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This study reports a rapid and eco-friendly green method for the synthesis of silver nanoparticles from silver nitrate solution using winter jasmine leaves extract as a reducing agent of Ag+ to Ag0. A visible Absorption Spectrophotometer was used to monitor the formation of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The visible spectrum showed an absorption peak at 420 nm which reflects the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of AgNPs. In addition to that, the synthesis of AgNPs was confirmed by the color change of the solution. By studying the most important factors affecting the formation of AgNPs, it was noted that the productivity of AgNPs in the solution increased by increasing the pH of the solution, and the basic medium was the appropriate medium for the synthesis process. Also, the amount of produced AgNPs increased with the increase in temperature, volume of extract, reaction time, the extract volume ratio of the winter jasmine leaves, and silver nitrate concentration. In conclusion, the aqueous extract of winter jasmine leaves represents a suitable material for the biosynthesis of AgNPs, and large amounts of AgNPs with appropriate sizes may be obtained by controlling the parameters that affect the synthesis process.

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Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) is the most common pathogen causing antibiotic-associated intestinal diseases in humans and some animal species, but it can also be present in various environments outside hospitals. Thus, the objective of this study was to investigate the presence and the characteristics of toxin-encoding genes and antimicrobial resistance of C. difficile isolates from different environmental sources. C. difficile was found in 32 out of 81 samples (39.50%) after selective enrichment of spore-forming bacteria and in 45 samples (55.56%) using a TaqMan-based qPCR assay. A total of 169 C. difficile isolates were recovered from those 32 C. difficile-positive environmental samples. The majority of environmental C. difficile isolates were toxigenic, with many (88.75%) positive for tcdA and tcdB. Seventy-four isolates (43.78%) were positive for binary toxins, cdtA and cdtB, and 19 isolates were non-toxigenic. All the environmental C. difficile isolates were susceptible to vancomycin and metronidazole, and most isolates were resistant to ciprofloxacin (66.86%) and clindamycin (46.15%), followed by moxifloxacin (13.02%) and tetracycline (4.73%). Seventy-five isolates (44.38%) showed resistance to at least two of the tested antimicrobials. C. difficile strains are commonly present in various environmental sources contaminated by feces and could be a potential source of community-associated C. difficile infections.

Abstract: Earth velocity changes under many reasons. They cause variations in the length of daytime. These reasons are; interior changes, which usually occur during events that tend to speed up Earth’s rotation slightly but noticeably, and Outward changes, where material that was typically at one point at a higher elevation on Earth surface falls down to be at a lower point. The first reason may show in several figures like earthquake and condensing core of earth. On the other hand, tide, melting glacier poles, and changing weather they cause the other reason. The amount of time that increasing or decreasing in a day until now do not exceed few seconds, but on the massive scale of time as the age of earth it becomes important value. 

Thyroid function is impaired by diabetes, resulting into thyroid disorders, accompanied by the alteration of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) and thyroxine (T4) levels. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of vitamin D supplementation on TSH and total T4 levels in serum of Libyan patients suffering from type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) with thyroid disorders. A total of 180 subjects were recruited and distributed into two groups: 80 participants in control group (43 females and 37 males), with an age range of 26-72 years, and 100 participants in T2DM patient group (54 females and 46 males), with an age range of 26-63 years. Each T2DM patient received a monthly intramuscular injection of 200000 ng/ml vitamin D for three months. Glucose, vitamin D, total T4 and TSH levels were determined in serum samples of healthy subjects and of T2DM patients (pre- and post-administration of vitamin D). After the T2DM group received vitamin D supplementation, the mean of vitamin D level increased in the T2DM, while the mean of glucose level decreased. Most importantly, the mean of total T4 level for patients increased significantly (p ˂ 0.05) from 1.34 to 8.23 g/dL, both of which were lower than the control group mean 10.99 g/dL. In contrast, the mean of TSH level for patients decreased significantly (p ˂ 0.05) from 11.77 to 2.71 mU/L, and both values were greater than the control group mean 2.01 mU/L. ANOVA results showed that age, gender, and body mass index had no significant individual interactions (p > 0.05) with vitamin D supplementation on total T4 and TSH levels. Vitamin D supplementation had a beneficial role on total T4 and TSH levels in serum of Libyan T2DM patients with thyroid disorders.

The network connectivity is often lost during some situations such as in war zones, battle fields or in regard to natural disasters like floods or earthquakes. Therefore, the connection becomes difficult for rescuing teams to locate people. At the same time, mobile nodes are difficult to be tracked/located. Therefore, flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) is the solution which provides a way to tackle this situation without the need for any central infrastructure with the use of flying objects (nodes). FANTEs are frequently formed of tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are flexible, affordable, and rapid to deploy. UAV as a router and without complex hardware deployment, provides an effective real-time communication solution for multiple UAV systems. FANETs can also be used to provide connectivity in such areas in which flying nodes are utilized. In this paper, we discuss the importance of the FANETs and present a routing protocol comparison that depends on the link budget to identify the optimized packet route for the data to be transmitted. The simulation design results show that a throughput enhancement of 0.62Gbps is achieved in comparison to the distance-based routing protocol. The results also confirm the efficiency of the optimized link state routing (OSLR) protocol over the other. The performance of FANETs can be optimized further by using the OLSR protocol.

In this paper, a novel robust blind grayscale image digital watermarking scheme is introduced based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) in combination with discrete cosine transform (DCT), Hessenberg decomposition, and entropy analysis for copyright protection of multimedia information. At first, the two levels of LWT are applied to the host grayscale image to improve the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme and then the high-frequency sub-band of the 2-level of LWT is decomposed by DCT. Next, the DCT coefficients are divided into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. After that, Hessenberg decomposition performs on each selected block, whereas the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix is utilized to hide the watermark. To evaluate the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed digital watermarking scheme, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and normalized cross-correlation (NC) are utilized to measure the quality and the ability of the proposed watermarking scheme to robust against signal processing operations and geometric attacks. Experimental and analysis results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is achieved a very good tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison with other scheme have shown that the proposed digital watermarking schemes have a superior performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness than other

In this work, we consider Nelder-Mead method to tackle the output

feedbackeigenvalue assignment problem for discrete–time control

systems. First, we reformulate this problem as a constrained minimization

problem. Then by applying apenalty-method approach we find a local

solution to the problem using Nelder-Meadmethod. The performance of

the method is illustrated through some test problemsfrom the literature.

Counting the number of people in many estimation systems, such as still images or video frames, is a buoyant research area that is challenging in the field of computer vision. It plays a considerable role in a variety of applications, such as security, management, education, and commerce. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a system to estimate the number of people in digital still images based on the Face Detection method. This system composed of two parts: face detection and counting of detected faces. In the detection step, the Skin Color Face Detection method was applied on the input of a digital still image. In the counting part, the obtained detected faces by the Skin Color Face Detection method have counted to estimate the number of people in an input color image with simple software and simple low-cost hardware. The skin color face detection algorithm was tested using 133 images from the People Image Groups dataset, which contains about 2573 color images of people, to test the proposed system. based on the obtained results, the best precision achieved of the proposed Skin Color face detection algorithm was 85%