Fructan and its relationship to abiotic stress tolerance in plants

Numerous studies have been published that attempted to correlate fructan concentrations with freezing and drought tolerance. Studies investigating the effect of fructan on liposomes indicated that a direct interaction between membranes and fructan was possible. This new area of research began to move fructan and its association with stress beyond mere correlation by confirming that fructan has the capacity to stabilize membranes during drying by inserting at least part of the polysaccharide into the lipid headgroup region of the membrane. This helps prevent leakage when water is removed from the system either during freezing or drought. When plants were transformed with the ability to synthesize fructan, a concomitant increase in drought and/or freezing tolerance was confirmed. These experiments indicate that besides an indirect effect of supplying tissues with hexose sugars, fructan has a direct protective effect that can be demonstrated by both model systems and genetic transformation

Narrative approach to understand people's comprehension of acquaintance rape: The role of Sex Role Stereotyping

One of the most unreported crimes is acquaintance rape. This may be the result of people's understanding of what rape is because of their rape script and their stereotypes of victim characteristics. These judgements may be moderated by sex role stereotyping (SRS). We utilised a narrative approach to understand low and high SRS participants' rape scripts. Young-adult participants described what they believed a typical rape was, followed by describing an acquaintance rape and then what they believed the stereotypical victim of each crime would be. A narrative analysis was conducted on the data. We found that the blitz script is still held by 44% of low SRS and 47% of high SRS people despite 90% of rapes being committed by an acquaintance. While acquaintance rape scripts existed, the emotional imagery and content of these depended on participants level of SRS. Stereotypical victim characteristics also depended on SRS: those with high SRS were more likely to endorse rape myth ideals in describing victims than those with low SRS. These results have implications for educating people about what rape is so that victims might feel more confident in reporting rape

Characterisation of a multi-view fringe projection system based on the stereo matching of rectified phase maps

Abstract Multi-view fringe projection systems can be effective solutions to address the limitations imposed by the limited field of view, line-of-sight issues and occlusions when measuring the geometry of complex objects, associated with single camera–projector systems. However, characterisation of a multi-view system is challenging since it requires the cameras and projectors to be in a common global coordinate system. We present a method for characterising a multi-view fringe projection system which does not require the characterisation of the projector. The novelty of the method lies in determining the correspondences in the phase domain using the rectified unwrapped phase maps and triangulating the matched phase values to reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of the object. A benefit of the method is that it does not require registration of the point clouds acquired from multiple perspectives. The proposed method is validated by experiment and comparison with a conventional system and a contact coordinate measuring machine.</jats:p

Artefacts used for testing 3D optical-based scanners

Performance verification of 3D optical based scanners is currently a topic of great discussion, since they are ever more used in the industrial manufacturing field for the dimensional verification of components. Among their advantages, there is the capability of acquire large amounts of points in a very short time, regardless the geometrical complexity of the object under measurement. Although, traceability is still critical and the uncertainty assessment conducted using artefacts calibrated through the more traceable Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs), is still the most implemented method. In this paper, some of the most interesting geometries used for the performance verification of optical based scanners have been reported, considering the most widespread measuring tasks which require the use of these instruments, both prismatic geometries and freeform shapes