Future proofing

Drastic improvements in growing technology in the Netherlands have achieved a large reduction in energy use and a striking increase in production

Het Nieuwe Telen voor groente-opkweek

Het Nieuwe Telen (HNT) is als systeem ontwikkeld voor de primaire productie bedrijven. Voor de opkweekbedrijven, die in korte teelten het basis uitgangsmateriaal maken is dit systeem niet één op één toepasbaar. Om de in Kas als Energiebron opgedane kennis te laten landen bij plantenkwekerijen moet een analyse en een vertaalslag gemaakt worden. In het project ‘Het Nieuwe Telen voor groente-opkweek’ is door middel van gesprekken met 10 opkweekbedrijven, een workshop en literatuurstudie in kaart gebracht waar de kansen en knelpunten liggen

Comparison of climate and production in closed, semi-closed and open greenhouses

A (semi-)closed greenhouse is a novel greenhouse with an active cooling system and temporary heat storage in an aquifer. Air is cooled, heated and dehumidified by air treatment units. Climate in (semi-)closed greenhouses differs from that of conventional open greenhouses. The aims of our research were first, to analyze the effect of active cooling on greenhouse climate, in terms of stability, gradient and average levels; second, to determine crop growth and production in closed and semi-closed greenhouses. An experiment with tomato crop was conducted from December 2007 until November 2008 in a closed greenhouse with 700 W m-2 cooling capacity, two semi-closed greenhouses with 350 and 150 W m-2 cooling capacity, respectively, and an open greenhouse. The higher the cooling capacity, the more independent the greenhouse climate was of the outside climate. As the cooling ducts were placed underneath the plants, cooling led to a remarkable vertical temperature gradient. Under sunny conditions temperature could be 5°C higher at the top than at the bottom of the canopy in the closed greenhouse. Cumulative production in the semi-closed greenhouses with 350 and 150 W m-2 cooling capacity were 10% (61 kg m-2) and 6% (59 kg m-2) higher than that in the open greenhouse (55 kg m-2), respectively. Cumulative production in the closed greenhouse was 14% higher than in the open greenhouse in week 29 after planting but at the end of the experiment the cumulative increase was only 4% due to botrytis. Model calculations showed that the production increase in the closed and semi-closed greenhouses was explained by higher CO2 concentratio

Het Nieuwe Telen: Energie onder de Knie: Tomaat 2009

In dit eerste experiment voor Het Nieuwe Telen met tomaat is door de actieve inbreng van de telers in de begeleidingscommissie een goede vorm van kennis interactie bereikt. Ondersteund door weblogs en de website Energiek2020 is de impact van dit onderzoek op het denken over energiezuinig telen groot geweest. In dit project zijn de doelstellingen voor productie, energie en kennisoverdracht gerealiseerd. Dit is een bijzonder resultaat voor een project met ambitieuze doelstellingen. Dit onderzoek mag daarom als een belangrijke doorbraak voor het bereiken van substantiële energie besparing worden genoemd en een belangrijke pijler voor het realiseren van de doelstellingen van Kas als Energiebron

Phase of beta-frequency tACS over primary motor cortex modulates corticospinal excitability

The assessment of corticospinal excitability by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation-induced motor evoked potentials is an established diagnostic tool in neurophysiology and a widely used procedure in fundamental brain research. However, concern about low reliability of these measures has grown recently. One possible cause of high variability of MEPs under identical acquisition conditions could be the influence of oscillatory neuronal activity on corticospinal excitability. Based on research showing that transcranial alternating current stimulation can entrain neuronal oscillations we here test whether alpha or beta frequency tACS can influence corticospinal excitability in a phase-dependent manner. We applied tACS at individually calibrated alpha- and beta-band oscillation frequencies, or we applied sham tACS. Simultaneous single TMS pulses time locked to eight equidistant phases of the ongoing tACS signal evoked MEPs. To evaluate offline effects of stimulation frequency, MEP amplitudes were measured before and after tACS. To evaluate whether tACS influences MEP amplitude, we fitted one-cycle sinusoids to the average MEPs elicited at the different phase conditions of each tACS frequency. We found no frequency-specific offline effects of tACS. However, beta-frequency tACS modulation of MEPs was phase-dependent. Post hoc analyses suggested that this effect was specific to participants with low (<19 Hz) intrinsic beta frequency. In conclusion, by showing that beta tACS influences MEP amplitude in a phase-dependent manner, our results support a potential role attributed to neuronal oscillations in regulating corticospinal excitability. Moreover, our findings may be useful for the development of TMS protocols that improve the reliability of MEPs as a meaningful tool for research applications or for clinical monitoring and diagnosis. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Het nieuwe telen Gerbera 2009-2011: Onderdeel rapport: Klimaat en techniek in detail

Bij het onderzoek van Het Nieuwe Telen Gerbera stond energiebesparing met behoud van productie en kwaliteit centraal. De energiedoelstelling moest gerealiseerd worden door selectiever belichten, meer uren schermen en gebruik van een dubbel scherm en vochtbeheersing met gewasventilatie. De opzet van het experiment, de opbouw van de installatie en de hoofdlijnen van de resultaten van het onderzoek worden beschreven in afzonderlijke rapporten. In dit rapport wordt ingegaan op de meer technische apsecten en detailmetingen aan het klimaat om het functioneren van de installatie en het effect op het microklimaat te beoordelen

Two remarks to noiseless coding

An inequality concerning Kullback's I-divergence is applied to obtain a necessary condition for the possibility of encoding symbols of the alphabet of a discrete memoryless source of entropy H by sequences of symbols of another alphabet of size D in such a way that the average code length be close to the optimum H/log D. The same idea is applied to the problem of maximizing entropy per second for unequal symbol lenghts, too

Emotional Voice and Emotional Body Postures Influence Each Other Independently of Visual Awareness

Multisensory integration may occur independently of visual attention as previously shown with compound face-voice stimuli. We investigated in two experiments whether the perception of whole body expressions and the perception of voices influence each other when observers are not aware of seeing the bodily expression. In the first experiment participants categorized masked happy and angry bodily expressions while ignoring congruent or incongruent emotional voices. The onset between target and mask varied from −50 to +133 ms. Results show that the congruency between the emotion in the voice and the bodily expressions influences audiovisual perception independently of the visibility of the stimuli. In the second experiment participants categorized the emotional voices combined with masked bodily expressions as fearful or happy. This experiment showed that bodily expressions presented outside visual awareness still influence prosody perception. Our experiments show that audiovisual integration between bodily expressions and affective prosody can take place outside and independent of visual awareness