Thyroid function is impaired by diabetes, resulting into thyroid disorders, accompanied by the alteration of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) and thyroxine (T4) levels. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of vitamin D supplementation on TSH and total T4 levels in serum of Libyan patients suffering from type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) with thyroid disorders. A total of 180 subjects were recruited and distributed into two groups: 80 participants in control group (43 females and 37 males), with an age range of 26-72 years, and 100 participants in T2DM patient group (54 females and 46 males), with an age range of 26-63 years. Each T2DM patient received a monthly intramuscular injection of 200000 ng/ml vitamin D for three months. Glucose, vitamin D, total T4 and TSH levels were determined in serum samples of healthy subjects and of T2DM patients (pre- and post-administration of vitamin D). After the T2DM group received vitamin D supplementation, the mean of vitamin D level increased in the T2DM, while the mean of glucose level decreased. Most importantly, the mean of total T4 level for patients increased significantly (p ˂ 0.05) from 1.34 to 8.23 g/dL, both of which were lower than the control group mean 10.99 g/dL. In contrast, the mean of TSH level for patients decreased significantly (p ˂ 0.05) from 11.77 to 2.71 mU/L, and both values were greater than the control group mean 2.01 mU/L. ANOVA results showed that age, gender, and body mass index had no significant individual interactions (p > 0.05) with vitamin D supplementation on total T4 and TSH levels. Vitamin D supplementation had a beneficial role on total T4 and TSH levels in serum of Libyan T2DM patients with thyroid disorders.

An attempt has been made to evaluate the effect of welding parameters on the weld penetration, weld bead width and heat effective zone of Tungsten Inert Gas (TIG) welded 2 mm 304L stainless steel joints. The welding parameters including arc current, welding travel speed and gas flow rate were used to achieve the optimum joint. Taguchi technique has been implemented to optimize the welding parameters. Orthogonal array L9 (Three factors with three levels 3x3) was used to study the effect of arc current, welding travel speed and gas flow rate on the quality of 304 stainless steel welds. Signal to a noise ratio (SNR) and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) are also used to determine the main effects of different welding parameters on the weld bead width (WB), weld penetration (WP) and heat affected zone (HAZ). Results showed that welding current has significant effect, whereas gas flow rate showed no effect on the quality of 304Lwelded joints. Welding current of 185A, welding speed of 135mm/min and gas flow rate of 15lit/min have been selected as the best process parameter of weld bead width and weld penetration at level three of experiment seven. However, the optimum process parameter for heat affected zone are level one experimental three at165 A, 235 mm/min, 15 lit/min of welding arc current ,travel speed and gas feeding rate, respectively.

In this paper, a novel robust blind grayscale image digital watermarking scheme is introduced based on lifting wavelet transform (LWT) in combination with discrete cosine transform (DCT), Hessenberg decomposition, and entropy analysis for copyright protection of multimedia information. At first, the two levels of LWT are applied to the host grayscale image to improve the imperceptibility of the watermarking scheme and then the high-frequency sub-band of the 2-level of LWT is decomposed by DCT. Next, the DCT coefficients are divided into 4× 4 non-overlapping blocks. After that, Hessenberg decomposition performs on each selected block, whereas the first row, first column element of the upper Hessenberg matrix is utilized to hide the watermark. To evaluate the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed digital watermarking scheme, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and normalized cross-correlation (NC) are utilized to measure the quality and the ability of the proposed watermarking scheme to robust against signal processing operations and geometric attacks. Experimental and analysis results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is achieved a very good tradeoff between imperceptibility and robustness. The comparison with other scheme have shown that the proposed digital watermarking schemes have a superior performance in terms of imperceptibility and robustness than other

• Abstract: The aim of this study is to investigate some punctuation errors made by English majors at Faculty of Arts, Assab'ah, University of Gheryan. To reach to this goal, the researchers administered a test to a group of 12 students, 2 males and 10 females. The results revealed that the most common errors committed by the participants were: wrong capitalization, misuse of the comma, the inappropriate use of full stop, dropping question marks, and some problems in using hyphen and quotation marks. In the light of the study findings, the researchers suggests that teachers should emphasize the importance of all the punctuation marks in writing. Key words: punctuation, committed, Majors, errors.

The network connectivity is often lost during some situations such as in war zones, battle fields or in regard to natural disasters like floods or earthquakes. Therefore, the connection becomes difficult for rescuing teams to locate people. At the same time, mobile nodes are difficult to be tracked/located. Therefore, flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) is the solution which provides a way to tackle this situation without the need for any central infrastructure with the use of flying objects (nodes). FANTEs are frequently formed of tiny unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are flexible, affordable, and rapid to deploy. UAV as a router and without complex hardware deployment, provides an effective real-time communication solution for multiple UAV systems. FANETs can also be used to provide connectivity in such areas in which flying nodes are utilized. In this paper, we discuss the importance of the FANETs and present a routing protocol comparison that depends on the link budget to identify the optimized packet route for the data to be transmitted. The simulation design results show that a throughput enhancement of 0.62Gbps is achieved in comparison to the distance-based routing protocol. The results also confirm the efficiency of the optimized link state routing (OSLR) protocol over the other. The performance of FANETs can be optimized further by using the OLSR protocol.

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the variations in the phytochemical compositions and the antimicrobial activities of Syzygium grande and Oenanthe javanica leaf extracts against Bacillus sp. The antibacterial activity of the methanol, 70% methanol, ethyl acetate, and hexane extracts of both plant species were examined in vitro, against various Bacillus species. In addition, the 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (1H NMR) spectroscopy-based metabolomics was employed to gain insights into the correlations between the chemical constituents of the bioactive extract to the biological activity. The hexane extract of S. grande leaves and methanolic extract of O. javanica leaves showed more potent anti Bacillus activity, among the test extracts. Principal component analysis (PCA) successfully differentiated the extracts on the basis of their metabolite profiles. The results of the Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis showed that the non-polar compounds of the hexane extract of S. grande (alanine, betulin, β-sitosterol, β-caryophyllene, acetic acid and 3-hydroxybutyric acid) were strongly correlated to its anti-Bacillus activity. On the other hand, choline, ellagic acid, and gallic acid, the metabolites present in the methanolic extract of O. javanica, were strongly correlated to its anti-Bacillus activity. On this basis, it was therefore concluded that these conmpounds could be the potential bioactive constituents, contributing to the anti-Bacillus activity of the individual plant species. Further in-depth investigations into the potential utilization of the two plants for useful applications in managing and control of Bacillus sp., will help pave the way towards their valorization.