4-Nonylphenol (4-NP) is a nephrotoxic substance that is highly prevalent in aquatic environments. Nigella sativa seed (NSS) has many biological activities and is widely used throughout the world as a medicinal product. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the cytoprotective effect of NSS on 4- NP-induced renal damage in African catfish (Clarias gariepinus). Thirty fish were divided into five equal groups: an untreated control group and four groups that were challenged with 4-NP at a dose of 0.1 mg L1 of aquarium water and fed a basal diet supplemented with 0%, 1%, 2.5%, and 5% NSS, respectively, for 3 weeks. Histological, histochemical, and ultrastructural features of the kidney were then assessed as biomarkers for renal tissue damage. Our results confirmed that 4-NP was a potent cytotoxic agent for the kidney tissue and induced renal damage, with 4-NP-intoxicated fish showing necrosis in the epithelial cells of the renal corpuscles, renal proximal convoluted tubules, and intertubular hematopoietic tissue, as well as loss of or a decrease in microvilli, a decrease in mitochondria, and an increase in the lysosomes in the epithelial cells of the proximal convoluted tubules. The kidneys of 4-NP-intoxicated fish also showed increased numbers of Perls’ Prussian blue-positive melanomacrophage centers and intraepithelial T-lymphocytes in the proximal convoluted tubules and plasma cells. The administration of NSS to 4-NP-challenged fish significantly minimized the cytotoxic effect of 4-NP, maintaining the normal kidney structure, with concentrations of 2.5% and 5% of feed being most effective for protecting the kidney against 4-NP-induced renal damage.

Orthogonal moments are used to represent digital images with minimum redundancy. Orthogonal moments with fractional-orders show better capabilities in digital image analysis than integer-order moments. In this work, the authors present new fractional-order shifted Gegenbauer polynomials. These new polynomials are used to defined a novel set of orthogonal fractional-order shifted Gegenbauer moments (FrSGMs). The proposed method is applied in gray-scale image analysis and recognition. The invariances to rotation, scaling and translation (RST), are achieved using invariant fractional-order geometric moments. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed FrSGMs and compare with the classical orthogonal integerorder Gegenbauer moments (GMs) and the existing orthogonal fractional-order moments. The new FrSGMs outperformed GMs and the existing orthogonal fractional-order moments in terms of image recognition and reconstruction, RST invariance, and robustness to noise.

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In this paper we prove some common fixed point theorems for family of occasionally weakly compatible mappings in Menger space. Also improvement of the results of B. D. Pant and Sunny Chauhan [1] under relaxed conditions is given.

In this paper, we establish a common xed point theorem for two pairs of mappings satisfying an almost generalized contractive condition for comparable elements in a partially ordered metric space. Our results generalize and extend the main results in [2] to multivalued mappings. As corollaries we obtain the results in [8, 9], and many others.

The classical radial harmonic Fourier moments (RHFMs) and the quaternion radial harmonic Fourier moments (QRHFMs) are gray-scale and color image descriptors. The radial harmonic functions with integer orders are not able to extract fine features from the input images. In this paper, the authors derived novel fractional-order radial harmonic functions in polar coordinates. The obtained functions are used to defined novel multi-channel fractional-order radial harmonic moments (FrMRHFMs) for color image description and analysis. The invariants to geometric transformations for these new moments are derived. A theoretical comparison between FrMRHFMs and QRHFMs is performed from the aspects of kernel function and the spectrum analysis. Numerical simulation is carried out to test these new moments in terms of image reconstruction capabilities, invariance to the similarity transformations, color image recognition and the CPU computational times. The obtained theoretical and numerical results clearly show that the proposed FrMRHFMs is superior to the QRHFMs and the existing fractional-order orthogonal moments.