of melanoma detection. Image

feature extraction is a critical step in differentiating between

melanoma and normal skin lesions. In this paper, we propose

to improve a bag-of-words approach by combining features

consisting of the color histogram and first order moments with the

Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). Experimental results

show that the proposed technique significantly improves the

detection accuracy, with an average sensitivity of 91% and

specificity of 85%. The proposed system was validated on a

dataset of 200 medically annotated images (40 melanomas and

160 non-melanomas) obtained from the database of the Hospital

Pedro Hispano. 

Abstract— Diagnosing skin cancer in its early stages is a challenging task for dermatologists given the fact that the chance for a patient’s survival is higher and hence the process of analyzing skin images and making decisions should be time efficient. Therefore, diagnosing the disease using automated and computerized systems has nowadays become essential. This paper proposes an efficient system for skin cancer detection on dermoscopic images. It has been shown that the statistical characteristics of the pigment network, extracted from the dermoscopic image, could be used as efficient discriminating features for cancer detection. The proposed system has been assessed on a dataset of 200 dermoscopic images of the ‘Hospital Pedro Hispano’ [1] and the results of cross-validation have shown high detection accuracy.