Background: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of in vitro long-term simulation of oral conditions on the bond strength of PEEK CAD/CAM lingual retainers.

Material and methods: The sample consisted of 12 PEEK CAD/CAM retainers each composed of 2 centrally perforated 3x4mm pads joined by a connector. They were treated by 98% sulfuric acid for 1 minute and then conditioned with Single Bond Universal and bonded to the lingual surface of premolar teeth by 3M Transbond TM System. Half of the retainers were artificially aged using a 30-day water storage and 5000 thermocycling protocol before bond strength testing to compare with the non-aged specimens.

Results: The artificially aged retainers showed a marginally

CuO nanoparticles were synthesized in two different ways, firstly by precipitation method using copper acetate monohydrate Cu(CO₂CH₁₃)₂·H2O, glacial acetic acid (CH3COOH) and sodium hydroxide(NaOH), and secondly by sol-gel method using copper chloride(CuCl₂), sodium  hydroxide (NaOH) and ethanol (C₂H₆O). Results of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) showed that different CuO nanostructures (spherical and Reef) can be formed using precipitation and sol- gel process, respectively, at which the particle size was found to be less than 2 µm. X-ray diffraction (XRD)manifested that the pure synthesized powder has no inclusions that may exist during preparations. XRD result

The fractional free volume (Fh) in polystyrene (PS) as a function of neutron -irradiation dose has been measured, using positron annihilation lifetime (PAL) method. The results show that Fh values decreased with increasing n-irradiation dose up to a total dose of 501.03× 10-2 Gy.
A percentage reduction of 2.14 in Fh values is noticed after the initial n-dose corresponding to a percentage reduction in the free volume equal to 42.14/Gy.
The total n-dose induces a percentage reduction of 7.26, corresponding to a percentage reduction of 1.45/Gy. These results indicate that cross -linking is the predominant process induced by n-irradiation.
The results suggest that n-irradiation induces structure changes in PS, causing cross-linking

Due to the large population of motorway users in the country of Iraq, various approaches have been adopted to manage queues such as implementation of traffic lights, avoidance of illegal parking, amongst others. However, defaulters are recorded daily, hence the need to develop a mean of identifying these defaulters and bring them to book. This article discusses the development of an approach of recognizing Iraqi licence plates such that defaulters of queue management systems are identified. Multiple agencies worldwide have quickly and widely adopted the recognition of a vehicle license plate technology to expand their ability in investigative and security matters. License plate helps detect the vehicle's information automatically ra

Suicidal ideation is one of the most severe mental health issues faced by people all over the world. There are various risk factors involved that can lead to suicide. The most common & critical risk factors among them are depression, anxiety, social isolation and hopelessness. Early detection of these risk factors can help in preventing or reducing the number of suicides. Online social networking platforms like Twitter, Redditt and Facebook are becoming a new way for the people to express themselves freely without worrying about social stigma. This paper presents a methodology and experimentation using social media as a tool to analyse the suicidal ideation in a better way, thus helping in preventing the chances of being the victim o

The Sliding Mode Control (SMC) has been among powerful control techniques increasingly. Much attention is paid to both theoretical and practical aspects of disciplines due to their distinctive characteristics such as insensitivity to bounded matched uncertainties, reduction of the order of sliding equations of motion, decoupling mechanical systems design. In the current study, two-link robot performance in the Classical SMC is enhanced via Adaptive Sliding Mode Controller (ASMC) despite uncertainty, external disturbance, and coulomb friction. The key idea is abstracted as follows: switching gains are depressed to the low allowable values, resulting in decreased chattering motion and control's efforts of the two-link robo

In this research the results of applying Artificial Neural Networks with modified activation function to perform the online and offline identification of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot will be described. The proposed model of identification strategy consists of a feed-forward neural network with a modified activation function that operates in parallel with the SCARA robot model. Feed-Forward Neural Networks (FFNN) which have been trained online and offline have been used, without requiring any previous knowledge about the system to be identified. The activation function that is used in the hidden layer in FFNN is a modified version of the wavelet function. This approach ha

In this article, we developed a new loss function, as the simplification of linear exponential loss function (LINEX) by weighting LINEX function. We derive a scale parameter, reliability and the hazard functions in accordance with upper record values of the Lomax distribution (LD). To study a small sample behavior performance of the proposed loss function using a Monte Carlo simulation, we make a comparison among maximum likelihood estimator, Bayesian estimator by means of LINEX loss function and Bayesian estimator using square error loss (SE) function. The consequences have shown that a modified method is the finest for valuing a scale parameter, reliability and hazard functions.

The two parameters of Exponential-Rayleigh distribution were estimated using the maximum likelihood estimation method (MLE) for progressively censoring data. To find estimated values for these two scale parameters using real data for COVID-19 which was taken from the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment, AL-Karkh General Hospital. Then the Chi-square test was utilized to determine if the sample (data) corresponded with the Exponential-Rayleigh distribution (ER). Employing the nonlinear membership function (s-function) to find fuzzy numbers for these parameters estimators. Then utilizing the ranking function transforms the fuzzy numbers into crisp numbers. Finally, using mean square error (MSE) to compare the outcomes of the survival