Manual fruit picking is labor-intensive and can damage fruit. Fully mechanized picking is efficient, but it also risks fruit damage. Therefore, semi-automated tools are needed to improve bitter orange picking. This paper presents a smart manual picker designed to facilitate picking while predicting fruit maturity based on picking force as well as various chemical and physical parameters using machine learning (ML). The study methodology consists of five stages: (1) manufacturing the smart picker, (2) picking 50 bitter orange samples, (3) measuring the characteristics of the bitter oranges in the laboratory, (4) training different ML models, and (5) identifying the most accurate model for predicting fruit maturity. The results indicate that

   It is challenging to remove antibiotics from water bodies, as they are among the most widespread contaminants in the environment, particularly with conventional wastewater treatment methods, due to their persistence and low biodegradability. The current study examined the use of nanoscale zero-valent iron to remove antibiotics. Conocarpus leaf extract, which is primarily composed of polyphenols like flavonoids and tannins, was employed as a green source to prepare Fe/Cu nanoparticles, which can act as an eco-friendly reducing agent. The nanoparticles were immobilized onto silica sand (SS), forming SS-Fe/Cu nanocomposite to remove tetracycline (TC) and ciprofloxacin (CIP) from aqueous solutions. The structural characteristics

   There is a growing imperative to extract oil not only through primary and secondary means but also via tertiary recovery methods to meet the escalating global energy demands. Consequently, Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is slated to increase significance in the oil industry in the coming years. The amalgamation of low salinity water (LSW) with chemicals to augment oil recovery has gained substantial traction in recent years owing to its demonstrated effectiveness. In this study, a systematic investigation utilizing contact angle measurements to elucidate the underlying mechanisms was undertaken. The results reveal that the contact angle (CA) demonstrated the effectiveness of the combined fluid in altering the wettability from oil-

Maintenance of  hospital buildings and its management are regarded as an important subject which needs attention because hospital buildings are service institutions which are very important to a society, requiring the search for the best procedure to develop maintenance in hospitals. The research is aimed to determine an equation to estimate the annual maintenance cost for public hospital. To achieve this aim, Al-Sader City Hospital maintenance system in Al-Najaf province has been studied with its main elements through survey of data, records and reports relating to maintenance during the years of the study 2008-2014 and to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threat points in the current system through Swat analysi

Community pharmacists faced more complex challenges in meeting patients’ medication needs during the pandemic than previously reported in the literature. Objectives To explore the perception and abilities of community pharmacists in managing patients’ needs in terms of medication dispensing during the pandemic, and to examine its effect on improving the patients’ situations. Materials and Methods A cross-sectional study design, validated by 30 experts, was conducted using an electronic survey (Google Form) to assess the effect of the dispensing practice of Iraqi community pharmacists on the patient’s clinical outcomes during the pandemic. The survey was distributed on professional pharmacist’s social media platforms from December

The multi-focus image fusion method can fuse more than one focused image to generate a single image with more accurate description. The purpose of image fusion is to generate one image by combining information from many source images of the same scene. In this paper, a multi-focus image fusion method is proposed with a hybrid pixel level obtained in the spatial and transform domains. The proposed method is implemented on multi-focus source images in YCbCr color space. As the first step two-level stationary wavelet transform was applied on the Y channel of two source images. The fused Y channel is implemented by using many fusion rule techniques. The Cb and Cr channels of the source images are fused using principal component analysis (PCA).