Storing fungicides safely

Growers who stocked up on fungicides for the 2005 growing season due to the threat of Asian soybean rust will likely be facing fungicide storage issues this winter, especially since it is likely that most products cannot be returned. The good news is that most fungicides have a shelf life of at least two years--and probably longer--assuming they are stored correctly. Optimum storage conditions are cool, dry conditions, away from sunlight. Storage temperatures should not go below freezing; however, if a fungicide does freeze, then slowly thaw it out at room temperature

On Document Relevance and Lexical Cohesion between Query Terms

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexical-semantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. In this paper we empirically investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms' occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Lexical cohesion between distinct query terms in a document is estimated on the basis of the lexical-semantic relations (repetition, synonymy, hyponymy and sibling) that exist between there collocates - words that co-occur with them in the same windows of text. Experiments suggest significant differences between the lexical cohesion in relevant and non-relevant document sets exist. A document ranking method based on lexical cohesion shows some performance improvements. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Mapping the cellular electrophysiology of rat sympathetic preganglionic neurones to their roles in cardiorespiratory reflex integration:A whole cell recording study in situ

Sympathetic preganglionic neurones (SPNs) convey sympathetic activity flowing from the CNS to the periphery to reach the target organs. Although previous in vivo and in vitro cell recording studies have explored their electrophysiological characteristics, it has not been possible to relate these characteristics to their roles in cardiorespiratory reflex integration. We used the working heart–brainstem preparation to make whole cell patch clamp recordings from T3–4 SPNs (n = 98). These SPNs were classified by their distinct responses to activation of the peripheral chemoreflex, diving response and arterial baroreflex, allowing the discrimination of muscle vasoconstrictor-like (MVC(like), 39%) from cutaneous vasoconstrictor-like (CVC(like), 28%) SPNs. The MVC(like) SPNs have higher baseline firing frequencies (2.52 ± 0.33 Hz vs. CVC(like) 1.34 ± 0.17 Hz, P = 0.007). The CVC(like) have longer after-hyperpolarisations (314 ± 36 ms vs. MVC(like) 191 ± 13 ms, P < 0.001) and lower input resistance (346 ± 49  MΩ vs. MVC(like) 496 ± 41 MΩ, P < 0.05). MVC(like) firing was respiratory-modulated with peak discharge in the late inspiratory/early expiratory phase and this activity was generated by both a tonic and respiratory-modulated barrage of synaptic events that were blocked by intrathecal kynurenate. In contrast, the activity of CVC(like) SPNs was underpinned by rhythmical membrane potential oscillations suggestive of gap junctional coupling. Thus, we have related the intrinsic electrophysiological properties of two classes of SPNs in situ to their roles in cardiorespiratory reflex integration and have shown that they deploy different cellular mechanisms that are likely to influence how they integrate and shape the distinctive sympathetic outputs

Separability and entanglement of four-mode Gaussian states

The known Peres-Horodecki criterion and scaling criterion of separability are considered on examples of three-mode and four-mode Gaussian states of electromagnetic field. It is shown that the principal minors of the photon quadrature dispersion matrix are sensitive to the change of scaling parameters. An empirical observation has shown that the bigger the modulus of negative principal minors, the more entangled the state.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Considerations for Soybean Insecticides and Fungicides

Several Iowa agribusinesses are offering soybean growers pest management plans that include applications of fungicide and insecticide. Although combining an insecticide and fungicide may be convenient, the results from our 2008 Pesticide Stewardship trials suggest this is a convenience that may not pay off

Virus-Phomopsis interactions on soybean and the effects of insect and disease management practices

Soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.) is affected by several seed-borne pathogens that reduce seed quality, affecting both marketability (Gergerich, 1999; Koning et al. 2001) and germination (Sinclair, 1999). One of the most common seedborne diseases is Phomopsis seed decay, primarily caused by Phomopsis longicolla T. W. Hobbs, a member of the Diaporthe-Phomopsis complex (Sinclair, 1999). Fungi of this complex are widespread throughout most of the soybean producing areas around the world, and the biggest impacts on seed and grain quality are physical damage, reduction in germination, alteration in protein content and reduction of oil quality (Meriles et al., 2004; Sinclair, 1999)