Evaluation of Physico-chemical Parameters of Soil in Different Cropping Systems and their Co-relation with Earthworm Diversity

Aim: The present study is an attempt to evaluate the impact of earthworm diversity on physico-chemical parameters of soil in different cropping systems (i.e. basmati-wheat, basmati-chickpea, soybean-wheat, moong-wheat) under organic and conventional farming systems. Place and Duration of Study: The study was conducted at the School of Organic Farming, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, Punjab, India from June, 2020 to March 2021. Methodology: The four earthworm species found during the study period are Metaphire posthuma, Lampito mauritti, Amynthas morissia and Travoscolides chengannure, which belong to two families i.e. Megascolicidae and Octochateidae. Out of these Travoscolides chengannure was reported for the first time in Punjab. Results: The results indicate that richer earthworm diversity was found in the organic farming systems as compared to the conventional farming systems. The correlation analysis of earthworm abundance with the physicochemical parameters of soil in different farming systems revealed that the abundance of earthworms in organic farming system shows positive but non-significant correlation with pH, nitrogen and potassium levels. In conventional farming system, significant positive correlation (p=0.01) was found for organic carbon, electric conductivity and nitrogen. Conclusion: The findings of this encourage switching from conventional to organic farming practices. These practices not only increase earthworm diversity, but enrich the soil with many major and micro-nutrients. The agriculture practices which are earthworm-friendly should be adopted for long-term soil productivity.&nbsp

Evidence for a common mechanism of spatial attention and visual awareness: Towards construct validity of pseudoneglect.

Present knowledge of attention and awareness centres on deficits in patients with right brain damage who show severe forms of inattention to the left, called spatial neglect. Yet the functions that are lost in neglect are poorly understood. In healthy people, they might produce "pseudoneglect"-subtle biases to the left found in various tests that could complement the leftward deficits in neglect. But pseudoneglect measures are poorly correlated. Thus, it is unclear whether they reflect anything but distinct surface features of the tests. To probe for a common mechanism, here we asked whether visual noise, known to increase leftward biases in the grating-scales task, has comparable effects on other measures of pseudoneglect. We measured biases using three perceptual tasks that require judgments about size (landmark task), luminance (greyscales task) and spatial frequency (grating-scales task), as well as two visual search tasks that permitted serial and parallel search or parallel search alone. In each task, we randomly selected pixels of the stimuli and set them to random luminance values, much like a poor TV signal. We found that participants biased their perceptual judgments more to the left with increasing levels of noise, regardless of task. Also, noise amplified the difference between long and short lines in the landmark task. In contrast, biases during visual searches were not influenced by noise. Our data provide crucial evidence that different measures of perceptual pseudoneglect, but not exploratory pseudoneglect, share a common mechanism. It can be speculated that this common mechanism feeds into specific, right-dominant processes of global awareness involved in the integration of visual information across the two hemispheres

γ-ray strength function for thallium isotopes relevant to the 205Pb−205Tl chronometry

Photoneutron cross sections were measured for 203Tl and 205Tl at energies between the one- and two-neutron thresholds using quasimonochromatic γ -ray beams produced in laser Compton scattering at the NewSUBARU synchrotron radiation facility. Our measurement results in cross sections significantly different from the previously reported bremsstrahlung experiment, leading to rather different giant dipole resonance (GDR) parameters, in particular to lower GDR peak energies and higher peak cross sections. The photoneutron data are used to constrain the γ -ray strength function on the basis of the Hartree-Fock-Bogolyubov plus quasiparticle random-phase approximation using the Gogny D1M interaction. Supplementing the experimentally constrained γ -ray strength function with the zero-limit E1 and M1 contributions for the de-excitation mode, we estimate the Maxwellian-averaged cross section for the s-process branching-point nucleus 204Tl in the context of the 205Pb-205Tl chronometry