Agro-morphological Diversity of High Altitude Bean Landraces in the Kailash Sacred Landscape of Nepal

Many varieties of bean are widely grown across diverse agro-ecological zones in Nepal. And opportunities exist for improving the crops and enhancing their resilience to various biotic and abiotic stressors. In this context, an experiment was conducted from June to October 2016 in Khar VDC of Darchula district to study the phenotypic traits of nine landraces of bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). The bean landraces were planted using randomized complete block design in three sites (Dhamidera, Dallekh and Sundamunda villages), with three replications in each site for their comparative analysis. The study considered the following phenotypic traits: days to emergence, days to 50% flowering, days to 90% pod maturity, number of nodes, pod length, pod width, number of pods, number of seeds per pod and weight and grain yield for 100 seeds. Kruskal-Wallis test showed significant differences in the landraces both within and among locations. KA-17-08-FB and KA-17-04-FB were late  flowering (63 and 65 days respectively) compared to other landraces whereas KA-17-07-FB flowered earliest (within 42 days). In all three sites, three landraces namely KA-17-07-FB, KA-17-04-FB and KA-17-06-FB were found to be relatively more resistant to pest and diseases than other landraces. Eight out of nine landraces in Dhamidera and Dallekh villages and seven out of nine in Sundamunda village produced seeds greater than 1.0 t/ha. Among the nine varieties KA-17-02-FB was the highest yielding variety, with an average yield of 3.8 t/ha. This study is useful for identifying suitable landraces for future promotion based on their maturity, grain yield, diseases resistance and other qualitative and quantitative characteristics

Energy Assessment of Different Weed Management Practices for Rice-Wheat Cropping System in India

Rosana G. Moreira, Editor-in-Chief; Texas A&M UniversityThis is a paper from International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR, Commission Internationale du Genie Rural) E-Journal Volume 8 (2006): Energy Assessment of Different Weed Management Practices for Rice-Wheat Cropping System in India. Manuscript EE 05 008. Vol.VIII. February, 2006

Role of the Bcl-2 gene family in prostate cancer progression and its implications for therapeutic intervention.

Prostate cancer (PC) is an escalating health burden in the western world. A large number of patients still present with extraprostatic (i.e., T3/T4, N0, M0/M1 or any T category and M1 disease or involved lymph nodes) and therefore incurable disease. Since the work of Huggins in 1940, there have been no major therapeutic advances and androgen ablation remains the best treatment option for extraprostatic androgen-responsive PC. Eighty to ninety percent of PC patients respond well to this form of treatment initially. After a median time of approximately 2 years, however, relapse to an androgen-independent (AI) state occurs, followed by death after a further median 6 months. Androgen ablation is rarely curative. The major molecular defect in extraprostatic and AI PC is the inability of PC cells to initiate apoptosis in response to a variety of stimuli, including different forms of androgen ablation and cytotoxic agents. The balance between cellular proliferation and cell death is regulated by multiple genes or families of genes through the cell cycle. The exact mechanisms governing this intricate and complex process are as yet not fully understood. One family of genes involved in cell survival/death control is the Bcl-2 gene family, which consists of homologous proteins that function to regulate distal and crucial commitment steps of the apoptotic pathway. The Bcl-2 family constitutes both agonists and antagonists of apoptosis that function at least in part through protein-protein interactions between various members of the family. The final outcome depends on the relative ratio of death agonists and antagonists. Bcl-2 expression has been closely associated with the AI phenotype of PC. Cytotoxic chemotherapy may be used as palliative therapy in AI PC but has not been found effective. Most chemotherapeutic cytotoxic agents induce apoptosis in cancer cells by direct and indirect action on the cell cycle. In vitro and in vivo studies have established that Bcl-2 expression confers an antiapoptotic activity against androgen withdrawal and cytotoxic chemotherapy. It thus offers a tempting potential target for therapeutic manipulations of PC

An improved block matching algorithm for motion estimation in video sequences and application in robotics

Block Matching is one of the most efficient techniques for motion estimation for video sequences. Metaheuristic algorithms have been used effectively for motion estimation. In this paper, we propose two hybrid algorithms: Artificial Bee Colony with Differential Evolution and Harmony Search with Differential Evolution based motion estimation algorithms. Extensive experiments are conducted using four standard video sequences. The video sequences utilized for experimentation have all essential features such as different formats, resolutions and number of frames which are generally required in input video sequences. We compare the performance of the proposed algorithms with other algorithms considering various parameters such as Structural Similarity, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Average Number of Search Points etc. The comparative results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperformed other algorithms

Numerical studies of ion beam in NX2 plasma focus for different applied voltage

Plasma focus device gives simultaneous interaction between magnetic and electric field which results in exhibiting multi-radiation properties. Ion beam radiates from the system is significant for experimenting target material of interest in plasma focus research. Lee code model is used to simulate the numerical experiments on NX2-plasma focus device system using different applied voltage in the range 10 to 14 kV. The system is operating in Neon filled at an optimum pressure depending on the applied voltage used in the experiment. Results obtained are analysed and fitted with the experimental results for system validation. Good fitting on the numerical with the experimental results is obtained by incorporating mass shedding effects and current shedding factor. The range of current density obtained is in the range 1.6 × 108 to 7.3×109 Am-2whilst the maximum ion beam energy is estimated to be 156 J

Floral biology studies of Egyptian clover, Trifolium alexandrinum L.

Floral biology studies of Egyptian clover, Trifolium alexandrinum was studied at Forage Section, Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CCS, Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar during 2012 and 2013. T. alexandrinum flower head of cultivar HB-2 consisted of numerous yellowish-white flowers that measured 22.7+1.3 mm in length and consists of a mean of 70.5+1.70 florets. The mean length of a floret, sepals, petals and stamen were 12.3±1.9, 4.4+0.6, 4.1+2.2 and 3.4+0.5 mm, respectively.  On an average a floret, remained in bud stage (A+B+C) for a longer period of 80.4+1.2 hours during 2012 than in 2013 (69.7+7.7 h). The overall mean duration of bud stage A (petals concealed in bud) was the longest (35.6+5.4 h) as compared to stage B when petals became visible but not expended (26.2+3.0 h) and C (24.8+2.0 h) when petals expended but anthers were not visible. The bud stage (A+B+C) lasted for a mean duration of 75.1+3.9 hours. The overall mean duration of the anthesis stage (D1+D2) was 63.1+5.6 hours (range 45-87 hours) and that of post anthesis at 37.8+6.9 (range 30-51) hours. The life cycle of T. alexandrinum flowers on an average was completed in 186.8±7.0 hours

Ultrafast Enhancement of Ferromagnetic Spin Exchange Induced by Ligand-to-Metal Charge Transfer

We theoretically predict and experimentally demonstrate a nonthermal pathway to optically enhance superexchange interaction energies in a material based on exciting ligand-to-metal charge-transfer transitions, which introduces lower-order virtual hopping contributions that are absent in the ground state. We demonstrate this effect in the layered ferromagnetic insulator CrSiTe₃ by exciting Te-to-Cr charge-transfer transitions using ultrashort laser pulses and detecting coherent phonon oscillations that are impulsively generated by superexchange enhancement via magneto-elastic coupling. This mechanism kicks in below the temperature scale where short-range in-plane spin correlations begin to develop and disappears when the excitation energy is tuned away from the charge-transfer resonance, consistent with our predictions

Water level prediction from social media images with a multi-task ranking approach

Floods are among the most frequent and catastrophic natural disasters and affect millions of people worldwide. It is important to create accurate flood maps to plan (offline) and conduct (real-time) flood mitigation and flood rescue operations. Arguably, images collected from social media can provide useful information for that task, which would otherwise be unavailable. We introduce a computer vision system that estimates water depth from social media images taken during flooding events, in order to build flood maps in (near) real-time. We propose a multi-task (deep) learning approach, where a model is trained using both a regression and a pairwise ranking loss. Our approach is motivated by the observation that a main bottleneck for image-based flood level estimation is training data: it is diffcult and requires a lot of effort to annotate uncontrolled images with the correct water depth. We demonstrate how to effciently learn a predictor from a small set of annotated water levels and a larger set of weaker annotations that only indicate in which of two images the water level is higher, and are much easier to obtain. Moreover, we provide a new dataset, named DeepFlood, with 8145 annotated ground-level images, and show that the proposed multi-task approach can predict the water level from a single, crowd-sourced image with ~11 cm root mean square error.Comment: Accepted in ISPRS Journal 202