Climate change awareness among the livestock rearers of east coast of India

The phenomenon of global climate change is directly affecting the livestock production system world overall. Therefore, understanding the changing climatic scenario by the millions of resource poor livestock rearers across the east coast of India found to be imperative to get information for strategic planning to improve the livelihoods of rural people. But, systematic methodology to assess climatic change awareness among the livestock rearers is currently not available. Therefore, a psychometric scale entitled “Climate Change Awareness Scale” was developed and applied among the randomly selected 480 livestock rearers of eastern coastal region of India. Results reflected majority of the population exhibit their strong level of awareness towards changing climatic scenario in general and particularly towards broad spectrum of climate change like causes, features, effects and impacts. It was also found that 37.188% of livestock rearers of coastal region were having higher level of awareness followed by 31.973% and 30.839% were having lower and medium level of awareness. Comparisons of state of awareness with the factual climatic data validated farmers’ claim and established the authenticity of the psychometric tool. Hence, this study will provide a significant tool for researchers and policy makers to assess state of climate change awareness among the end users and to develop appropriate adaptation strategies to minimize the risk of livestock sector to climate change

Electrochemical integration of graphene with light absorbing copper-based thin films

We present an electrochemical route for the integration of graphene with light sensitive copper-based alloys used in optoelectronic applications. Graphene grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) transferred to glass is found to be a robust substrate on which photoconductive Cu_{x}S films of 1-2 um thickness can be deposited. The effect of growth parameters on the morphology and photoconductivity of Cu_{x}S films is presented. Current-voltage characterization and photoconductivity decay experiments are performed with graphene as one contact and silver epoxy as the other

Polarization-resolved single-molecule tracking reveals strange dynamics of individual fluorescent tracers through a plasticized (rubbery) polymer network

Tracking the movement of fluorescent single-molecule (SM) tracers has provided several new insights on the local structure and dynamics in complex environments such as soft materials and biological systems. However, SM tracking (SMT) remains unreliable at molecular length scales, as the localization-error (LE) of SM trajectories (~30-50 nm) is considerably larger than size of molecular tracers (~1-3 nm). Thus, instances of tracer (im)mobility in heterogeneous media, which provide indicator for underlying anomalous-transport mechanisms, remains obscured within the realms of SMT. Since translation of passive tracers in an isotropic network is associated with fast dipolar rotation, we propose authentic pauses within LE can be revealed upon probing SM reorientational dynamics. Here, we demonstrate how polarization-resolved SMT (PR-SMT) can provide emission-anisotropy at each super-localized position, thereby revealing tumbling propensity of SMs during random walk. For Rhodamine 6G tracers undergoing heterogeneous transport in a hydrated polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) network, analyses of PR-SMT trajectories enabled us to discern instances of genuine immobility and localized motion within the LE. Our investigations on 100 SMs in hydrated (plasticized) PVP films reveal a wide distribution of dwell-times and pause-frequencies, which demonstrate that majority of probes intermittently experience complete translational and rotational immobilization. This indicates tracers serendipitously encounter compact, rigid polymer cavities during transport, implying the existence of nanoscale glass-like domains sparsely distributed in a redominantly deep-rubbery polymer network far above the glass transition. PR-SMT is simple to implement and opens up alternate avenues to interrogate transient (bio)molecular interactions leading to anomalous transport in inhomogeneous media.</div

Dendron-like growth of silver nanoparticles using a water-soluble oligopeptide

A dendron-like nanostructure of silver was grown in solution using a water-soluble tetrapeptide Tyr-Aib-Tyr-Val (Aib, α-amino isobutyric acid), silver nitrate, and methanol. These structures are composed of silver nanoparticles having a bimodal size distribution with the median diameters around 2.0 and 19.5 nm, respectively. The dendron-like growth is ascribed to the effect of the local electric field generated by the dipoles associated with the peptide molecules. The optical absorption spectra have been analyzed by Mie scattering theory, which shows that there is a metal-nonmetal transition in silver particles having diameters less than ~2.0 nm