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 bef

    A mounted specimen of a mustelid animal deposited in the Kurdistan Museum of Natural History, Salahaddin University, Erbil proved to be Mustela erminea (Linnaeus, 1758) and represents a new record for the mammalian fauna of Iraq. Its measurements and some biological noted are provided. Also, two passerine birds; the Red-headed bunting, Emberiza bruniceps Brandt, 1841(Family, Emberizidae) and the Variable wheatear, Oenanthe picata (Blyth, 1847) (Family, Muscicapidae) were recorded for the first time in Iraq. Furthermore, the tree frog Hyla savignyi Audouin, 1829 was found in two locations north east of Iraq with spotted dorsum and having interesting behavior in having the capabil

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The grain hardness, wet and dry gluten contents, protein and ash contents are determined in grains from different cultivars of wheat which are important in food products, either which are present in raw materials or in final products. Wheat is also a very important food raw material, and flour as the final product of milling. The importance of knowing the physical and chemical properties of wheat and flour is due to the determination of quality and kind of flour which is produced after the milling process. In this work, some physical and chemical properties of different wheat cultivars are determined and the comparisons of these characteristics are performed in both wheat and flour. Uruq Wheat sample (W5) has the highest results when compar

This study deals with air pollution tolerance index (APTI) and anatomical variation in leaves of two species of terrestrial plants Ficus sp. and Conocarpus sp. that have bee commonly the separated along roadsides in many stations within Babylon province. APTI values of both species were less than 10 during study period which represented sensitivity of these plants to air pollution. There are Anatomical responses to pollution in the leaves of both studied species. Main adaptations included increased thickness of parenchyma cell walls with clear dark deposits in sections of Ficus sp. from sections of stations 2 and 4 which represent polluted stations. Conocarpus sp. main adaptation included stomata increased in density and decreased in size w