Understanding the compatibility between spider silk and conducting materials is essential to advance the use of spider silk in electronic applications. Spider silk is tough, but becomes soft when exposed to water. Here we report a strong affinity of amine-functionalised multi-walled carbon nanotubes for spider silk, with coating assisted by a water and mechanical shear method. The nanotubes adhere uniformly and bond to the silk fibre surface to produce tough, custom-shaped, flexible and electrically conducting fibres after drying and contraction. The conductivity of coated silk fibres is reversibly sensitive to strain and humidity, leading to proof-of-concept sensor and actuator demonstrations.
Oxidative stress plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of peripheral artery disease (PAD). This study aimed to investigate the effect of clopidogrel on oxidative stress in PAD patients. Seventy subjects were divided into three groups: PAD patients before treatment (B-PAD), PAD patients after treatment with clopidogrel (A-PAD), and healthy controls. Serum levels of superoxide dismutase (SOD), copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), manganese (Mn), and oxidized protein were measured. SOD activities were also determined. The results showed that SOD activities, and SOD specific activities were significantly decreased in PAD patients compared to healthy individuals. After treatment with clopidogrel, SOD activities, and SOD specific activities were continuous
... Show MoreHuman interaction technology based on motion capture (MoCap) systems is a vital tool for human kinematics analysis, with applications in clinical settings, animations, and video games. We introduce a new method for analyzing and estimating dorsal spine movement using a MoCap system. The captured data by the MoCap system are processed and analyzed to estimate the motion kinematics of three primary regions; the shoulders, spine, and hips. This work contributes a non-invasive and anatomically guided framework that enables region-specific analysis of spinal motion which could be used as a clinical alternative to invasive measurement techniques. The hierarchy of our model consists of five main levels; motion capture system settings, marker data
... Show MoreTopic management is the awareness of how speakers deal with initiating, developing, changing, and ending a topic and how they fix the relationship when a misunderstanding occurs. It is such an important unit of conversation as it includes the transition from one strategy to the other to be accomplished in a systematic and orderly manner. These strategies are impaired in dementia patients thus lead to communication breakdown. This study aims at detecting the dementia patients' topic management strategies in selected speeches and answering the questions of which of these strategies are fully or partially detected in these speeches. The researchers use a qualitative method to examine the speeches of those patients and they adopt an eclectic
... Show MoreEvery body has a size and mass that distinguishes it from others and makes it different from others. Some of these bodies are huge and large in size, and some are small and light in weight. Among these masses and bodies are some that are dealt with by their size and weight, each according to its quantity, weight, and cheapness. This is why they created quantities by which these weights and quantities could be estimated, so they used measures and weights for that. Objectives: The research aims to know some measures and weights, such as the wife’s maintenance, the amount of zakat, etc.I found it to be a widely spread topic, and widely used in the folds of jurisprudence. During my reading of jurisprudence books, I found jurists using many qu
... Show More<p><span>This research deals with the feasibility of a mobile robot to navigate and discover its location at unknown environments, and then constructing maps of these navigated environments for future usage. In this work, we proposed a modified Extended Kalman Filter- Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (EKF-SLAM) technique which was implemented for different unknown environments containing a different number of landmarks. Then, the detectable landmarks will play an important role in controlling the overall navigation process and EKF-SLAM technique’s performance. MATLAB simulation results of the EKF-SLAM technique come with better performance as compared with an odometry approach performance in terms of measuring the
... Show MoreIn this paper a system is designed on an FPGA using a Nios II soft-core processor, to detect the colour of a specific surface and moving a robot arm accordingly. The surface being detected is bounded by a starting mark and an ending mark, to define the region of interest. The surface is also divided into sections as rows and columns and each section can have any colour. Such a system has so many uses like for example warehouses or even in stores where their storing areas can be divided to sections and each section is coloured and a robot arm collects objects from these sections according to the section’s colour also the robot arm can organize objects in sections according to the section’s colour.
Researchers are interested in the issue of children abuse and they look for its cause in the past and present. Their interest is limited to identifying penal liability which is caused by children abuse away from focusing on civil liability. So, the study is going to clarify the parents' responsibility for children abuse rather than civil liability of the medic in case he wouldn’t notify the authorities about the case according to the American law rules and the attitude of Iraqi law rather than some judicial application of civil cases that were exposed to American judiciary concerning children abuse.
In recent years, there has been a rise in interest in the study of antibiotic occurrence in the aquatic environment due to the negative consequences of prolonged exposure and the potential for bacterial antibiotic resistance. Most antibiotic residues from treated wastewater end up in the aquatic environment as they are not eliminated in facilities that treat wastewater. Antibiotics must be identified in influent and effluent wastewater using reliable analytical techniques for several reasons. Firstly, monitoring antibiotic presence in aquatic environments. Secondly, assessing environmental risks, computing wastewater treatment plant removal efficiencies, and estimating antibiotic consumption. Therefore, this work aims to provide an overview
... Show MoreThis paper includes a comparison between denoising techniques by using statistical approach, principal component analysis with local pixel grouping (PCA-LPG), this procedure is iterated second time to further improve the denoising performance, and other enhancement filters were used. Like adaptive Wiener low pass-filter to a grayscale image that has been degraded by constant power additive noise, based on statistics estimated from a local neighborhood of each pixel. Performs Median filter of the input noisy image, each output pixel contains the Median value in the M-by-N neighborhood around the corresponding pixel in the input image, Gaussian low pass-filter and Order-statistic filter also be used. Experimental results shows LPG-PCA method
... Show MoreNarcissism is a complicated phenomenon that can be reflected in the narcissist’s language. Investigating narcissism in terms of linguistics, and pragmatics in particular, does not seem to have been given its due attention, as this study reveals. Thus, this study is an endeavor to discover how narcissism is reflected in the American movie Big Eyes (2014). It is known for introducing narcissistic behaviors. This paper aims to identify the types, motivations, and pragmatic manifestations of narcissism in the selected movie. Three pragmatic theories are chosen to scrutinize narcissism in the data: Searle’s speech acts (1969), Grice’s maxims breaching (1975), and Culppeper’s impoliteness (1996). To cope with the nature of the
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