A fundamental approach for the measurement of solid-liquid interfacial energy

Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series by IOP Publishing Ltd

A STUDY ON THE INTRODUCTION OF BUS RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEM IN ASIAN DEVELOPING CITIES

Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has increasingly become an attractive urban transit alternative in many Asian developing cities due to its cost-effective and flexible implementation. However, it still seems to be difficult to introduce BRT to these cities because almost all of their city structures have been developed under solely a road transport development city plan and weakness of land use control gives rise to many problems, such as urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and air pollution. The purpose of this study was to introduce several strategies to support BRT implementation in Asian developing cities, such as a strategy to appropriately integrate the paratransit system into BRT system as being a feeder along a BRT corridor to supply demand. These proposed strategies were evaluated by applying demand forecasting and emission models to the BRT project plan of Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) in Thailand. It was demonstrated that the proposed strategies could effectively improve the BRT ridership, traffic conditions, and air pollution emission of the entire system in Bangkok. This study could be further extended to include strategy recommendation if a BRT system were to be introduced to other Asian developing cities. Document type: Articl

Fresh-marketable tomato yields enhanced by moderate weed control and suppressed fruit dehiscence with woodchip mulching

The use of plastic film imposes various environmental risks in agroecosystems. The replacement of plastics with organic materials for mulching has been suggested to enhance the sustainability of agroecosystems. However, whether woodchip mulch can be used for annual crops needs to be verified. We examined the effects of mulberry woodchip mulches on tomato-fruit yields over two successive years. Mulberry is the unique food plant of silkworms, and it will be better if its pruned shoots can be recycled rather than incinerated as waste. Setting three treatments, including woodchip mulch, weed-free and weedy (i.e., unweeded) treatments, we compared the amounts of fresh-marketable and unmarketable tomato fruits. The yields of fresh-marketable tomato fruits in the woodchip mulch treatment were significantly 16–57% higher than those in the weed-free treatment and comparable to those in the weedy treatment. The yields of unmarketable dehiscent tomato fruits in the weed-free treatment were significantly 46–86% higher than those of the other two treatments. The woodchip mulches extensively suppressed the weed density, while the grown weeds became large, preventing strong sunlight exposure and dehiscence of tomato fruits. Current results suggest that woodchips could be a possible alternative to plastics, facilitating climate change mitigation with agroforestry practices

See-Saw Realization of the Texture Zeros in the Neutrino Mass Matrix

We study the see-saw realization of seven textures of the neutrino mass matrix, which were presented by Frampton, Glashow and Marfatia. Two of them B_1 and B_2 are not realized in the see-saw mechanism without fine-tuning of parameters. We present some specific textures of the Dirac neutrino mass matrix and the right-handed Majorana neutrino one. In order to test these textures, we discuss the effect on the branching ratio of mu --> e gamma. We also study the U(1)_X times U(1)_{X'} flavor symmetry, in which U(1)_X is anomalous and U(1)_{X'} is non-anomolous, to reproduce texture zeros. We present examples of U(1) charges for two textures A_1 and A_2$.Comment: Latex file, 15 pages, the sign of charge is revise