Transformational agronomy by growing summer crops in winter: Crop establishment in cold soils

Winter sown sorghum reduces the impact of heat and water stresses around flowering and increases cropping intensity, though, achieving uniform plant establishment remains challenging. Sowing sorghum in winter will require crops to uniformly germinate and emerge in soils which are cooler than the recommended >16ºC minimum daily temperature, during the driest time of the year. Prolonged emergence periods and reduced total emergence can decrease canopy uniformity with negative impacts on yield, crop management and cropping system intensity. Acceptable establishment percentages (>80%) were achieved for some site by seedlot combinations, though large differences in establishment rate between seedlots were observed. The differences in seedlot emerge rate were related to final establishment. This calls for seed vigour testing, novel seed production technologies, management of seedbed hydrothermal conditions and breeding programs for cold tolerance

Genital Tract Interleukin-8 but not Interleukin-1β or Interleukin-6 Concentration is Associated with Bacterial Vaginosis and Its Clearance in HIV-Infected and HIV-Uninfected Women

Genital tract infections and cytokine perturbations are associated with increased HIV acquisition and transmission. We measured the relationship between bacterial vaginosis (BV) and concentrations of Interleukin-8 (IL-8), Interleukin-1β (IL-1β), and Interleukin-6 (IL-6) in cervicovaginal lavage (CVL) specimens collected longitudinally from 16 HIV-infected and 8 HIV-uninfected high-risk women. CVL samples were analyzed when women presented with BV, and at their next visit, after successful treatment, when BV was cleared. A subset of participants had cytokine levels evaluated at three consecutive clinic visits: before developing BV, at the time of BV diagnosis, and after clearing BV. Significantly higher IL-8, but not IL-1β or IL-6 levels were present when women had active BV compared to when BV was absent. Trends in cytokine levels were similar for HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected women. BV in these women was associated with significantly higher concentrations of genital tract IL-8 which decreased 2.4 fold when BV was cleared

UNIT project: Universe NN-body simulations for the Investigation of Theoretical models from galaxy surveys

We present the UNIT $N$-body cosmological simulations project, designed to provide precise predictions for nonlinear statistics of the galaxy distribution. We focus on characterizing statistics relevant to emission line and luminous red galaxies in the current and upcoming generation of galaxy surveys. We use a suite of precise particle mesh simulations (FastPM) as well as with full $N$-body calculations with a mass resolution of $\sim 1.2\times10^9\,h^{-1}$M$_{\odot}$ to investigate the recently suggested technique of Angulo & Pontzen 2016 to suppress the variance of cosmological simulations We study redshift space distortions, cosmic voids, higher order statistics from $z=2$ down to $z=0$. We find that both two- and three-point statistics are unbiased. Over the scales of interest for baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions, we find that the variance is greatly reduced in the two-point statistics and in the cross correlation between halos and cosmic voids, but is not reduced significantly for the three-point statistics. We demonstrate that the accuracy of the two-point correlation function for a galaxy survey with effective volume of 20 ($h^{-1}$Gpc)$^3$ is improved by about a factor of 40, indicating that two pairs of simulations with a volume of 1 ($h^{-1}$Gpc)$^3$ lead to the equivalent variance of $\sim$150 such simulations. The $N$-body simulations presented here thus provide an effective survey volume of about seven times the effective survey volume of DESI or Euclid. The data from this project, including dark matter fields, halo catalogues, and their clustering statistics, are publicly available at http://www.unitsims.org.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. This version matches the one accepted by MNRAS. The data from this project are publicly available at: http://www.unitsims.or