Triticale is a hybrid of wheat and rye grown for use as animal feed. In Florida, due to its soft coat, triticale is highly vulnerable to Sitophilus oryzae L. (rice weevil) and there is interest in development of methods to detect early-instar larvae so that infestations can be targeted before they become economically damaging. The objective of this study was to develop prediction models of the infestation degree for triticale seed infested with rice weevils of different growth stages. Spectral signatures were tested as a method to detect rice weevils in triticale seed. Groups of seeds at 11 different levels (degrees) of infestation, 0–62%, were obtained by combining different ratios of infested and uninfested seeds. A spectrophotometer wa

Obesity is a risk factor associated with age-related disorders that accelerate aging, and it increases the risk of metabolic diseases. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the association of leukocyte telomere length (LTL) with the presence of higher body weight in middle-aged females and males. The study subjects comprised 160 (80 control and 80 higher body mass index BMI groups) with ranging ages of 30-50 years included and stratified for BMI. The physio-biochemical analysis was measured using enzymatic determination. Mean telomere length was determined by using the southern blotting technique. The association analysis revealed a significant variance (P < 0.01) in biochemical parameters between higher BMI grou

The aim of this study is to develop a novel framework for managing risks in smart supply chains by enhancing business continuity and resilience against potential disruptions. This research addresses the growing uncertainty in supply chain environments, driven by both natural phenomena-such as pandemics and earthquakes—and human-induced events, including wars, political upheavals, and societal transformations. Recognizing that traditional risk management approaches are insufficient in such dynamic contexts, the study proposes an adaptive framework that integrates proactive and remedial measures for effective risk mitigation. A fuzzy risk matrix is employed to assess and analyze uncertainties, facilitating the identification of disr

Cancer is in general not a result of an abnormality of a single gene but a consequence of changes in many genes, it is therefore of great importance to understand the roles of different oncogenic and tumor suppressor pathways in tumorigenesis. In recent years, there have been many computational models developed to study the genetic alterations of different pathways in the evolutionary process of cancer. However, most of the methods are knowledge-based enrichment analyses and inflexible to analyze user-defined pathways or gene sets. In this paper, we develop a nonparametric and data-driven approach to testing for the dynamic changes of pathways over the cancer progression. Our method is based on an expansion and refinement of the pathway bei

In general, path-planning problem is one of most important task in the field of robotics. This paper describes the path-planning problem of mobile robot based on various metaheuristic algorithms. The suitable collision free path of a robot must satisfies certain optimization criteria such as feasibility, minimum path length, safety and smoothness and so on. In this research, various three approaches namely, PSO, Firefly and proposed hybrid FFCPSO are applied in static, known environment to solve the global path-planning problem in three cases. The first case used single mobile robot, the second case used three independent mobile robots and the third case applied three follow up mobile robot.  Simulation results, whi

This paper presents a new algorithm in an important research field which is the semantic word similarity estimation. A new feature-based algorithm is proposed for measuring the word semantic similarity for the Arabic language. It is a highly systematic language where its words exhibit elegant and rigorous logic. The score of sematic similarity between two Arabic words is calculated as a function of their common and total taxonomical features. An Arabic knowledge source is employed for extracting the taxonomical features as a set of all concepts that subsumed the concepts containing the compared words. The previously developed Arabic word benchmark datasets are used for optimizing and evaluating the proposed algorithm. In this paper,

The new, standard molecular biologic system for duplicating DNA enzymatically devoid of employing a living organism, like E. coli or yeast, represents polymerases chain reaction (PCR). This technology allows an exponential intensification of a minor quantity of DNA molecule several times. Analysis can be straightforward with more DNA available. A thermal heat cycler performs a polymerization chain reaction that involves repeated cycles of heating and cooling the reactant tubes at the desired temperature for each reaction step. A heated deck is positioned on the upper reaction tube to avoid evaporating the reaction mixture (normally volumes range from 15 to 100 l per tube), or an oil layer can be placed on a reaction mixture su