Apple orchard frost protection with wind machine operation

Research has shown that wind machines are more effective under conditions of strong thermal inversions. Quantitative relationships between the level of protection and inversion strength, however, are not well known, and there are few reports on the effect of fan operation on energy balance. Whether the wind machines should be started before surface cooling causes turbulence damping and atmospheric stratification or if it is possible to delay starting until just before the critical temperature occurs remains a matter of discussion. Therefore, experiments were conducted on 11 spring frost nights during the 1999 and 2000 to assess the effectiveness of a fan operation on frost protection of an apple orchard under different microclimatic conditions. The 11 frost events were characterized by light winds (0.58–1.92 m s−1) and clear skies for most of the night, resulting in an average accumulated radiative loss of 2.67 ± 0.38 MJ m−2. The air temperature increased immediately after the wind machines were started and the temperature rise depended on inversion strength. For each 1 °C increase in temperature inversion strength between 1.5 and 15 m height, wind machine operation caused a 0.3 °C increase of air temperature at a 1.5 m height within the main area affected by the fan operation. Using multiple regression, the area protected was significantly related to the temperature increase and the inversion strength. Wind machine operation reduced flower damage by 60% in 1999 and 37% in 2000. Distribution of flower damage varied spatially, and it was related to wind drift

Modelling apple flower and fruit damage to frost

Good quality apples are grown in relatively cold areas. However, frost frequently causes damage to flowers and small fruits. When the percentage of frost damage losses is higher than the thinning requirement of the cultivar, production is reduced. In addition to reducing yield, frost damage to the skin and malformation of the fruits often devalues the quality and reduces profits. Critical temperature tables in relation to phenological stage are available for apples and other deciduous crops (Ballard and Proebsting, 1978; Proebsting and Mills, 1978). Some of the data came from field observations using temperatures from standard shelters and some came from excised branch chamber studies. Since plants adapt to the short term temperature environment and there are biological and physical phenomena that influence the critical damage temperature, extrapolation of these critical temperatures to a given crop and environment is questionable. For a thorough discussion see Snyder et al. (2004). In this paper, a program that predicts the fraction of damage to flowers and fruits, and hence the reduction of high quality production, is presented and validated using minimum temperature data and the observed fraction of damaged apple flowers of three cultivars from 13 locations over two years of multiple frost events

A low-lying scalar meson nonet in a unitarized meson model

A unitarized nonrelativistic meson model which is successful for the description of the heavy and light vector and pseudoscalar mesons yields, in its extension to the scalar mesons but for the same model parameters, a complete nonet below 1 GeV. In the unitarization scheme, real and virtual meson-meson decay channels are coupled to the quark-antiquark confinement channels. The flavor-dependent harmonic-oscillator confining potential itself has bound states epsilon(1.3 GeV), S(1.5 GeV), delta(1.3 GeV), kappa(1.4 GeV), similar to the results of other bound-state qqbar models. However, the full coupled-channel equations show poles at epsilon(0.5 GeV), S(0.99 GeV), delta(0.97 GeV), kappa(0.73 GeV). Not only can these pole positions be calculated in our model, but also cross sections and phase shifts in the meson-scattering channels, which are in reasonable agreement with the available data for pion-pion, eta-pion and Kaon-pion in S-wave scattering.Comment: A slightly revised version of Zeitschrift fuer Physik C30, 615 (1986

Diskitis in children: study of eight cases

The authors report the study of eight children with diskitis diagnosed through clinical, neurogical and orthopedic evaluation. The evidence of self limiting inflammation or infection of the intervertebral disk space and of soft tissue were avaliable by image studies. Findings with routine roentgenograms, computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging are discussed.Os autores apresentam o estudo de oito crianças com diagnóstico de discite estabelecido através da avaliação clínica, neurológica e ortopédica. A comprovação de alterações inflamatórias em um espaço discal, vertebral e em tecidos moles foi possível em estudos por imagem, sendo discutidos aqueles obtidos por radiologia convencional, tomografia computadorizada e ressonância magnética.53553

Genome-wide identification, characterization and expression profiling of the ubiquitin-proteasome genes in biomphalaria glabrata

Biomphalaria glabrata is the major species used for the study of schistosomiasis-related parasite-host relationships, and understanding its gene regulation may aid in this endeavor. The ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) performs post-translational regulation in order to maintain cellular protein homeostasis and is related to several mechanisms, including immune responses. The aims of this work were to identify and characterize the putative genes and proteins involved in UPS using bioinformatic tools and also their expression on different tissues of B. glabrata. The putative genes and proteins of UPS in B. glabrata were predicted using BLASTp and as queries reference proteins from model organism. We characterized these putative proteins using PFAM and CDD software describing the conserved domains and active sites. The phylogenetic analysis was performed using ClustalX2 and MEGA5.2. Expression evaluation was performed from 12 snail tissues using RPKM. 119 sequences involved in the UPS in B. glabrata were identified, which 86 have been related to the ubiquitination pathway and 33 to proteasome. In addition, the conserved domains found were associated with the ubiquitin family, UQ_con, HECT, U-box and proteasome. The main active sites were lysine and cysteine residues. Lysines are responsible and the starting point for the formation of polyubiquitin chains, while the cysteine residues of the enzymes are responsible for binding to ubiquitin. The phylogenetic analysis showed an organized distribution between the organisms and the clades of the sequences, corresponding to the tree of life of the animals, for all groups of sequences analyzed. The ubiquitin sequence was the only one with a high expression profile found in all libraries, inferring its wide range of performance. Our results show the presence, conservation and expression profile of the UPS in this mollusk, providing a basis and new knowledge for other studies involving this system. Due to the importance of the UPS and B. glabrata, this work may influence the search for new methodologies for the control of schistosomiasis114CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO - CNPQ479890/2013-

Local non-Gaussianity from rapidly varying sound speeds

We study the effect of non-trivial sound speeds on local-type non-Gaussianity during multiple-field inflation. To this end, we consider a model of multiple-field DBI and use the deltaN formalism to track the super-horizon evolution of perturbations. By adopting a sum separable Hubble parameter we derive analytic expressions for the relevant quantities in the two-field case, valid beyond slow variation. We find that non-trivial sound speeds can, in principle, curve the trajectory in such a way that significant local-type non-Gaussianity is produced. Deviations from slow variation, such as rapidly varying sound speeds, enhance this effect. To illustrate our results we consider two-field inflation in the tip regions of two warped throats and find large local-type non-Gaussianity produced towards the end of the inflationary process.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures; typos corrected, references added, accepted for publication in JCA

A feasibility cachaca type recognition using computer vision and pattern recognition

Brazilian rum (also known as cachaça) is the third most commonly consumed distilled alcoholic drink in the world, with approximately 2.5 billion liters produced each year. It is a traditional drink with refined features and a delicate aroma that is produced mainly in Brazil but consumed in many countries. It can be aged in various types of wood for 1-3 years, which adds aroma and a distinctive flavor with different characteristics that affect the price. A research challenge is to develop a cheap automatic recognition system that inspects the finished product for the wood type and the aging time of its production. Some classical methods use chemical analysis, but this approach requires relatively expensive laboratory equipment. By contrast, the system proposed in this paper captures image signals from samples and uses an intelligent classification technique to recognize the wood type and the aging time. The classification system uses an ensemble of classifiers obtained from different wavelet decompositions. Each classifier is obtained with different wavelet transform settings. We compared the proposed approach with classical methods based on chemical features. We analyzed 105 samples that had been aged for 3 years and we showed that the proposed solution could automatically recognize wood types and the aging time with an accuracy up to 100.00% and 85.71% respectively, and our method is also cheaper.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Large slow-roll corrections to the bispectrum of noncanonical inflation

Nongaussian statistics are a powerful discriminant between inflationary models, particularly those with noncanonical kinetic terms. Focusing on theories where the Lagrangian is an arbitrary Lorentz-invariant function of a scalar field and its first derivatives, we review and extend the calculation of the observable three-point function. We compute the "next-order" slow-roll corrections to the bispectrum in closed form, and obtain quantitative estimates of their magnitude in DBI and power-law k-inflation. In the DBI case our results enable us to estimate corrections from the shape of the potential and the warp factor: these can be of order several tens of percent. We track the possible sources of large logarithms which can spoil ordinary perturbation theory, and use them to obtain a general formula for the scale dependence of the bispectrum. Our result satisfies the next-order version of Maldacena's consistency condition and an equivalent consistency condition for the scale dependence. We identify a new bispectrum shape available at next-order, which is similar to a shape encountered in Galileon models. If fNL is sufficiently large this shape may be independently detectable.Comment: v1: 37 pages, plus tables, figures and appendices. v2: supersedes version published in JCAP; some clarifications and more detailed comparison with earlier literature. All results unchanged. v3:improvements to some plots; text unchange

Non-Centrosymmetric Heavy-Fermion Superconductors

In this chapter we discuss the physical properties of a particular family of non-centrosymmetric superconductors belonging to the class heavy-fermion compounds. This group includes the ferromagnet UIr and the antiferromagnets CeRhSi3, CeIrSi3, CeCoGe3, CeIrGe3 and CePt3Si, of which all but CePt3Si become superconducting only under pressure. Each of these superconductors has intriguing and interesting properties. We first analyze CePt3Si, then review CeRhSi3, CeIrSi3, CeCoGe3 and CeIrGe3, which are very similar to each other in their magnetic and electrical properties, and finally discuss UIr. For each material we discuss the crystal structure, magnetic order, occurrence of superconductivity, phase diagram, characteristic parameters, superconducting properties and pairing states. We present an overview of the similarities and differences between all these six compounds at the end.Comment: To appear in "Non-Centrosymmetric Superconductors: Introduction and Overview", Lecture Notes in Physics 847, edited by E. Bauer and M. Sigrist (Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 2012) Chap. 2, pp. 35-7