Improving fertilizer recommendations for Nepalese farmers with the help of soil-testing mobile van

Smallholder farmers dominate agriculture in Nepal. These farmers have poor knowledge about agriculture and lack of support for soil management and integrated plant-nutrient systems. Focusing on the importance and need for soil-fertility management, a soil-testing mobile van program has recently been introduced in Nepal by Soil Management Directorate, Hariharbhawan. With the introduction of the mobile lab, famers can get their soil tested for nutrient deficiencies and fertilizer requirements at their doorsteps. Using mobile lab, spatial distributions of chemical properties, including pH, organic matter (OM), total nitrogen (N), available phosphorus (as P2O5), and available potassium (as K2O) were examined in soil samples taken from the 0 to 15 cm depth from selected agricultural fields in eight different districts in the mid-hills and Terai regions of Nepal. Tests conducted on 1,479 soil samples in the soil-testing mobile van revealed the following: the mean soil OM ranged from 0.01 to 1.77%; total N content ranged from 0.01 to 0.08%; mean available P2O5 ranged from 16.47 to 197.82 kg ha−1; and mean available K2O ranged from 84.3 to 422.57 kg ha−1. For each crop to be grown, farmers were provided with individual soil health reports and fertilizer recommendations (rate, amount, and type). This program not only allows scientists and farmers to work closely and share information but also serves as a model for the nation to successfully transfer technology for improving soil health and sustainability

Improving fertilizer recommendations for Nepalese farmers with the help of soil-testing mobile van

Smallholder farmers dominate agriculture in Nepal. These farmers have poor knowledge about agriculture and lack of support for soil management and integrated plant-nutrient systems. Focusing on the importance and need for soil-fertility management, a soil-testing mobile van program has recently been introduced in Nepal by Soil Management Directorate, Hariharbhawan. With the introduction of the mobile lab, famers can get their soil tested for nutrient deficiencies and fertilizer requirements at their doorsteps. Using mobile lab, spatial distributions of chemical properties, including pH, organic matter (OM), total nitrogen (N), available phosphorus (as P2O5), and available potassium (as K2O) were examined in soil samples taken from the 0 to 15 cm depth from selected agricultural fields in eight different districts in the mid-hills and Terai regions of Nepal. Tests conducted on 1,479 soil samples in the soil-testing mobile van revealed the following: the mean soil OM ranged from 0.01 to 1.77%; total N content ranged from 0.01 to 0.08%; mean available P2O5 ranged from 16.47 to 197.82 kg ha−1; and mean available K2O ranged from 84.3 to 422.57 kg ha−1. For each crop to be grown, farmers were provided with individual soil health reports and fertilizer recommendations (rate, amount, and type). This program not only allows scientists and farmers to work closely and share information but also serves as a model for the nation to successfully transfer technology for improving soil health and sustainability

Extending the Measurement of True Dynamic Strain via Chirped-Pulse Phase-Sensitive Optical Time Domain Reflectometry to 100's of Microstrains

26ª edición del congreso internacional Optical Fiber Sensors (OFS26), 24/09/2018-28/09/2018, Lausanne, Suiza.It is experimentally demonstrated that a chirped pulse phase-sensitive OTDR can measure large and fast dynamic strains (~100’s of µε, ~100’s of Hz) with SNR of ≥ 24dB. Signal smoothing and impact of error accumulation are also discussed.European Commissio

Synthesis and Characterization of Cobalt Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications

Nanomaterial research has attracted a great deal of enthusiasm from the public because of the applications of nanomaterials in various areas of science such as physics, chemistry, medicine, and materials science. Biocompatible and nontoxic cobalt nanoparticles have biomedical applications including drug delivery, cell and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) separation, gene cloning, and magnetic resonance imaging. The main aim of this research project is to produce contamination-free cobalt nanoparticles for biomedical applications. Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) technique was used to fabricate contamination-free cobalt nanoparticles directly from cobalt foil. A KrF laser having laser pulses of wavelength 248 nm, pulse duration of 20 ns, and repetition rate of 10 Hz was employed in pulsed laser deposition technique. The synthesized cobalt nanoparticles were characterized using UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy and dynamic laser light scattering (DLLS). The synthesized cobalt nanoparticles were stabilized in glucose solutions of various concentrations. The UV-Vis absorption peak around 268 nm confirms the presence of cobalt nanoparticles in aqueous media. The DLLS size distribution of cobalt nanoparticles has been found in the range between 355 nm to 465 nm with variation of growth parameters such as laser energy, number of shot, and glucose concentration. Glucose stabilized cobalt nanoparticles have been successfully functionalized with DNA and laser modified DNA. The binding of cobalt nanoparticles with DNA plays an important role in the future for gene delivery

Distorted Acquisition of Dynamic Events Sensed by Frequency-Scanning Fiber-Optic Interrogators and a Mitigation Strategy

Fiber-optic dynamic interrogators, which use periodic frequency scanning, actually sample a time-varying measurand on a non-uniform time grid. Commonly, however, the sampled values are reported on a uniform time grid, synchronized with the periodic scanning. It is the novel and noteworthy message of this paper that this artificial assignment may give rise to significant distortions in the recovered signal. These distortions increase with both the signal frequency and measurand dynamic range for a given sampling rate and frequency scanning span of the interrogator. They may reach disturbing values in dynamic interrogators, which trade-off scanning speed with scanning span. The paper also calls for manufacturers of such interrogators to report the sampled values along with their instants of acquisition, allowing interpolation algorithms to substantially reduce the distortion. Experimental verification of a simulative analysis includes: (i) a commercial dynamic interrogator of ‘continuous’ FBG fibers that attributes the measurand values to a uniform time grid; as well as (ii) a dynamic Brillouin Optical time Domain (BOTDA) laboratory setup, which provides the sampled measurand values together with the sampling instants. Here, using the available measurand-dependent sampling instants, we demonstrate a significantly cleaner signal recovery using spline interpolation

Performance analysis of the differential pulse-width pair Brillouin optical time domain analysis using the log normalized and linearly normalized gain

The performance of the differential pulse-width pair Brillouin optical time domain analysis (DPP-BOTDA) is evaluated experimentally using either the gain from log normalization or linear normalization for the subtraction of traces collected with pump pulses of slightly different pulse widths. Using pump pulses widths of 43 ns and 40 ns, amplified Brillouin time domain probe traces were obtained for 10 km of standard single mode fiber. Two hotspots of length 30 cm and 6 m, separated by more than the spatial resolutions of the individual pulses and kept in a temperature controlled hot bath facility, were interrogated with temperature variations from 5 to 70°C, having probe signal gain of ~ 40% at the Brillouin Frequency Shift (BFS). This research work demonstrates, for the first time, that the use of linear gains for the subtraction step in creating the Brillouin gain spectrum, produces results for small to medium Brillouin frequency shifts (≤30 MHz), that deviate from the results of the subtraction of the logarithmic gains by as much as 2 MHz (~ 2°C), particularly for hotspots of the order of the spatial resolution of the DPP-BOTDA. For hotspots longer than the spatial resolution of the technique, the difference between results of the two processing methods show BFS deviations only at the end of the hotspots

Outcomes Bronchoscopic Evaluation in A University Hospital

Introduction: Study of clinical profile of the patients and diagnostic yield of the selected bronchoscopic procedures gives us important information in clinical decision making and better patient care. There are hardly very few studies regarding these entities. Therefore, we decided to study clinical characteristics and outcomes of the patients who underwent bronchoscopic evaluation in our setting. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study the consecutive patients who underwent bronchoscopy from 1st May 2013- 30th April 2015 in division of pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. The main procedure performed was bronchoalveolar lavage. Results: The mean age was 54.71 years with 76 (76%) males. Recurrent hemoptysis in 58 (58%) patients were the commonest indication. Total 95 (95%) patients have chest X-ray abnormalities. The commonest bronchoscopic finding was bronchiectasis 23 (23%) of patients followed by chronic bronchitis in 18 (18%) and endobronchial tuberculosis in 16 (16%). Total 10 (71%) of the 14 bronchoscopically suspected lung cancer patients have intraluminal lesions. Bronchoalveolar lavage culture for tuberculosis showed growth in 46 (46%), positive for malignancy in 7 (7%) positive Ziehl Neelson stain for tuberculosis in 6 (6%). Conclusions: Bronchoscopic evaluation of patients with pulmonary diseases gives us a lot of information that may help us in better patient care and bronchoalveolar lavage has high diagnostic yield in diagnosing pulmonary tuberculosis. Keywords: bronchoalveolar lavage;clinical profile;fiberoptic bronchoscopy. | PubMe

Dynamic Measurements of 1000 Microstrains Using Chirped-Pulse Phase-Sensitive Optical Time-Domain Reflectometry

8 pags., 6 figs., -- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 4.0This paper extends the capabilities of chirped-pulse phase-sensitive optical time-domain reflectometry to the measurement of large dynamic strains over hundreds of meters of standard single-mode fiber. Benefitting from single-shot strain measurements, this technique has already demonstrated dynamic strains of the order of submicrostrains with a sensitivity of picostrains-per-root-Hertz. Yet, for large dynamic strains, it relies on the accumulation of incremental measurements, where each trace is cross correlated with its predecessor to determine the relative change of strain. However, practical time records of measured high slew-rate applied perturbations contain disturbing outliers. We then detail and analyze a post-processing strategy to mitigate this limitation. Through this strategy, we are able to achieve for the first time (to our knowledge) high signal-to-noise Rayleigh-backscattering-based distributed measurements of large and fast dynamic strains of a longitudinally vibrating 4 m section at the end of 210 m of a single-mode fiber: from peak to peak 150-1190 ¿¿ at vibration frequency of 400 Hz and 50 Hz, respectively.The work of H. D. Bhatta was performed in the framework of ITN-FINESSE, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action grant agreement n.° 722509. Additional support was obtained from EC H2020 (project DOMINO, ERANET Cofund Water Works 2014 call) and Spanish MINECO (project DOMINO, project TEC2015-71127-C2-2-R and project RTI2018- 097957-B-C31), UAH (FPI contract) and Regional Program SINFOTON2-CM: P2018/NMT-4326. (Corresponding author: Hari Datta Bhatta.