Design and Implementation of Automated Irrigation Control System using WSN: An overview

Agriculture plays an important role in Indian economy. It is the biggest water user with the irrigation accounting for 70 percent of global water usage. It is assumed that without improved efficiency of water usage, the consumption of agriculture water can increase by 20 percent by 2050 at global level. In our country rainfall controls the agriculture; but the rainfall is non-uniform and irregular. This creates hassle in irrigation which badly affects the agriculture produce. This paper reviews different smart irrigation methods to achieve the efficiency in water use, higher production levels, low cost, decreased manpower requirements, higher reliability in water supply and certainly higher profits to farmers. The smart irrigation system should be cost effective so that the farmers can use it in the farm field

WSN based Automated Irrigation Control System

The main aim of this work is to provide an automated irrigation system for the farmer on the basis of wireless sensor network. The challenge is to develop such an irrigation control system that makes efficient usage of water and also must be cost effective. To calculate plant’s water requirement, it is important to measure different parameters. This system continuously monitors the parameters- temperature, humidity, and moisture of soil to which crops are susceptiveAn algorithm was developed with threshold values of soil moisture to be maintained continuously. System starts or stops irrigation based on moisture content of the soil. The tests were conducted on three crops- green chili, marigold and tomato. With the help of this system, water supply was reduced by 20- 30%, while crop yield was found to be slightly increased

Use of Mobile Health in Infant and Young Child Nutrition: A Formative Study in Rural Maharashtra

Undernutrition is a major public health problem for under 5 years of age children in India. Approximately 41% and 21% of under 5 years of age children are stunted and wasted respectively. Despite the known importance of age appropriate infant and young child feeding practices for child nutrition, the rates of these practices remain poor in India. The major determinants for inappropriate IYCF practices are beliefs and knowledge of parents and caregivers. These can be effectively addressed through counselling by mobile Health technology as mobile phones are widely available and have a high penetration across the country. This formative research explored the perceptions of caregivers regarding infant feeding practices, feasibility of mobile phone for counselling and targeted messaging to mothers on appropriate infant feeding. We conducted in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and key informant interviews. The data were translated, transcribed and analysed using a thematic approach. We found that rural households have at least one mobile phone with good network connectivity. Utilizing mobile phones for counselling was found to be acceptable in the community, provided that the advice given is affordable, tailored to their cultural beliefs and socio-economic status

An RxLR effector from phytophthora infestans prevents re-localisation of two plant NAC transcription factors from the endoplasmic reticulum to the nucleus

The plant immune system is activated following the perception of exposed, essential and invariant microbial molecules that are recognised as non-self. A major component of plant immunity is the transcriptional induction of genes involved in a wide array of defence responses. In turn, adapted pathogens deliver effector proteins that act either inside or outside plant cells to manipulate host processes, often through their direct action on plant protein targets. To date, few effectors have been shown to directly manipulate transcriptional regulators of plant defence. Moreover, little is known generally about the modes of action of effectors from filamentous (fungal and oomycete) plant pathogens. We describe an effector, called Pi03192, from the late blight pathogen Phytophthora infestans, which interacts with a pair of host transcription factors at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) inside plant cells. We show that these transcription factors are released from the ER to enter the nucleus, following pathogen perception, and are important in restricting disease. Pi03192 prevents the plant transcription factors from accumulating in the host nucleus, revealing a novel means of enhancing host susceptibility

Cardiovascular magnetic resonance in systemic hypertension

Systemic hypertension is a highly prevalent potentially modifiable cardiovascular risk factor. Imaging plays an important role in the diagnosis of underlying causes for hypertension, in assessing cardiovascular complications of hypertension, and in understanding the pathophysiology of the disease process. Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) provides accurate and reproducible measures of ventricular volumes, mass, function and haemodynamics as well as uniquely allowing tissue characterization of diffuse and focal fibrosis. In addition, CMR is well suited for exclusion of common secondary causes for hypertension. We review the current and emerging clinical and research applications of CMR in hypertension

The impacts of climate change on the winter water cycle of the western Himalaya

Some 180 million people depend on the Indus River as a key water resource, fed largely by precipitation falling over the western Himalaya. However, the projected response of western Himalayan precipitation to climate change is currently not well constrained: CMIP5 GCMs project a reduced frequency and vorticity of synoptic-scale systems impacting the area, but such systems would exist in a considerably moister atmosphere. In this study, a convection-permitting (4 km horizontal resolution) setup of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to examine 40 cases of these synoptic-scale systems, known as western disturbances (WDs), as they interact with the western Himalaya. In addition to a present-day control run, three experiments are performed by perturbing the boundary and initial conditions to reflect pre-industrial, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 background climates respectively. It is found that in spite of the weakening intensity of WDs, net precipitation associated with them in future climate scenarios increases significantly; conversely there is no net change in precipitation between the pre-industrial and control experiments despite a significant conversion of snowfall in the pre-industrial experiment to rainfall in the control experiment, consistent with the changes seen in historical observations. This shift from snowfall to rainfall has profound consequences on water resource management in the Indus Valley, where irrigation is dependent on spring meltwater. Flux decomposition shows that the increase in future precipitation follows directly from the projected moistening of the tropical atmosphere (which increases the moisture flux incident on the western Himalaya by 28%) overpowering the weakened dynamics (which decreases it by 20%). Changes to extreme rainfall events are also examined: it is found that such events may increase significantly in frequency in both future scenarios examined. Two-hour maxima rainfall events that currently occur in 1-in-8 WDs are projected to increase tenfold in frequency in the RCP8.5 scenario; more prolonged (one-week maxima) events are projected to increase fiftyfold

Analysis of accuracy of high-aspect-ratio holes generated using micro-electric discharge machining drilling

Micro-electric discharge machining (micro-EDM) has evolved as one of the prominent processes to generate high-aspect-ratio and accurate micro-structures in many industrial applications. This paper presents an extensive experimental analysis of the micro-EDM process to explore the relationship between accuracy as a function of depth of micro-holes drilled using micro-EDM drilling. It is shown that a depth of 5.0 mm can be achieved by a 200 mu m diameter tool electrode while controlling the regular process parameters, but beyond this length, the process is governed by a number of derived phenomena such as secondary sparking, debris accumulation, etc. instead of the regular processing parameters. The optimum depth of the hole that could be achieved with a good accuracy i.e. a minimum oversize lies between 2.5 and 5.0 mm, the largest depth that could be achieved was 8.33 mm. The highest aspect ratio achieved in this experiment was 15.63