Wells and ill-fare: impacts of well failures on cultivators in hard rock areas of Madhya Pradesh

WellsDrillingCostsGroundwater depletionWater tableGroundwater irrigationOwnershipEconomic impactSocial impactCrop managementFood security

Gene expression strategies of barley yellow dwarf virus

Barley yellow dwarf virus (BYDV) has a positive sense, 5.7kb RNA genome encoding at least six open reading frames (ORFs). BYDV uses variety of unusual translational strategies to express its genes. These include frameshifting in the polymerase (60K) ORF, leaky scanning at the AUGs of the overlapping coat protein (CP) and 17K ORFs, and readthrough of the CP stop codon;Full-length cDNA clone of BYDV-PAV has been constructed to understand functions of different viral genes and the roles of specific sequences in translation, replication and encapsidation. Translation in cell-free extracts using in vitro synthesized full-length transcripts resulted in expected 99 kDa frameshift product. These transcripts were biologically active. The 39K ORF at the 5\u27 end of the genome overlaps by 13 nucleotides with a 60K ORF. The region of overlap contains a shifty heptanucleotide, followed by a highly structured region that may contain a pseudoknot. The 39K ORF stop codon immediately next to the shifty heptanucleotide sequence is necessary for in vivo frameshifting and viral replication. Deletion mutants indicate that the ORF1, ORF2 and ORF6 or 3[superscript]\u27 terminal 1157 nucleotides are necessary for BYDV-PAV replication in protoplasts;The CP, 17K and 50K ORFs located at the 3\u27 half of the genome are expressed from a tricistronic subgenomic RNA (sgRNA1), that is generated in infected cells. The 17K ORF is embedded in the sequence that encodes the CP ORF, in a different reading frame. The 17K ORF start codon is 43 bases downstream of the CP start codon. Ribosomes initiate translation at the start codons of both ORFs, giving rise to both proteins. Systematic mutagenesis was performed to show, in vitro and in vivo, that overlapping ORFs of the sgRNA1 are expressed by Kozak\u27s leaky scanning mechanisms. A new ribosome pausing model is proposed to explain the unexpected observation that mutations that reduce translation initiation at the downstream 17K AUG also reduce initiation at the upstream CP AUG. Implications of these results on expression of luteovirus coat protein in transgenic plants are discussed;The 50K ORF is translated by readthrough of the CP stop codon, giving rise to 72 kDa polypeptide in vitro. The GUS reporter gene was inserted downstream of the CP stop codon in the full-length BYDV-PAV infectious clone to elucidate the mechanism of readthrough for the luteovirus class. Results indicate that the signals required in luteovirus class are more complex and different from the well-studied tobacco mosaic virus like group of readthrough. Use of readthrough strategy to express biologically active recombinant proteins are discussed

Frequency Coded Chipless RFID Tag using Spurline Resonators

A novel compact chipless RFID tag using spurline resonators is discussed in this paper. The detection of the tag's ID is using the spectral signature of a spurline resonator circuit. The tag has a data capacity of 8-bits in the range 2.38 to 4.04 GHz. The tag consists of a spurline multiresonating circuit and two cross polarised antennas. The prototype of the tag is fabricated on a substrate C-MET/LK4.3 of dielectric constant 4.3 and loss tangent 0.0018. The measured results show that group delay response can also be used to decode the tag’s identity

Intensity interferometry of thermal photons from relativistic heavy ion collisions

Intensity interferometry of thermal photons, having transverse momenta $k_T \approx$ 0.1 -- 2.0 GeV, produced in relativistic collision of heavy nuclei is studied. It is seen to provide an accurate information about the temporal and spatial structure of the interacting system. The source dimensions and their $k_T$ dependence revealed by the photon interferometry, display a richness not seen in pion interferometry. We attribute this to difference in the source functions, the fact that photons come out from every stage of the collision and from every point in the system, and the fact that the rate of production of photons is different for the quark-gluon plasma, which dominates the early hot stage, and the hadronic matter which populates the last phase of the collision dynamics. The usefulness of this procedure is demonstrated by an application to collision of lead nuclei at the CERN SPS. Prediction for the transverse momentum dependence of the sizes for SPS, RHIC, and LHC energies are given.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures. Added discussions and references. To appear in Phys. Rev.

Soil Chemical Properties Under Conservation Agriculture and Cereal-Based Cropping System in Eastern Tarai of Nepal

Field experiments were conducted for four years (2014-2017) at five locations namely Salbani, Bhokraha, Simariya, Bhaluwa and Kaptanganj of Sunsari district to assess the changes in soil chemical properties under conservation agriculture (CA)-based practices in two cropping systems namely rice-kidney bean-maize at Salbani and rice-wheat at rest of the locations. In rice-wheat cropping system, there were four treatments: (1) conventional tillage (CT) for rice transplantation and subsequent wheat sowing, (2) conventional tillage rice transplantation followed by zero tillage (ZT) wheat, (3) unpuddled rice transplantation followed by zero tillage wheat, (4) zero tillage in both rice and wheat. Similarly, in rice-kidney bean-maize cropping system, there were four treatments; (1) conventional tillage for rice transplantation and sowing of both kidney bean and maize, (2) conventional tillage rice transplantation followed by zero tillage in both kidney bean and maize, (3) unpuddled rice transplantation followed by zero tillage in both kidney bean and maize, (4) zero tillage in all three crops. Soil samples were taken at initial and every year after rice harvest.The soil samples were analyzed for total nitrogen, available phosphorus, available potassium, pH and soil organic matter.Total nitrogen (N) showed a slightly decreasing trend in the first three years and showed a slight increase at the end of experiment under ZT in all locations. The total N under ZT changed from 0.12 to 0.13%, 0.05 to 0.06%, 0.10 to 0.12%, 0.11 to 0.08% and 0.09 to 0.13% in Salbani, Bhokraha, Simariya, Bhaluwa and Kaptanganj, respectively.  All locations showed the positive values of available potassium; Salbani  revealing considerable change of 64.3 to 78.5 mg/kg in CT while 68.4 to 73.3 mg/kg in ZT condition. The treatment where rice was transplanted in unpuddled condition and zero tilled to wheat, had a mean value of available phosphorus and potassium as 87.3 and 81.9 mg/kg respectively. Soil pH ranged from 4.8 to 7.1 in CT while it was 5.2 to 6.8 in ZT across the locations. The change in soil organic matter in CT of all locations except Salbani was narrower as compared to ZT

A New Perspective on Path Integral Quantum Mechanics in Curved Space-Time

A fundamentally different approach to path integral quantum mechanics in curved space-time is presented, as compared to the standard approaches currently available in the literature. Within the context of scalar particle propagation in a locally curved background, such as described by Fermi or Riemann normal co-ordinates, this approach requires use of a constructed operator to rotate the initial, intermediate, and final position ket vectors onto their respective local tangent spaces, defined at each local time step along some arbitrary classical reference worldline. Local time translation is described using a quantum mechanical representation of Lie transport, that while strictly non-unitary in operator form, nevertheless correctly recovers the free-particle Lagrangian in curved space-time, along with new contributions. This propagator yields the prediction that all probability violating terms due to curvature contribute to a quantum violation of the weak equivalence principle, while the remaining terms that conserve probability also correspondingly satisfy the weak equivalence principle, at least to leading-order in the particle's Compton wavelength. Furthermore, this propagator possesses an overall curvature-dependent and gauge-invariant phase factor that can be interpreted as the gravitational Aharonov-Bohm effect and Berry's phase.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure; major additions and revisions introduced; main conclusions are unchanged; new affiliation adde

Segmentation of Unstructured Newspaper Documents

Document layout analysis is one of the important steps in automated document recognition systems. In Document layout analysis, meaningful information is retrieved from document images by identifying, categorizing and labeling the semantics of text blocks from the document images. In this paper, we present simple top-down approach for document page segmentation. We have tested the proposed method on unstructured documents like newspaper which is having complex structures having no fixed structure. Newspaper also has multiple titles and multiple columns. In the proposed method, white gap area which separates titles, columns of text, line of text and words in lines have been identified to separate document into various segments. The proposed algorithm has been successfully implemented and applied over a large number of Indian newspapers and the results have been evaluated by number of blocks detected and taking their correct ordering information into account