John Updike’s use of setting in his fiction has elicited different and even conflicting reactions from critics, varying from symbolic interpretations of setting to a sense of confusion at his use of time and place in his stories.  The present study is an attempt at examining John Updike’s treatment of binary settings in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories (1962) to reveal theme, characters’ motives and conflicts.  Analyzing Updike’s stories from a structuralist’s perspective reveals his employment of two different places and times in the individual stories as a means of reflecting the psychological state of the characters, as in “The Persistence of Desire”, or expressing conflicting views on social and political is

The concept of quality of auditing profession comes on top of the concerns of the international business community and international institutions particularly now following the impact of the several failures and financial hardships suffered by the major companies in the recent collapse of money markets in some countries of the world and fear of their recurrence in the future.An observer of the local and international rules and standards (or principles) finds that these include such implications have direct or indirect effects on the performance of the service of the accountant and auditor, which should upgrade their professional performance in these services to a high level of quality so as to be in line with the requirements, principles

Introduction: Selenium is an essential trace element involved in different physiological functions of the human body. An inverse relationship between serum selenium levels and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia has been reported. cervical intraepithelial neoplasia is regarded as a potentially premalignant transformation of squamous cells of the cervix. Objectives: To evaluate the relationship between the serum level of selenium and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. Methods: A case-control study was conducted at Baghdad Teaching Hospital and Iraqi National Cancer Research Center in the University of Baghdad during the period from July 2021 to July 2022. A convenient sample of 100 women was enrolled in the current study and included

Water quality planning relies on Biochemical Oxygen Demand BOD. BOD testing takes five days. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is increasingly used for water resource forecasting. This work designed a PSO technique for estimating everyday BOD at Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment facility inlet. Al-Rustumiya wastewater treatment plant provided 702 plant-scale data sets during 2012-2022. The PSO model uses the daily data of the water quality parameters, including chemical oxygen demand (COD), chloride (Cl^-), suspended solid (SS), total dissolved solids (TDS), and pH, to determine how each variable affects the daily incoming BOD. PSO and multiple linear regression (MLR) findings are compared, and their perfor

Background:Plant-derived compounds have action alongside Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria and numerous compounds, inhibit efflux pumps and hence have become known as efflux pump inhibitors. Clarithromycin is a macrolide antibiotic used to treat pharyngitis, tonsillitis, acute maxillary sinusitis and acute bacterial exacerbation of chronic bronchitis the antibacterial range is the similar as erythromycin but it is active against Mycobacterium avium complex, M.leprae and atypical mycobacteria. The in vitro antibacterial activity results of different boswellic acid compounds discovered alpha keto-boswellic acid (AKBA) to be the preponderance potent antibacterial compound alongside Gram-positive pathogens, but it showed no significant a

Introduction and Aim: Cancers are a complex group of genetic illnesses that develop through multistep, mutagenic processes which can invade or spread throughout the body. Recent advances in cancer treatment involve oncolytic viruses to infect and destroy cancer cells. The Newcastle disease virus (NDV), an oncolytic virus has shown to have anti-cancer effects either directly by lysing cancer cells or indirectly by activating the immune system. The green fluorescent protein (GFP) has been widely used in studying the anti-tumor activity of oncolytic viruses. This study aimed to study the anticancer effect of a recombinant rNDV-GFP clone on NCI-H727 lung carcinoma cell line in vitro.   Materials and Methods: The GFP gene was inserted t

The current study aimed to determine the morphometric and meristic characteristics of the North African catfish Clarias gariepinus (Burchell, 1822). Six specimens of C. gariepinus were collected from the Tigris River, in central Iraq. This study is considered the confirmation first record of this species in Iraq, and the second documentation of this exotic fish. The present species is characterized by a very long dorsal fin, a rounded caudal fin and four pairs of barbels.