Enhanced anti-biofilm activity of facile synthesized silver oxide nanoparticles against K. pneumoniae

Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials - The silver oxide nanoparticle was successfully synthesized using floral waste by simple one pot, cost effective method. The complete...     

Water-saving strategies for irrigation agriculture in Saudi Arabia

Agriculture policy changes in Saudi Arabia are investigated by water footprint (WF) assessment. WF is calculated with the model SPARE:WATER for 3758 irrigated sites. The WF of agriculture areas (WF_area, km³ yr^?1) has decreased (–17%) since the year 2000 to 13.84 km³ yr^?1 (2011), which is mainly caused by the reduction of cropland by –33%. Nevertheless, water consumption per field has increased about 16%, which can be attributed to the cultivation of fodder crops (+12%). A scenario analysis revealed that a shifting cropping pattern towards less fodder crops reduces WF_area by –15%, and implementing improved irrigation technology leads to a combined reduction of up to 32%     

A review study on blockchain-based IoT security and forensics

The term Internet of Things (IoT) represents all communicating countless heterogeneous devices to share data and resources via the internet. The speedy advance of IoT devices proposes limitless benefits, but it also brings new challenges regarding security and forensics. Likewise, IoT devices can generate a massive amount of data that desires integrity and security during its handling and processing in an efficient way. IoT devices and data can be vulnerable to various types of cyber-crimes at each IoT layer. For combating these cyber-crimes in IoT infrastructure, IoT forensic term has shown up. The IoT forensic is the process of performing digital forensic investigation in the IoT environment in a forensically sound and timely fashion manner. Sundry challenges face the IoT forensics that requires urgent solutions and mitigation methods; digital evidence needs to be collected, preserved, analyzed, processed, and reported in a trusted manner to be acceptable for presenting in the court of law. Preserving the evidence unchanged or tampered with is the most critical challenge in digital forensics. Authentication is another challenge facing digital forensics; who is allowed to deal with the evidence? One of the most recent solutions for supporting IoT forensics is the use of Blockchain. Using Blockchain in digital forensics guarantees data integrity, immutability, scalability, and security. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive review of IoT security and forensics with the integration with Blockchain technology. It begins by providing an inclusive discussion of IoT security, as well as the need for IoT forensics, and the concepts of Blockchain. Then, a review of Blockchain-based IoT security and forensics issues is presented. Finally, a discussion of open research directions is provided.

     

Microstructural properties and improvement in photoluminescence thermometry of Mn-activated single-phased Zn–SO–Mn phosphors

Fabrication by sol–gel and study of the physical properties of Mn²⁺ doped Zn₂SiO₄ (Zn–SO–Mn) materials phosphors (heat-treated at 1500 °C) were reported. The morphology, microstructure and size of the particles were resolved by the XRD and TEM techniques. Moreover, PL measurements of the samples phosphors demonstrate a good emission at 576 nm (yellow: ⁴T₁–⁶A₁). The decay kinetics of the emission (yellow: ⁴T₁–⁶A₁) was analyzed (fitting: a single exponential function). After the adjustment, the Zn–SO–Mn samples exhibited that the lifetime is around 13.09 ms. These lifetime are considered as promising values compared to those obtained until now. In fact, these results provide a simple means of obtaining the phosphors have excellent yellow luminescence which is very interesting for several technological applications.

     

Unsaponified and unsaponifiable determinations as applied to incompletely saponified soaps

Unsaponified and unsaponifiable determinations were made on toilet bar soap, potash vegetable oil paste soap, yellow laundry soap and hardwater cocoa bar soap according to the method of (1) the American Oil Chemists’ Society, and (2) the Society of Public Analysts (British). The results obtained by the two methods were comparable for toilet bar soap, potash vegetable oil paste soap and yellow laundry soap. The unsaponifiable matter in hardwater cocoa bar soap, however, appeared considerably lower when determined by the A. O. C. S. method than when determined by the S. P. A. method. Extraction of unsaponified matter in the former method is by petroleum ether; in the latter method by ethyl ether. In order to determine whether the difference in results could be traced to the difference in solvents, extraction with petroleum ether in the A. O. C. S. method was followed by extraction with ethyl ether. The weight of unsaponified matter (50 gram sample) was increased thereby from 0.791 g. to 1.423 g. The saponification value of the ethyl ether extract under the A. O. C. S. method tended to show that practically all of the additional material extracted with ethyl ether was made up of mono and diglycerides with the mono predominating.     

Making scanned Arabic documents machine accessible using an ensemble of SVM classifiers

International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) - Raster-image PDF files originating from scanning or photographing paper documents are inaccessible to both text search engines...     

Supporting ontology adaptation and versioning based on a graph of relevance

Ontologies recently have become a topic of interest in computer science since they are seen as a semantic support to explicit and enrich data-models as well as to ensure interoperability of data. Moreover, supporting ontology adaptation becomes essential and extremely important, mainly when using ontologies in changing environments. An important issue when dealing with ontology adaptation is the management of several versions. Ontology versioning is a complex and multifaceted problem as it should take into account change management, versions storage and access, consistency issues, etc. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach and tool for ontology adaptation and versioning. A series of techniques are proposed to ‘safely’ evolve a given ontology and produce a new consistent version. The ontology versions are ordered in a graph according to their relevance. The relevance is computed based on four criteria: conceptualisation, usage frequency, abstraction and completeness. The techniques to carry out the versioning process are implemented in the Consistology tool, which has been developed to assist users in expressing adaptation requirements and managing ontology versions.     

Composite Nanoarchitectonics of Graphene Oxide for Better Understanding on Structural Effects on Photocatalytic Performance for Methylene Blue Dye

Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials - The fabrication of graphene/graphene oxide bounded metal nanostructures, to form hybrid composites, and their utilization for the...