High temperatures effect on morpho-physiological indicators in common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) plants during the germination and growth in non-optimum season

The knowledge about high temperature effect on plant crop is important for adaptation strategies to Climate Change. For this reason the aim of the paper was to analyze its abiotic effect on common bean cultivation in a Red Ferralitic soil. A sowing of twelve varieties was performed in non-optimum season (high heat environment) during three years: 2013, 2014 and 2015 through an alpha-Latin design using three replicates per accession. The number of germinated plants was measured within the first 11 days after sowing to obtain the survival percentage. In the same way absolute (AGR) and relative (RGR) growth rate between 21 and 30 days and the plant height from 20 to 70 days with measurement ranges of 10 and 15 days were also evaluated and plotted by a logistic model. The values of daily mean temperature (DMT) were registered to calculate the accumulative temperature during the germination and growth phases. For the statistical evaluation, AGR and RGR were analyzed by one-way analysis of variance and a Tukey comparison where significance was defined with a probability level of P<0.05. The results showed that plant survival percentage was significantly affected by increasing temperature following a sigmoid model, where differences among varieties were observed, while a prediction of survival behavior was also carried out for extreme values of temperature. The model corroborated that DMT above 28 C decreases the survival percentage until values less than 30%. On the other hand the most sensible varieties in the germination stage showed a higher relative growth rate which contributes for understanding the physiological effect of thermal stress in common bean plants

The merging/AGN connection II. Ionization of the circumnuclear regions

We report the first results of a study of a sample of 20 galaxy mergers/interacting systems, using the VIMOS and PMAS integral field spectrographs. For each object, we extracted the integrated spectrum of the central regions and analyzed the ionization state using classical diagnostic diagrams (Veilleux & Osterbrock 1987). There is evidence of AGN ionization in 4 of the objects, i.e. 20% of the sample, a considerably higher fraction than found in previous studies ~4%Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publishing in A&A Letter

Global Positioning System Analysis of Physical Demands in Elite Women’s Beach Handball Players in an Official Spanish Championship

This cross-sectional study aims to analyze the physical demands of elite beach handball players during an official competition. Nine elite female (mean age: 24.6 ± 4.0 years; body weight: 62.4 ± 4.6 kg; body height: 1.68 ± 0.059 m; training experience: 5 years; training: 6 h/week) beach handball players of the Spanish National Team were recruited for this study. A Global Positioning System was incorporated on each player’s back to analyze their movement patterns. Speed and distance were recorded at a sampling frequency of 15 Hz, whereas acceleration was recorded at 100 Hz by means of a built-in triaxial accelerometer. The main finding of the study is that 53% of the distance travelled is done at speeds between 1.5 and 5 km/h and 30% of the distance is between 9 and 13 km/h (83% of the total distance covered), which shows the intermittent efforts that beach handball involves at high intensity, as reflected in the analysis of the internal load with 62.82 ± 14.73% of the game time above 80% of the maximum heart rate. These data help to orientate training objectives to the physical demands required by the competition in order to optimize the players’ performance

A new simple technique for improving the random properties of chaos-based cryptosystems

A new technique for improving the security of chaos-based stream ciphers has been proposed and tested experimentally. This technique manages to improve the randomness properties of the generated keystream by preventing the system to fall into short period cycles due to digitation. In order to test this technique, a stream cipher based on a Skew Tent Map algorithm has been implemented on a Virtex 7 FPGA. The randomness of the keystream generated by this system has been compared to the randomness of the keystream generated by the same system with the proposed randomness-enhancement technique. By subjecting both keystreams to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) tests, we have proved that our method can considerably improve the randomness of the generated keystreams. In order to incorporate our randomness-enhancement technique, only 41 extra slices have been needed, proving that, apart from effective, this method is also efficient in terms of area and hardware resources

Effect of Temperature on Galvanic Corrosion of Non-Welded/Welded AISI 316L Stainless Steel in H3PO4

[EN] Galvanic corrosion of non-welded/welded AISI 316L SS at different temperatures (25 degrees C to 60 degrees C) at a Reynolds number of 1456 in phosphoric acid has been studied using polarization curves (by the mixed potential theory) and zero resistance ammeter (ZRA) measurements. Imposed potential measurements provide more active predicted coupled potentials and higher Galvanic current densities than those obtained using ZRA measurements. Polarization curves show that the anode of the pair is the non-welded AISI 316L. Galvanic current density values obtained from polarization curves increase with temperature. ZRA tests present the highest i(G) values at 60 degrees C; however, the values are very close to zero for all the temperatures studied. This is in agreement with the low value of the compatibility limit and of the parameter which evaluate the Galvanic phenomenon importance. Both techniques present the most positive potentials at the highest temperature.The authors would like to express their gratitude to the Spanish MAEC (PCI Mediterráneo C/018046/08).Sánchez Tovar, R.; Montañés, M.; Garcia-Anton, J.; Guenbour, A. (2010). Effect of Temperature on Galvanic Corrosion of Non-Welded/Welded AISI 316L Stainless Steel in H3PO4. ECS Transactions. 25(37):63-81. https://doi.org/10.1149/1.3407548S6381253

Chaotic Encryption Applied to Optical Ethernet in Industrial Control Systems

In the past decades, Ethernet has become an alternative technology for the field buses traditionally used in industrial control systems and distributed measurement systems. Among different transmission media in Ethernet standards, optical fiber provides the best bandwidth, excellent immunity to electromagnetic interference, and less signal loses than other wired media. Due to the absence of a standard that provides security at the physical layer of optical Ethernet links, the main motivation of this paper is to propose and implement the necessary modifications to introduce encryption in Ethernet 1000Base-X standard. This has consisted of symmetric streaming encryption of the 8b10b symbols flow at physical coding sublayer level, thanks to a keystream generator based on chaotic algorithm. The overall system has been implemented and tested in an field programmable gate array and Ethernet traffic has been encrypted and transmitted over an optical link. The experimental results show that it is possible to cipher traffic at this level and hide the complete Ethernet traffic pattern from passive eavesdroppers. In addition, no space overhead is introduced in data frames during encryption, achieving the maximum throughput

Physical Layer Encryption for Industrial Ethernet in Gigabit Optical Links

Industrial Ethernet is a technology widely spread in factory floors and critical infrastructures where a high amount of data need to be collected and transported. Fiber optic networks at gigabit rates fit well with that type of environment, where speed, system performance, and reliability are critical. In this paper, a new encryption method for high-speed optical communications suitable for such kinds of networks is proposed. This new encryption method consists of a symmetric streaming encryption of the 8b/10b data flow at physical coding sublayer level. It is carried out thanks to a format preserving encryption block cipher working in CTR (counter) mode. The overall system has been simulated and implemented in a field programmable gate array. Thanks to experimental results, it can be concluded that it is possible to cipher traffic at this physical level in a secure way. In addition, no overhead is introduced during encryption, getting minimum latency and maximum throughput

Analysis of Silage Fermentation Characteristics Using Transflectance Measurements by Near Infrared Spectroscopy

The fermentation end products as lactic acid, volatile fatty acids and ammonia-nitrogen, are important indicators of the efficiency of silage fermentation and are closely related to nutritive value of them (Jaster, 1995). Drying is problematic in the case of silage as many fermentation products are volatile and may get lost during the drying process. This may be a reason why NIR technology is being little used for the evaluation of silage fermentation characteristics. The feasibility of using near infrared transflectance spectroscopy to evaluate the content in fermentation end products of grass and maize fresh silage was investigated in this study

Photoionization models of the CALIFA HII regions. I. Hybrid models

Photoionization models of HII regions require as input a description of the ionizing SED and of the gas distribution, in terms of ionization parameter U and chemical abundances (e.g. O/H and N/O). A strong degeneracy exists between the hardness of the SED and U, which in turn leads to high uncertainties in the determination of the other parameters, including abundances. One way to resolve the degeneracy is to fix one of the parameters using additional information. For each of the ~ 20000 sources of the CALIFA HII regions catalog, a grid of photoionization models is computed assuming the ionizing SED being described by the underlying stellar population obtained from spectral synthesis modeling. The ionizing SED is then defined as the sum of various stellar bursts of different ages and metallicities. This solves the degeneracy between the shape of the ionizing SED and U. The nebular metallicity (associated to O/H) is defined using the classical strong line method O3N2 (which gives to our models the status of "hybrids"). The remaining free parameters are the abundance ratio N/O and the ionization parameter U, which are determined by looking for the model fitting [NII]/Ha and [OIII]/Hb. The models are also selected to fit [OII]/Hb. This process leads to a set of ~ 3200 models that reproduce simultaneously the three observations. We find that the regions associated to young stellar bursts suffer leaking of the ionizing photons, the proportion of escaping photons having a median of 80\%. The set of photoionization models satisfactorily reproduces the electron temperature derived from the [OIII]4363/5007 line ratio. We determine new relations between the ionization parameter U and the [OII]/[OIII] or [SII]/[SIII] line ratios. New relations between N/O and O/H and between U and O/H are also determined. All the models are publicly available on the 3MdB database.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&