Advancing Agricultural Production With Machine Learning Analytics: Yield Determinants for California's Almond Orchards.

Agricultural productivity is subject to various stressors, including abiotic and biotic threats, many of which are exacerbated by a changing climate, thereby affecting long-term sustainability. The productivity of tree crops such as almond orchards, is particularly complex. To understand and mitigate these threats requires a collection of multi-layer large data sets, and advanced analytics is also critical to integrate these highly heterogeneous datasets to generate insights about the key constraints on the yields at tree and field scales. Here we used a machine learning approach to investigate the determinants of almond yield variation in California's almond orchards, based on a unique 10-year dataset of field measurements of light interception and almond yield along with meteorological data. We found that overall the maximum almond yield was highly dependent on light interception, e.g., with each one percent increase in light interception resulting in an increase of 57.9 lbs/acre in the potential yield. Light interception was highest for mature sites with higher long term mean spring incoming solar radiation (SRAD), and lowest for younger orchards when March maximum temperature was lower than 19°C. However, at any given level of light interception, actual yield often falls significantly below full yield potential, driven mostly by tree age, temperature profiles in June and winter, summer mean daily maximum vapor pressure deficit (VPDmax), and SRAD. Utilizing a full random forest model, 82% (±1%) of yield variation could be explained when using a sixfold cross validation, with a RMSE of 480 ± 9 lbs/acre. When excluding light interception from the predictors, overall orchard characteristics (such as age, location, and tree density) and inclusive meteorological variables could still explain 78% of yield variation. The model analysis also showed that warmer winter conditions often limited mature orchards from reaching maximum yield potential and summer VPDmax beyond 40 hPa significantly limited the yield. Our findings through the machine learning approach improved our understanding of the complex interaction between climate, canopy light interception, and almond nut production, and demonstrated a relatively robust predictability of almond yield. This will ultimately benefit data-driven climate adaptation and orchard nutrient management approaches

Thermodynamics of lattice QCD with 2 sextet quarks on N_t=8 lattices

We continue our lattice simulations of QCD with 2 flavours of colour-sextet quarks as a model for conformal or walking technicolor. A 2-loop perturbative calculation of the $\beta$-function which describes the evolution of this theory's running coupling constant predicts that it has a second zero at a finite coupling. This non-trivial zero would be an infrared stable fixed point, in which case the theory with massless quarks would be a conformal field theory. However, if the interaction between quarks and antiquarks becomes strong enough that a chiral condensate forms before this IR fixed point is reached, the theory is QCD-like with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry and confinement. However, the presence of the nearby IR fixed point means that there is a range of couplings for which the running coupling evolves very slowly, i.e. it 'walks'. We are simulating the lattice version of this theory with staggered quarks at finite temperature studying the changes in couplings at the deconfinement and chiral-symmetry restoring transitions as the temporal extent ($N_t$) of the lattice, measured in lattice units, is increased. Our earlier results on lattices with $N_t=4,6$ show both transitions move to weaker couplings as $N_t$ increases consistent with walking behaviour. In this paper we extend these calculations to $N_t=8$. Although both transition again move to weaker couplings the change in the coupling at the chiral transition from $N_t=6$ to $N_t=8$ is appreciably smaller than that from $N_t=4$ to $N_t=6$. This indicates that at $N_t=4,6$ we are seeing strong coupling effects and that we will need results from $N_t > 8$ to determine if the chiral-transition coupling approaches zero as $N_t \rightarrow \infty$, as needed for the theory to walk.Comment: 21 pages Latex(Revtex4) source with 4 postscript figures. v2: added 1 reference. V3: version accepted for publication, section 3 restructured and interpretation clarified. Section 4 future plans for zero temperature simulations clarifie

The second phase transition in the pyrochlore oxide Cd2Re2O7

Evidence for another phase transition at 120 K in the metallic pyrochlore oxide Cd2Re2O7, following the structural transition at 200 K and followed by the superconducting transition at 1.0 K, is given through resistivity, magnetoresistance, specific heat, and X-ray diffraction measurements. The results indicate unique successive structural and electronic transitions occurring in the pyrochlore compound, revealing an interesting interplay between the crystal and electronic structures on the itinerant electron system in the pyrochlore lattice

Gate-error analysis in simulations of quantum computers with transmon qubits

In the model of gate-based quantum computation, the qubits are controlled by a sequence of quantum gates. In superconducting qubit systems, these gates can be implemented by voltage pulses. The success of implementing a particular gate can be expressed by various metrics such as the average gate fidelity, the diamond distance, and the unitarity. We analyze these metrics of gate pulses for a system of two superconducting transmon qubits coupled by a resonator, a system inspired by the architecture of the IBM Quantum Experience. The metrics are obtained by numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation of the transmon system. We find that the metrics reflect systematic errors that are most pronounced for echoed cross-resonance gates, but that none of the studied metrics can reliably predict the performance of a gate when used repeatedly in a quantum algorithm

Semi-Inclusive B\to K(K^*) X Decays with Initial Bound State Effects

The effects of initial $b$ quark bound state for the semi-inclusive decays $B\to K(K^*) X$ are studied using light cone expansion and heavy quark effective theory methods. We find that the initial bound state effects on the branching ratios and CP asymmetries are small. In the light cone expansion approach, the CP-averaged branching ratios are increased by about 2% with respect to the free $b$-quark decay. For $\bar B^0 \to K^- (K^{*-}) X$, the CP-averaged branching ratios are sensitive to the phase $\gamma$ and the CP asymmetry can be as large as 7% (14%), whereas for $B^-\to \bar K^0 (\bar K^{*0})X$ the CP-averaged branching ratios are not sensitive to $\gamma$ and the CP asymmetries are small ($< 1$). The CP-averaged branching ratios are predicted to be in the ranges $(0.53 \sim 1.5)\times 10^{-4}$ [$(0.25 \sim 2.0)\times 10^{-4}$] for $\bar B^0 \to K^- (K^{*-})X$ and $(0.77 \sim 0.84)\times 10^{-4}$ [$(0.67 \sim 0.74)\times 10^{-4}$] for $B^-\to \bar K^0 (\bar K^{*0}) X$, depending on the value of the CP violating phase $\gamma$. In the heavy quark effective theory approach, we find that the branching ratios are decreased by about 10% and the CP asymmetries are not affected. These predictions can be tested in the near future.Comment: 29 pages, 12 ps figure

Propagating waves in an extremal black string

We investigate the black string in the context of the string theories. It is shown that the graviton is the only propagating mode in the (2+1)--dimensional extremal black string background. Both the dilation and axion turn out to be non-propagating modes.Comment: Minor corrections, 11 pages in ReVTeX, no figure

Physiological Electrical Signals Promote Chain Migration of Neuroblasts by Up-Regulating P2Y1 Purinergic Receptors and Enhancing Cell Adhesion

Acknowledgments This work was supported by a grant from NHS Grampian. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are creditedPeer reviewedPublisher PD