Effects of Surfactant Combinations with Captan for Control of Apple Fruit Rots and Russeting

Surfactants are adjuvants that lower the surface tension between two liquids or between a liquid and a solid. Surfactants can improve efficacy of fungicides on crops and could reduce the rate and number of fungicide applications. Combining fungicides and surfactants may increase the efficacy of existing control options. However, since some fungicide-surfactant combinations have been reported to cause phytotoxicity, these compounds should be screened. This is the first year of a two-year study to evaluate commercial surfactants+captan for control of apple fruit rot and phytotoxicity

Validation of the Gleason-Duttweiler Warning System for Sooty Blotch and Flyspeck Management Using a Modified Relative Humidity Threshold

The appearance of black blotches and blemishes on apples infected with sooty blotch and flyspeck (SBFS) fungi reduces the fresh fruit quality and market value. In order to control the infection of SBFS, most of the growers in North Central region spray fungicide every 10 to 14 days from shortly after petal fall until harvest. The fungicides widely used are thiophanate-methyl and captan, both of which carry substantial safety risks

Multimode Hyperspectral Imaging for Food Quality and Safety

Food safety and quality are becoming progressively important, and a failure to implement monitoring processes and identify anomalies in composition, production, and distribution can lead to severe financial and customer health damages. If consumers were uncertain about food safety and quality, the impact could be profound; hence, we need better ways of minimizing such risks. On the data management side, the rise of artificial intelligence, data analytics, the Internet of Things, and blockchain all provide enormous opportunities for supply chain management and liability management, but the impact of any approach starts with the quality of the relevant data. Here, we present state-of-the-art spectroscopic technologies including hyperspectral reflectance, fluorescence imaging as well as Raman spectroscopy, and speckle imaging that are all validated for food safety and quality applications. We believe a multimode approach comprising of a number of these synergetic optical detection modes is needed for the highest performance. We present a plan where our implementations reflect this concept through a multimode tabletop system in the sense that a large, real-time production-level device would be based on more modes than this mid-level one, while a handheld, portable unit may only address fewer challenges, but with a lower cost and size

Free-floating planets in the Milky Way

Gravitational microlensing is a powerful method to search for and characterize exoplanets, and it was first proposed by Paczyński in 1986. We provide a brief historical excursus of microlensing, especially focused on the discoveries of free-floating planets (FFPs) in the Milky Way. We also emphasize that, thanks to the technological developments, it will allow to estimate the physical parameters (in particular the mass and distance) of FFPs towards the center of our Galaxy, through the measure of the source finite radius, Earth or satellite parallax, and/or astrometric effects

Free-floating planets in the Milky Way

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