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This article provides a critical reading of Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building (2002), evoking important questions about the nature of terrorism in Egypt and how young men are transformed into religious fanatics. While certainly not excusing terrorists' violent acts, we try to use the novel as a guide to understand what makes a terrorist tick. The novel invites us to witness the fall into the abyss of terror of a young man who dreams of being a policeman. The novel shows that while Taha struggles to change his fate, he faces marginalisation, police corruption, oppression and torture, which finally set him on the path to violence. The paper thus uses the novel as a focal point to broaden our understanding of who a terrorist figure is. Furthermore, we are interested in the literary representations of terrorism and why this novelist chooses terrorism as a main structuring element. By offering a qualitative, different understanding of the fundamental aspects of terrorism, we try to reveal that while it is the terrorist's finger that pulls the trigger, there is a disorienting history of social, political and economic circumstances behind each bullet. The paper concludes that Al Aswany neither demonises nor offers an apology for extremists. He simply presents them as humans so that we can understand what they are angry about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article anatomizes the depiction of the dictator's mind-set and psyche in Yasmina Khadra's The Dictator's Last Night (2015). Using the first person, Khadra attempts to give an inside insight into the mind of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, one of the most colorful, controversial and complex figures of recent history. The selected novel broadens our understanding by offering a psychiatric diagnosis of the dictator. This paper thus explores how the author delves into the dictator's mind mapping literary psychopathology of Gaddafi's personality through realistic reconstructions. In other words, we attempt to explain how the dictator manifests the symptoms of one who is trapped in a destructive state of mind using the novel as a focal point and guide. The paper tries to put flesh on the bones of questions concerning Gaddafi's mind-set and absolute power wedded to madness and megalomania as well as reflecting upon certain images and symbols utilized to show historically or in mythic form the hyperbolic figure of the dictator that forms the central theme in the novel. To make the journey inside the dictator's mind possible, the article uses a psychoanalytic approach and refers to historical facts to back up the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screening microalgae from extreme environments, including hot springs, is an important research topic that has lately emerged. A thermophilic green alga was isolated from a north-eastern Algerian hot spring at a temperature of 63 °C, and its fatty acid (FA) profile was explored. The strain was cultivated in BBM medium at 35 °C in a 16:8 h light/dark cycle and 75 μM photons m−2 s−1. The morphological studies combined with phylogenetic analysis revealed that the isolate was Coelastrella thermophila var. globulina Q. Wang, H. Song, X. Liu, G. Liu and Z. Hu. The monounsaturated fatty acid (MUFA) content was 51.12%. The saturated fatty acid (SFA) and polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) content, respectively, accounted for 27.01% and 21.87%. The main FA was oleic acid (18:1n–9), whose value was 35.95%, followed in decreasing order by palmitic acid (16:0) with 21.45%, linoleic acid (18:2n–6) with 14.38% and α-linolenic acid (18:3n–3) with 04.22%. The FA profile exhibited high total n–6 and n–3 PUFA values (15.80% and 5.76%, respectively). Coelastrella thermophila var. globulina is particularly interesting for producing n-6 and n-3 PUFA and is likely suitable for other biotechnological purposes. This is the first time that this taxon has been reported in hot springs. Other species can be expected to be reported, which emphasises the importance of the biodiversity of extreme habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work was to establish the antioxidant and antimicrobial activity of hydro-alcoholic and aqueous extracts prepared from the leaves of Globularia alypum L. The quantitative estimation of total polyphenols (by the Folin-Ciocalteu method) and total flavonoids (by the method of aluminium trichloride) showed that the aqueous and ethyl acetate extracts had the highest content of phenolic and flavonoid compounds. Moreover, the results of antioxidant power assessed by both method DPPH and phosphomolybdenum indicated that leaves extracts of G. alypum expressed a considerable activity. The evaluation of the antimicrobial effects, using the disc diffusion method from antibacterial screening and the direct contact method from the antifungal activity, indicated strong antibacterial and antifungal activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reading of Yasmina Khadra's Wolf Dreams (2003) evoking important questions on the nature of terrorism in Algeria during the black decade of the 1990s. The novel describes the rise of fundamentalism and how young men are transformed into religious fanatics. This paper is interested in the literary function of terrorism; i.e. how terrorism is used as a literary tool and why this novelist chooses it as a main structuring element. This study offers a more adequate account of terrorism's figurative aspects, it clarifies the writer's stylistic strategies and his use of techniques such as narrative suspense, metaphors, and figurative language to respond to instances of violence in this era. The paper also examines ways in which Khadra's Wolf Dreams can help broaden understandings of terrorism in Algeria. It emphasizes especially the responses to terrorism and considers the status of literature as a way to get knowledge about the atrocities of war. Our objective is to map how Khadra engages terrorism in his novel and uses his literary historical imagination to provide a coherent narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Algeria, chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the second food legume produced after beans. Its cultivation has undergone a certain gradual evolution in terms of areas and consumption, and a regressive evolution in terms of productivity. Despite this importance, Chickpea is faced with many phytosanitary problems, the most damaging of which are caused by fungi. One of the factors that restricts the growth of Chickpea is fungal diseases which are the main biotic stresses. In the present study, the effect of different concentrations of Cytokinin and Fungal metabolic from Aspergillus fumigatus on the germination of two types of Chickpea (FLIP 85-55 and ILC 32-79) was investigated. At first, various pretreatments were done on the seeds, and after that, the seeds were sown in Petri dishes. The findings demonstrated that when the concentration of toxin (fungal metabolic) increased, the germination rate decreased. The type ILC 32-79 was less tolerant than the type FLIP 85-55. Contrarily, a prominent improvement in the rate of germination was caused by the cytokinin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of the coronavirus has claimed the lives of millions worldwide, which led to the emergence of an economic and health crisis at the global level, which prompted many researchers to submit proposals for early diagnosis of the coronavirus to limit its spread. In this work, we propose an automated system to detect COVID-19 based on the cough as one of the most important infection indicators. Several studies have shown that coughing accounts for 65% of the total symptoms of infection. The proposed system is mainly based on three main steps: first, cough signal detection and segmentation; second, cough signal extraction; and third, three techniques of supervised machine learning-based classification: Support Vector Machine (SVM), KNearest Neighbours (KNN), and Decision Tree (DT). Our proposed system showed high performance through good accuracy values, where the best accuracy for classifying female coughs was 99.6% using KNN and 88% for males using SVM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]