Scaling Up Sweetpotato Through Agriculture and Nutrition in Malawi (SUSTAIN)

This flyer outlines the progress made towards achieving the objectives of the SUSTAIN project in Mozambique from June 2014 to July 2015. SUSTAIN is a 5-year partnership (2013-2018), coordinated by CIP and financed by the UK Department for International Development, to scale up the nutrition benefits of biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP). The goal is to reach 1.2 million households with under-5 year old children in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Rwanda

Seed systems and seed relief: an annotated bibliography

Annotated bibliography of resources related to seed systems and seed relief

Addressing seed security in disaster response - linking relief with development

This volume contains eight case studies managed by CIAT, CRS, and CARE Norway in a project entitled, Assisting disaster-affected and chronically stressed communities in East, Central and Southern Africa: Focus on small farmer systems. The case studies were undertaken to evaluate various forms of emergency seed aid and to couple these with analyses of the broader seed and crop systems. The objectives were to understand if and how vulnerable farmers are being helped by the kinds of assistance they receive —and how to move forward on improving practice

Plastic Deformation in Laser-Induced Shock Compression of Monocrystalline Copper

Copper monocrystals were subjected to shock compression at pressures of 10–60 GPa by a short (3 ns initial) duration laser pulse. Transmission electron microscopy revealed features consistent with previous observations of shock-compressed copper, albeit at pulse durations in the µs regime. The results suggest that the defect structure is generated at the shock front. A mechanism for dislocation generation is presented, providing a realistic prediction of dislocation density as a function of pressure. The threshold stress for deformation twinning in shock compression is calculated from the constitutive equations for slip, twinning, and the Swegle-Grady relationship

Review of Community Seed Production Practices in Africa Part 2: Lessons Learnt and Future Perspective

Within the context of the case studies presented, there are clear lessons learned and the second section of the review (Part 2) draws out those lessons in looking at seed and variety, description of community seed production, the support role of public, private, and civil society actors, the role of subsidies and technical support, farm level impact, and sustainability. A general theme running through all of these case studies is improving farmers’ access to quality seed of desired varieties. Topics include varietal identification, seed production, seed quality, seed policy, and seed marketing. The main conclusions are: Community seed production is necessary to improve formal and farmer seed system links; community seed production objectives should be explicit and include coherent activities for closing out, transitioning into commercial entities, or linking with publicly funded programs; community seed production is more effective when there is strong collaboration between the public sector, the commercial sector, and civil society/NGOs; The lack of standard ex-ante seed system diagnostics, including economic analysis to justify the scale and scope of interventions, significantly limits the capacity of donors and seed practitioners to make rational investments and intervention design decisions

Search for Nanosecond Near-infrared Transients around 1280 Celestial Objects

Stars and planetary system

Striatal dopamine D2 receptor binding of risperidone in schizophrenic patients as assessed by 123I-iodobenzamide SPECT: a comparative study with olanzapine

The aim of this investigation was to compare the degree of striatal dopamine-(D2) receptor blockade by two atypical antipsychotic drugs, risperidone and olanzapine. The percentage of D2 receptor occupancy during treatment was calculated by comparing the results of 123I-iodobenzamide SPECT with those from healthy control subjects. Twenty inpatients suffering from schizophrenia or schizoaffective psychosis according to DSM IV/ICD-10 criteria were treated with clinically recommended doses of risperidone and compared with 13 inpatients treated with up to 20 mg olanzapine. Neuroleptic dose and D2 receptor blockade correlated strongly for both risperidone (Pearson r = –0.86, p = 0.0001) and olanzapine (Pearson r = –0.77, p = 0.002). There was no significant difference between the D2 receptor occupancy of the two substances when given in the clinically recommended dose range (unpaired t-test, t= –0.112, p=0.911)

Review of Community Seed Production Practices in Africa Part 1: Implementation Strategies and Models

This review is limited in scale and scope and covers five case studies in Africa. Two of the studies are classic emergency interventions: one post-conflict and one post drought. Three of the case studies are developmental in nature; one focused on different approaches to increase farmer access to recently released drought-tolerant cereal varieties, another looking at smallholder participation in legume seed supply, and one looking at three women’s groups as seed enterprises. This review is based on an analysis of published and unpublished policy reviews, briefing and discussion papers, journal articles, meta-reviews, training material, strategy documents, evaluations, and case studies on seed production and seed delivery with a focus on the diverse but not well understood area between farmer seed management and commercial seed. This review has also been informed by discussion with seed system practitioners, particularly those involved in the case studies examined. This space between farmer seed management and commercial seed has been referred to as community seed production, smallholder seed enterprises, informal seed supply, and local seed system development programs. The objective of this review is to examine the status and trends in community seed production in order to identify key criteria for success and possible areas of improvement, including the role of community seed production in linking formal (public and private) seed sectors with the farmer seed system. The first section of the review (Part 1) details the five case studies in terms of major activities and implementation strategies

An exact solution of the moving boundary problem for the relativistic plasma expansion in a dipole magnetic field

An exact analytic solution is obtained for a uniformly expanding, neutral, highly conducting plasma sphere in an ambient dipole magnetic field with an arbitrary orientation of the dipole moment in the space. Based on this solution the electrodynamical aspects related to the emission and transformation of energy have been considered. In order to highlight the effect of the orientation of the dipole moment in the space we compare our results obtained for parallel orientation with those for transversal orientation. The results obtained can be used to treat qualitatively experimental and simulation data, and several phenomena of astrophysical and laboratory significance.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:physics/060323