Heavy metal (HM) pollution has long been a significant source of environmental deterioration and a problem for the safety of food. Iraqis prefer rice over any other food, and since heavy metals have a direct impact on health, their traces in rice have drawn particular attention. Before cooking rice, it is usual in Iraq to wash and soak it. Some 55 varieties of imported and local rice were sampled from Erbil city markets in 2022 with the aim of determining the concentration of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb before and after soaking. Standard procedure of acid digestions was applied on the raw and soaked samples. The solutions were analyzed using ICPE-9820 Shimadzu. The mean concentrations of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (in mg/kg) in the rice samples before soaking was 0.655, 0.170, 0.160, 0.387, 0.489, respectively and after soaking 0.421, 0.109, 0.115, 0.124 and 0.336, respectively. The concentration of As and Pb was found to be beyond the optimum level of 0.2 mg/kg codex standards for rice; whereas Cd and Cr were within the proposed level of codex standards. Moreover, local rice showed higher concentration of (Cd and Cr), whereas (AS and Pb) concentration in imported rice was higher. Further, results validated that rice soaking can decrease levels of As, Cd, Cr, Ni and Pb (32.5%, 40.2%, 27.9%, 61.6% and 31.3%, respectively). These findings suggest that soaking as a kitchen practice has efficiency to evaporate metals and has a great influence on the reduction of toxic heavy metals and thus reduces exposure to toxic metals in rice
The humid and warm conditions in greenhouses provide an excellent environment for pests’ living conditions, and therefore, they provide ideal medium for alien introductions. Molluscs are among the most significant pests that infest plastic covered greenhouses. To identify and report their mollusc species, 23 greenhouses in Iraq were surveyed between March 2023 and April 2024. Of these, 11 were found to be infested with snails. A total of 158 specimens were collected and morphologically identified to seven species: Monacha obstructa (L. Pfeiffer, 1842), Eobania vermiculata (O.F. Müller, 1774), Xeropicta krynickii (Krynicki, 1833), Rumina decollata (Linnaeus, 1758), Polygyra cereolus (Megerle Von Mühlfeld, 1818), Cochlicella barba
... Show MoreAbstract The present work included morphological, anatomical, and palynological characters for the new species Acaalypha australis L. specimens, which belong to the family Euphorbiaceae. The species recorded in the study for the first time in Iraq. The plants of this species are annual herbs with green, striated or sub – polygonal stem, and branched near bases, Leaves are simple spirally alternate and lanceolate in shape. Flowers are unisexual, arranged in the axial of distinct leafy and cordate bracts, female flower arranged at the bracts bases and each flower with trileafed perianth and superior ovary with trilobed stylar stigma which has dense and coiled stigmatic hairs. Male flowers are arranged as a mixed verticellate inflorescence a
... Show Morepublishing has become a large space in the field of interactive education and modern pages have become dedicated to the service of the educational effort in this area as the research in this context of the urgent scientific necessities, especially as we consider in Iraq from the new countries in the exploitation of these new technologies and investment possibilities of the information network And the contents of different in the framework of so-called distance education Here lies the problem of research in the possibility of finding scientific solutions for the design of interactive inter active website for students of the preparatory stage in Iraq and to find out the scientific ways to find design The study, which included the problem of
... Show MoreOpenStreetMap (OSM) is the world’s biggest publicly licensed geographic data collection. Because OSM is rapidly being used in a wide range of applications, researchers have focused their efforts on determining its quality. The OSM buildings data quality is still ambiguous, due to the limitations, and a few researchers have evaluated the OSM buildings data quality through difficulties where the authoritative data are not obtainable. The focus of this research is to analyze and assess the accuracy of OSM buildings including completeness, and positional accuracy methods. Two different study areas in Baghdad city-Iraq have been investigated: Al-Rasheed and Al-Karrada. The process of the (OSM) data evaluation involved identifying the correspon
... Show MoreAstragalus mesogitanus is a new recorded species for Iraqi flora, from Onobrychium genus section, was collected from Erbil district, all morphological features were described in details as well as some micromorphological character as the trichomes and were provided with dimensions and plates, section key was also updated which illustrated the importance of standard (corolla) trichomes in species identification. Keywords: Astragalus, Fabaceae, Iraq, New record, Onobrychium, Trichomes.
The digital dermatoglyphics were studied in 120 females derived from northern region of Iraq (60 Arabs and 60 Kurds). Two kinds of analyses were perfomed : Quantitative and Qualtative. The unilateral and bilateral analyses for dermal ridge counts in each digital and the overall did not reveal any significant difference when t-test was used. A high correlation coefficients were revealed in this study between homologous and adjacent digits, moreover, significant differences were revealed between Arabian and Kurdish samples in both analyses when Fisher Z transform test was used, but the significant differences in the bilateral analysis exceed the ones in the unilateral. This indicates the importance of the former analysis in detecting the vari
... Show MoreA total of 722 algal taxa are recorded in Diyala River by different authors. Most of the identification algae belong to three Divisions: Bacillariophyceae (367, 50.8%), Chlorophyceae (179, 24.8%), and Cyanophyceae (126, 17.5%).