Cadmium sulfide decorated with carbon nanoparticles from peanut shells: An efficient photocatalyst

1084-1091Carbon decorated cadmium sulfide nanoparticles have been synthesized by chemical precipitation method in aqueous medium using dichloroacetic acid as a complexing agent to study their optical and photocatalytic properties. Carbon nanoparticles have been prepared from waste peanut shells by simple pyrolysis method. The as-prepared materials have been characterized by XRD analysis, UV-visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, spectrofluorometer, FTIR and BET analysis. SEM and TEM images indicate nano crystallites with spherical agglomeration of average 40 nm size. Band gap energy for pure CdS is observed in the order of 2.4 eV. As prepared carbon decorated CdS nanoparticles with increased surface area efficiently catalyzed the photodegradation of Rhodamine B dye solution under sunlight irradiation than pure CdS

Technical Note: In silico and experimental evaluation of two leaf-fitting algorithms for MLC tracking based on exposure error and plan complexity.

PURPOSE: Multileaf collimator (MLC) tracking is being clinically pioneered to continuously compensate for thoracic and pelvic motion during radiotherapy. The purpose of this work was to characterize the performance of two MLC leaf-fitting algorithms, direct optimization and piecewise optimization, for real-time motion compensation with different plan complexity and tumor trajectories. METHODS: To test the algorithms, both in silico and phantom experiments were performed. The phantom experiments were performed on a Trilogy Varian linac and a HexaMotion programmable motion platform. High and low modulation VMAT plans for lung and prostate cancer cases were used along with eight patient-measured organ-specific trajectories. For both MLC leaf-fitting algorithms, the plans were run with their corresponding patient trajectories. To compare algorithms, the average exposure errors, i.e., the difference in shape between ideal and fitted MLC leaves by the algorithm, plan complexity and system latency of each experiment were calculated. RESULTS: Comparison of exposure errors for the in silico and phantom experiments showed minor differences between the two algorithms. The average exposure errors for in silico experiments with low/high plan complexity were 0.66/0.88 cm2 for direct optimization and 0.66/0.88 cm2 for piecewise optimization, respectively. The average exposure errors for the phantom experiments with low/high plan complexity were 0.73/1.02 cm2 for direct and 0.73/1.02 cm2 for piecewise optimization, respectively. The measured latency for the direct optimization was 226 ± 10 ms and for the piecewise algorithm was 228 ± 10 ms. In silico and phantom exposure errors quantified for each treatment plan demonstrated that the exposure errors from the high plan complexity (0.96 cm2 mean, 2.88 cm2 95% percentile) were all significantly different from the low plan complexity (0.70 cm2 mean, 2.18 cm2 95% percentile) (P < 0.001, two-tailed, Mann-Whitney statistical test). CONCLUSIONS: The comparison between the two leaf-fitting algorithms demonstrated no significant differences in exposure errors, neither in silico nor with phantom experiments. This study revealed that plan complexity impacts the overall exposure errors significantly more than the difference between the algorithms

Fishery and biology of Penaeid prawns at Harnaii, Maharashtra

Penaeid prawn fishery at Harnaii in Ratnagiri District of Maharashtra was investigated during fishing seasons of 2002-03 and 2003-04 from mechanized (MLD) and hand operated trawlers (HT). During the two years, MLD contributed 86% and HT 14% to the average annual penaeid prawn catch of 2,242 t. The catch showed two peaks, a major during October-December and a minor during April-May in both the gears but abundance of the individual species differed. P. stylifera, Metapenaeopsis affinis, Solenocera crassicornis, Metapenaeopsis brevicornis, P. merguiensis and Metapenaeopsis dobsoni mainly constituted the fishery and their species composition, seasonal abundance, annual size distribution and monthly mean size were investigated. Biological studies on food, size at maturity, spawning period, sex-ratio and juvenile abundance were carried out to explain temporal abundance of the species in the fishery. Among the species P. stylifera, M. affinis and S. crassicornis exhibited distinct seasonality with two spawning peaks, one in pre-monsoon and the other in post monsoon period to produce two discrete broods while P. merguiensis despite two spawning peaks exhibited a single dominant brood. M. brevicornis showed monsoon and post-monsoon spawning while M. dobsoni showed only post-monsoon spawning. Migrations between nearshore and offshore waters resulted in mixing of the broods and they remained inseparable in the catch

Record sized Kiddi prawn caught off Mumbai

Parapenaeopsis stylifera is a penaeid prawn commercially called as Kiddi prawn and locally known as ‘Jinga’. A large sized P. stylifera was collected from New Ferry Wharf on 29.04.2014 during regular field sampling. The mechanized shrimp trawler which had landed the specimen was fishing in 40 - 60 m depths off Gujarat coast. It landed about 50 - 60 kg P. stylifera along with the catches of other penaeid prawns such as Metapenaeus affinis, M. monoceros and Solenocera crassicornis. The particular specimen was a female measuring 158 mm in total length and weighing 27.6 grams

Studies on germination and seedling vigour characters for genotype selection in nutmeg (Myristica fragrans Houtt.)

An experiment was conducted at Ratnagiri (Maharashtra) to study the regeneration ability and variability of 34 nutmeg (Myristica fragrans) seedling genotypes. The variations recorded for germination percentage, period required for germination and seedling growth parameters were significant. Higher magnitudes of genotypic coefficient of variation, phenotypic coefficient of variation, heritability and genetic advance on per cent mean basis were recorded for fresh seed weight, germination percentage, days for germination and root length. The selection of nutmeg genotypes at seedling stage on the basis of vigour of the characters such as number, length and breadth of leaves, collar thickness and petiole length would help to identify genotypes for propagation. Among the genotypes studied, N22, N24, N26, N29, N34, N37, N38, N42, N43, N51, N63 and N72 were promising. &nbsp

MesonNet 2013 International Workshop. Mini-proceedings

The mini-proceedings of the MesonNet 2013 International Workshop held in Prague from June 17th to 19th, 2013, are presented. MesonNet is a research network within EU HadronPhysics3 project (1/2012 -- 12/2014). The web page of the conference, which contains all talks, can be found at http://ipnp.mff.cuni.cz/mesonnet13Comment: 106 pages, 53 contributions. Mini-proceedings of the MesonNet 2013 International Workshop. Editors: K. Kampf, A. Kupsc, and P. Masjua

OPERATIONAL NEAR REAL TIME RICE AREA MAPPING USING MULTI-TEMPORAL SENTINEL-1 SAR OBSERVATIONS

Spatio-temporal crop phenological information helps in understanding trends in food supply, planning of seed/fertilizer inputs, etc. in a region. Rice is one of the major food sources for many regions of the world especially in monsoon Asia and accounts for more than 11&thinsp;% of the global cropland. Accurate, on-time and early information on spatial distribution of rice would be useful for stakeholders (cultivators, fertilizer/pesticide manufacturers and agriculture extension agencies) to effectively plan supply of inputs, market activities. Also, government agencies can plan and formulate policies regarding food security. Conventional methods involves manual surveying for developing spatio-temporal crop datasets while remote sensing satellite observations provide cost effective alternatives with better spatial extent and temporal frequency. Remote sensing is one of the effective technologies to map the areal extent of the crops using optical as well as microwave/Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) sensors. Cloud cover is the major problem faced in using the optical datasets during monsoon (June to Sept. locally called Kharif season). Hence, Sentinel-1 C-band (center frequency: 5.405&thinsp;GHz) RADAR sensor launched by European Space Agency (ESA) which has an Interferometric Wide-swath mode (IW) with dual polarization (VV and VH) has been used for rice area mapping. Limited studies have attempted to establish operational early season rice area mapping to facilitate local governance, agri-input management and crop growers. The key contribution of this work is towards operational near real time and early season rice area mapping using multi-temporal SAR data on GEE platform. The study has been carried out in four districts viz., Guntur, Krishna, East Godavari andWest Godavari from Andhra Pradesh (AP), India during the period of Kharif 2017. The study region is also called as coastal AP where rice transplanting during the Kharif season is carried out during mid Jun. till Aug. and harvesting during Oct. to mid Dec. months. The training data for various classes viz, Rice, NonRice-Agriculture, Waterbodies, Settlements, Forest and Aquaculture have been obtained from GEE, Global Land Cover (GLC) layers developed by ESA and field observations. We have evaluated the performance of Random Forest (RF) classifier by varying the number of trees and incrementally adding the SAR images for model training. Initially the model has been trained considering two images available from mid June 2017. Further, various models have been trained by adding one consecutive image till end of August 2017 and classification performance has been evaluated on validation dataset. The classified output has been further masked with agriculture non-agriculture layer derived from global land-cover layer obtained from ESA. Analysis shows that incremental addition of temporal observations improves the performance of the classifier. The overall classification accuracy ranges between 78.11 to 87.00&thinsp;%. We have found that RF classifier with 30 trees trained on six images available from mid June till end August performed better with classification accuracy of 87.00&thinsp;%. However, accuracy assessment performed using independent stratified random sampling approach showed the classification accuracy of 84.45&thinsp;%. An attempt is being made to follow the proposed approach for current (i.e. 2018) season and provide incremental rice area estimates in near real-time

Studies on genotypic response of nutmeg to softwood grafting

An experiment was conducted to study the success rate of softwood grafting in 22 female, 12 hermaphrodite and S male nutmeg genotypes. The variation among genotypes for sprouting, survival and growth parameters was statistically significant. The magnitudes of GeV, pev, habitability and genetic advance were low for sprouting and survival of nutmeg grafts. The graft survival has strong negative correlation with leaf width. Maximum graft sprouting was associated with the faster production of new leaves with less breadth and longer petiole. The genotypes, N66, N24, N61, Nl, NS, N29, N38 and N49 gave the best response to grafting. &nbsp