Socio-scientific issues provide a great platform to both engage students in scientific topics and assess their understanding of scientific concepts. Nancy R. Singer, Amy Lannin, Maha Kareem, William Romine, and Katie Kline report on the STEM Literacy Project, a three-year National Science Foundation grant that aimed to improve STEM teachers’ knowledge and integration of literacy in their classrooms. They describe teachers’ professional learning, scenario-based assessments and other strategies they incorporated in their STEM classrooms, and how writing enables students to understand real-world issues.
This study assessed the advantage of using earthworms in combination with punch waste and nutrients in remediating drill cuttings contaminated with hydrocarbons. Analyses were performed on day 0, 7, 14, 21, and 28 of the experiment. Two hydrocarbon concentrations were used (20000 mg/kg and 40000 mg/kg) for three groups of earthworms number which were five, ten and twenty earthworms. After 28 days, the total petroleum hydrocarbon (TPH) concentration (20000 mg/kg) was reduced to 13200 mg/kg, 9800 mg/kg, and 6300 mg/kg in treatments with five, ten and twenty earthworms respectively. Also, TPH concentration (40000 mg/kg) was reduced to 22000 mg/kg, 10100 mg/kg, and 4200 mg/kg in treatments with the above number of earthworms respectively. The p
... Show MoreThe fetal heart rate (FHR) signal processing based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN),Fuzzy Logic (FL) and frequency domain Discrete Wavelet Transform(DWT) were analysis in order to perform automatic analysis using personal computers. Cardiotocography (CTG) is a primary biophysical method of fetal monitoring. The assessment of the printed CTG traces was based on the visual analysis of patterns that describing the variability of fetal heart rate signal. Fetal heart rate data of pregnant women with pregnancy between 38 and 40 weeks of gestation were studied. The first stage in the system was to convert the cardiotocograghy (CTG) tracing in to digital series so that the system can be analyzed ,while the second stage ,the FHR time series was t
... Show MoreThis paper deals with the design and implementation of an ECG system. The proposed system gives a new concept of ECG signal manipulation, storing, and editing. It consists mainly of hardware circuits and the related software. The hardware includes the circuits of ECG signals capturing, and system interfaces. The software is written using Visual Basic languages, to perform the task of identification of the ECG signal. The main advantage of the system is to provide a reported ECG recording on a personal computer, so that it can be stored and processed at any time as required. This system was tested for different ECG signals, some of them are abnormal and the other is normal, and the results show that the system has a good quality of diagno
... Show MoreToday with increase using social media, a lot of researchers have interested in topic extraction from Twitter. Twitter is an unstructured short text and messy that it is critical to find topics from tweets. While topic modeling algorithms such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are originally designed to derive topics from large documents such as articles, and books. They are often less efficient when applied to short text content like Twitter. Luckily, Twitter has many features that represent the interaction between users. Tweets have rich user-generated hashtags as keywords. In this paper, we exploit the hashtags feature to improve topics learned
Biomarkers to detect Alzheimer’s disease (AD) would enable patients to gain access to appropriate services and may facilitate the development of new therapies. Given the large numbers of people affected by AD, there is a need for a low-cost, easy to use method to detect AD patients. Potentially, the electroencephalogram (EEG) can play a valuable role in this, but at present no single EEG biomarker is robust enough for use in practice. This study aims to provide a methodological framework for the development of robust EEG biomarkers to detect AD with a clinically acceptable performance by exploiting the combined strengths of key biomarkers. A large number of existing and novel EEG biomarkers associated with slowing of EEG, reductio
... Show MoreMost below-knee prostheses are manufactured in Iraq without considering the fast progress in smart prostheses, which can offer movements in the desired directions according to the type of control system designed for this purpose. The proposed design appears to have the advantages of simplicity, affordability, better load distribution, suitability for subjects with transtibial amputation, and viability in countries with people having low socio-economic status. The designed prosthetics consisted of foot, ball, and socket joints, two stepper motors, a linkage system, and an EMG shield. All these materials were available in the local markets in Iraq. The experimental results showed t
... Show MoreOlmesartan medoxomil (OM) has low bioavailability and limited solubility. To enhance bioavailability, fast dissolving films (FDF) with mixed micelles of soluplus (SPL) and solutol HS15 (STL H15) were developed using solvent casting. The optimised formula, FM2, used polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and showed high entrapment efficiency, rapid disintegration, and significant improvement in OM bioavailability compared to the market tablet (Olmetec®). FM2 also demonstrated stability and potential for enhanced drug delivery.