ABSTRACT Cassava is an important staple crop and its starch is an important source of biomaterial for food and non-food industries. Processing of cassava is very important due to its rapid postharvest deterioration and cyanide content, but it can also add value and provides employment opportunities. There is a correlation between cyanogenic poison and poverty in communities where cassava is a staple food. Therefore development of starches occupies a central position in the quest for cassava c...
ABSTRACT Mobile devices have changed from being terminal equipment for making voice calls, video calls, playing games and sending messages to including differing functionalities such as acting as a server and client for sharing information. Information sharing directly between modern mobile phones can be done using Bluetooth or WiFi functionalities. Such a network does not need a fixed infrastructure, thereby allowing people to create Opportunistic mobile phone networks when they need the ser...
Abstract This study sought to find out the factors that contribute to the low pass rate in Geography at O Level in rural secondary schools. A descriptive design was used as methodology. A sample of 6 teachers and 60 students was purposively sampled. Interviews were used to generate data while students responded to questionnaires. Content analysis was used to analyse the data generated to answer the two main questions of this study. This study revealed that the poor performance of student...
ABSTRACT Chicken rearing has been widely spread in the country for both economic purposes and family consumption. In both cases there is need to reduce the labour and solve problems caused by inadequate water supply and stunted rooster growth. The Intelligent Rooster Water Monitoring System solves this problem by making sure that the roosters always have water to drink as well as making sure that they are in a bearable environment. The system measures the amount of water left in the rooster c...
Abstract The purpose of this study is to come up with a system that allows online hybrid sales analysis The main contributing reason for the development of this system is that the company has no particular system which is used for predicting sales The research main objectives were to make a system which permits compilations of agents sales and calculating the revenue that have been collected at a particular time. Different alternatives where looked at and these include improving the current s...
Sleep specialists often conduct manual sleep stage scoring by visually inspecting the patient’s neurophysiological signals collected at sleep labs. This is, generally, a difficult, tedious and time-consuming task. The limitations of manual sleep stage scoring have escalated the demand for developing Automatic Sleep Stage Classification (ASSC) systems. Sleep stage classification refers to identifying the various stages of sleep and is a critical step in an effort to assist physicians in t...
ABSTRACT The study examined the education gap between learners from poor and affluent backgrounds in Chinhoyi urban cluster. The problem was that there were many differences exhibited at school by learners between those coming from poor family backgrounds and from affluent backgrounds. The literature review showed that the families' socioeconomic status, parental income, parental education, family size and marital status have an impact on the education of children. The study employed a descri...
ABSTRACT Three banana varieties (Omini Red, Cavendish and Cooking banana) were transversely cut into 10 mm slices, pretreated in sucrose solution of 52, 60 and 68°B and maintained at 25°C for 12 hours. Both fresh and pre-osmosed banana slices were subsequently oven-dried at 60°C for 72 hours. Adsorption isotherms of fresh and preosmosed oven-dried banana slices were determined at 20 and 40°C using gravimetric–static method. Suitability of eight sorption models in describing the adsorpt...
ABSTRACT The present study was conducted to investigate the presence of Arenaviruses from rodents, shrews and elephant shrews captured in selected wildlife-human interfaces in Tanzania. The study involved six sites with high potential for contact between wildlife and humans namely; Ruaha, Kilombero, Mtwara, Mbeya, Mbinga and Mikumi. A total of 121 animals comprising 111 rodents, 3 shrews and 7 elephant shrews were screened for Arenaviruses using conventional Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). T...
ABSTRACT The objectives of this work were to study the quality and acceptability of new rice varieties (Oryza sativa L.). The rice varieties (TXD88, NERICA4, NERICA1, TXD85 and TXD306) were analyzed for rough rice quality indices, proximate composition, milling quality, cooking time, physicochemical properties and sensory evaluation. The rough rice quality indices were 5.96 – 14.62% (immature grains); 30.91 – 36.78g (1000 grains’ weight); 7.81 – 9.05mm (length) and 3.14 – 3.65 (leng...
ABSTRACT Human health depends on reliable access to safe drinking water, but in many developing countries there are problems of accessing it. This is mainly attributed to water pollution, poor infrastructure for potable water treatment and unhygienic practices in water bottling companies. This study was carried out to assess the physico-chemical and microbiological quality of borehole, bottled and municipal water in Harare (Zimbabwe), by evaluating the compliance of each water type with WHO s...
ABSTRACT Plants remain a major source of novel drugs for the treatment of various diseases like cancer. The search for safe anticancer drugs from plants has led to the discovery of camptothecin and taxol. Smilax kraussiana is used in herbal medicine to treat tumors, veneral and skin diseases. Many plants including S. kraussiana are still underexploited despite their ethnomedicinal properties. This study was designed to isolate and characterise the constituents of S. kraussiana, synthesise ac...
ABSTRACT One of the objectives of x-ray examination is high quality images; however administered radiation doses may be harmful to patients‟ health. Data on radiation dose to patients are scarce, and thus hinder the determination of local and national reference dose levels specific to a country owing to the differences in patient anatomy and radiological practice among nationals of different countries. This study was therefore, designed to determine the patient doses, local reference dose ...
Abstract Clay bodies occur as lenses and interbeds within the predominantly shaley Akinbo Formation in the eastern Dahomey Basin. They are greenish to grayish, plastic, and in some places contain concretions. In order to assess their sedimentological significance as well as evaluate their potential as industrial raw materials, representative outcrop arid borehole samples .were subjected to mineralogical, chemical and physical characterisation. • • •, •, > l j . Mineralogical determin...
ABSTRACT Mushrooms such as Pleurotus, Vovariella and Auricularia species are cultivated for food and medicinal purposes in the world. However, cultivation of Auricularia in Nigeria is limited due to inadequate information on its characteristics, nutritional contents and cultivation requirements. Hence, this study was designed to characterise Auricularia species in Southwestern Nigeria and determine suitable substrates for their cultivation. Fifty-four samples of Auricularia species were ran...