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
It is well known that the rate of penetration is a key function for drilling engineers since it is directly related to the final well cost, thus reducing the non-productive time is a target of interest for all oil companies by optimizing the drilling processes or drilling parameters. These drilling parameters include mechanical (RPM, WOB, flow rate, SPP, torque and hook load) and travel transit time. The big challenge prediction is the complex interconnection between the drilling parameters so artificial intelligence techniques have been conducted in this study to predict ROP using operational drilling parameters and formation characteristics. In the current study, three AI techniques have been used which are neural network, fuzzy i
... Show MoreBackground: changing in lifestyle like displacing place could cause depression which is a common mental disorder that change general health that affect dental caries incidence and severity. The aims of this study were to assess the relation of depression status on prevalence and severity of dental caries among internally displaced people. Material and Method: The sample include 121 internally displaced people aged from 13-17 years. Method for depression measuring is by using Children Depression Inventory (CDI2) questionnaire. Dental caries is measured by using caries experience (DMFs) and caries severity D1-4. Result: the mean value for decayed and missing surfaces were higher in high depression grade as compering with low and medium dep
... Show MoreHaemoproteus burhinus is described from the stone curlew, Burhinus oedicnemus saharae (Reichenow) from Al-Attariya, 45 km SE Baghdad city middle of Iraq. It is related to but differs from H. peireci in that it hypertrophied the erythrocyte and the erythrocyte nucleus is always laterally displaced in microgametocytes.
The study aims to predict Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) as a water quality indicator parameter at spatial and temporal distribution of the Tigris River, Iraq by using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model. This study was conducted on this river between Mosul and Amarah in Iraq on five positions stretching along the river for the period from 2001to 2011. In the ANNs model calibration, a computer program of multiple linear regressions is used to obtain a set of coefficient for a linear model. The input parameters of the ANNs model were the discharge of the Tigris River, the year, the month and the distance of the sampling stations from upstream of the river. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the distance and discharge
... Show MorePhytoplankton community is a model for of monitoring aquatic systems and interpreting the environmental change in aquatic systems. The present study aimed to forecast environmental parameters that drive the change of phytoplankton community structure in the lake. The present study was carried out in Baghdad Tourist Island Lake (BTIL) for the period From October 2021 to May 2022. The study included the quality and quantity of phytoplankton, moreover, the highest and lowest value of the physical and chemical parameters were (Water temperature (13-30 °C), Light penetration (94-275cm), electric conductivity (837-1128 µS/cm), salinity (0.5-0.7 ‰), pH (7-8.2), total alkalinity (126-226 mg CaCO3/L), total Hardness (297-395 mg CaCO3/L
... Show MoreSurvival analysis is widely applied to data that described by the length of time until the occurrence of an event under interest such as death or other important events. The purpose of this paper is to use the dynamic methodology which provides a flexible method, especially in the analysis of discrete survival time, to estimate the effect of covariate variables through time in the survival analysis on dialysis patients with kidney failure until death occurs. Where the estimations process is completely based on the Bayes approach by using two estimation methods: the maximum A Posterior (MAP) involved with Iteratively Weighted Kalman Filter Smoothing (IWKFS) and in combination with the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. While the other
... Show MoreEvaporation is one of the major components of the hydrological cycle in the nature, thus its accurate estimation is so important in the planning and management of the irrigation practices and to assess water availability and requirements. The aim of this study is to investigate the ability of fuzzy inference system for estimating monthly pan evaporation form meteorological data. The study has been carried out depending on 261 monthly measurements of each of temperature (T), relative humidity (RH), and wind speed (W) which have been available in Emara meteorological station, southern Iraq. Three different fuzzy models comprising various combinations of monthly climatic variables (temperature, wind speed, and relative humidity) were developed
... Show MoreContracaecum rudolphii Hartwich, 1964 is a nematode which causes major concerns to human and wildlife animal’s health. However, the population genetics of C. rudolphii has been poorly studied in Iraq. In order to gain a deeper understanding in the outline of the genetic diversity of the nematode C. rudolphii that were isolated from its host cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo (Linnaeus, 1758), in the middle areas of Iraq, twenty specimens of C. rudolphii adults were isolated from nine individuals of P. carbo. The first (ITS-1) internal transcribed spacers (ITS) of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) of C. rudolphii were amplified using conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR); then, the amplicons were subjected to sequencing. Concatenation of ITS-1 (rD
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