World pineapple production: an overview

This review paper discusses the origin, production, cultivation practices, storage, transportation and uses of pineapple. The economic importance of pineapple is easily justified by its unique characteristics as a fruit, which ensured its rapid diffusion and adoption, in the tropics and subtropics. Pineapple is a perennial monocotyledonous plant with a terminal multiple fruit. This perishable fruit is usually stored only for 4-5 days after harvesting in normal conditions. Generally, ripened pineapple fruit is consumed fresh or as pineapple juice. Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Hawaii, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Dominican Republic and South Africa are the leading pineapple producing countries. Among the countries Philippines, Thailand, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Chile, Ivory Coast and South Africa are the major exporters of pineapple in the world market. Quality of pineapple varies due to cultivation technique, growing environment and variety. Good quality pineapple grows well in acidic loams, sandy loams and clay loams soils under warm and humid climate with sunny days and cool nights. Pineapples need a neutral to mildly acidic soil ranging pH from 4.5 to 6.5. Pineapple reproduction is through vegetative propagation using suckers and crowns. Fertilizer requirement increases sharply after planting and peak at two to four months before floral initiation. Earthing up operation gives better anchorage to the plants. Mulch promotes rooting by concentrating moisture, increasing soil temperature in the root zone and controlling weeds. Irregular flowering behavior of pineapples also affects its commercial yield adversely. A variety of chemicals are available to achieve uniformity and control flowering. Storage and transportation facilities are the important factors for local and international marketing. Harvested fruits are packed in the crates and transported in refrigerated containers for quality assurance. The prospect of pineapple is bright due to increasing trend of total consumption and export potential.Key words: Pineapple, Origin, Distribution, Climate, Propagation, Intercultural operations, Post-harvest operations, Use

Cellular tracking in time-lapse phase contrast images

The quantitative analysis of live cells is a key issue in evaluating biological processes. The current clinical practice involves the application of a tedious and time consuming manual tracking procedure on large amount of data. As a result, automatic tracking systems are currently developed and evaluated. However, problems caused by cellular division, agglomeration, Brownian motion and topology changes are difficult issues that have to be accommodated by automatic tracking techniques. In this paper, we detail the development of a fully automated multi-target tracking system that is able to deal with Brownian motion and cellular division. During the tracking process our approach includes the neighbourhood relationship and motion history to enforce the cellular tracking continuity in the spatial and temporal domain. The experimental results reported in this paper indicate that our method is able to accurately track cellular structures in time-lapse data

Possible re-entrant superconductivity in EuFe2As2 under pressure

We studied the temperature-pressure phase diagram of EuFe2As2 by measurements of the electrical resistivity. The antiferromagnetic spin-density-wave transition at T_0 associated with the FeAs-layers is continuously suppressed with increasing pressure, while the antiferromagnetic ordering temperature of the Eu 2+ moments seems to be nearly pressure independent up to 2.6 GPa. Above 2 GPa a sharp drop of the resistivity, \rho(T), indicates the onset of superconductivity at T_c \approx 29.5 K. Surprisingly, on further reducing the temperature \rho(T) is increasing again and exhibiting a maximum caused by the ordering of the Eu 2+ moments, a behavior which is reminiscent of re-entrant superconductivity as it is observed in the ternary Chevrel phases or in the rare-earth nickel borocarbides

Eco-biology of Mastacembelus pancalus (Ham.) and their distribution in different water bodies

The eco-biological of the spiny eel, Mastacembelus pailcalus in the river Padma, adjacent flood plains and ponds were influenced by various physico-chemical factors such as water temperature, water transparency, pH, dissolved oxygen, free carbon dioxide and alkalinity. Flood plain areas are the best habitat for the M. pancalus with maximum abundance

Case studies of six CBFM-2 water bodies

The case studies report on how CBFM-2 interventions have affected aquatic productivity, income, employment and livelihoods in six case study sites, Beelbhora beel cluster (Kishoreganj), Sholuar beel (Narail), Chapundaha beel (Rangpur), Hamil beel (Tangail), Kutir beel (Kishoreganj) and Dikshi beel (Pabna).

Eight-Chain and Full-Network Models and Their Modified Versions for Rubber Hyperelasticity: A Comparative Study

The eight-chain model, also known as Arruda-Boyce model, is widely used to capture the rate-independent hyperelastic response of rubber-like materials. The parameters of this model are physically based and explained from micromechanics of chain molecules. Despite its excellent performance with only two material parameters to capture bench measurements in uniaxial and pure shear regime, the model is known to be significantly deficient in predicting the equibiaxial data. To ameliorate such drawback, over the years, several modified versions of this successful model have been proposed in the literature. The so-called full-network model is another micromechanically motivated chain model, which has also few modified versions in the literature. For this study, two modified versions of the full-network model have been selected. In this contribution, five modified versions of the Arruda-Boyce model and two modified versions of full-network model are critically compared with the classical eight-chain model for their adequacy in representing equibiaxial data. To do a comparison of all selected models in reproducing the well-known Treloar data, the analytical expressions for the three homogeneous deformation modes, that is, uniaxial tension, equibiaxial tension, and pure shear have been derived and the performances of the selected models are analysed. The comparative study demonstrates that modified Flory-Erman model, Gornet-Desmorat (GD) model, Meissner-Matějka model, and bootstrapped eight-chain model predict well the three deformation modes compare to the classical eight-chain model

Automatic cellular segmentation in time-lapse phase contrast images

The process of cellular detection and tracking is a key task in the analysis of cellular motility and proliferation. The current clinical procedure involves a time consuming procedure that requires the manual annotation of cells in sequences of time-lapse phase contrast microscopy images. With the development of modern imaging modalities, the amount of data to be interpreted by biologists is constantly increasing, thus the development of automatic techniques that are able to detect cellular structures in large image sequences is more necessary than ever before. Robust cellular detection represents the first step in the development of cellular tracking algorithms and one of the objectives of our work was focused on the development of an automatic technique that is able to segment the cells in various sequences of cellular data. The proposed segmentation framework adaptively determines the criteria to separate the cells and the background and additional morphological operations are applied to detect the initial structures that define the cells in each image of the sequence. The initial segmentation results are refined by applying motion consistency constraints to detect the cells that are missed by the initial segmentation process due to factors such as image noise and low contrast. In our experiments we have applied the proposed segmentation framework to NE4C, MDCK and HUVEC cellular data. A number of experimental results are illustrated in Figure 1