2,188 research outputs found
VARIETY CHARACTERISTICS AND THE LAND ALLOCATION DECISIONS OF FARMERS IN A CENTER OF MAIZE DIVERSITY
There is emerging interest in the prospects for enhancing farmers' management of genetic resources as a complementary strategy to ex situ conservation. Using a framework that combines a characteristics model with the notion of impure public goods, we investigate farmers' incentives to grow the varieties identified as important genetic resources.Land Economics/Use, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,
Maize Revolutions in Sub-Saharan Africa
There have been numerous episodes of widespread adoption of improved seed and long-term achievements in the development of the maize seed industry in Sub-Saharan Africa. This summary takes a circumspect view of technical change in maize production. Adoption of improved seed has continued to rise gradually, now representing an estimated 44 percent of maize area in Eastern and Southern Africa (outside South Africa), and 60 percent of maize area in West and Central Africa. Use of fertilizer and restorative crop management practices remains relatively low and inefficient. An array of extension models has been tested and a combination of approaches will be needed to reach maize producers in heterogeneous agricultural environments. Yield growth overall has been 1 percent over the past half-century, although this figure masks the high variability in maize yields, as well as improvements in resistance to disease and abiotic pressures that would have caused yield decline in the absence of maize breeding progress. The authors argue that conducive policies are equally, if not more, important for maize productivity in the region than the development of new technology and techniques. Currently popular, voucher-based subsidies can “crowd out” the private sector and could be fiscally unsustainable.Sub-Saharan Africa, maize, seed, Agricultural and Food Policy, Production Economics,
Morse homology for the heat flow
We use the heat flow on the loop space of a closed Riemannian manifold to
construct an algebraic chain complex. The chain groups are generated by
perturbed closed geodesics. The boundary operator is defined in the spirit of
Floer theory by counting, modulo time shift, heat flow trajectories that
converge asymptotically to nondegenerate closed geodesics of Morse index
difference one.Comment: 89 pages, 3 figure
Gamma ray burst distances and the timescape cosmology
Gamma ray bursts can potentially be used as distance indicators, providing
the possibility of extending the Hubble diagram to redshifts ~7. Here we follow
the analysis of Schaefer (2007), with the aim of distinguishing the timescape
cosmological model from the \LambdaCDM model by means of the additional
leverage provided by GRBs in the range 2 < z < 7. We find that the timescape
model fits the GRB sample slightly better than the \LambdaCDM model, but that
the systematic uncertainties are still too little understood to distinguish the
models.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, revised version accepted for publication in MNRA
Farmer Management of Maize Diversity in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, Mexico: CIMMYT/INIFAP 1998 Baseline Socioeconomic Survey
Crop Production/Industries,
Renewed methane increase (2007-2014): Contribution of oil and natural gas emissions determined from methane and ethane column observations
Contribution of oil and natural gas production to renewed increase of atmospheric methane (2007-2014): top-down estimate from ethane and methane column observations
Abstract. Harmonized time series of column-averaged mole fractions of atmospheric methane and ethane over the period 1999–2014 are derived from solar Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) measurements at the Zugspitze summit (47° N, 11° E; 2964 m a.s.l.) and at Lauder (45° S, 170° E; 370 m a.s.l.). Long-term trend analysis reveals a consistent renewed methane increase since 2007 of 6.2 [5.6, 6.9] ppb yr−1 (parts-per-billion per year) at the Zugspitze and 6.0 [5.3, 6.7] ppb yr−1 at Lauder (95 % confidence intervals). Several recent studies provide pieces of evidence that the renewed methane increase is most likely driven by two main factors: (i) increased methane emissions from tropical wetlands, followed by (ii) increased thermogenic methane emissions due to growing oil and natural gas production. Here, we quantify the magnitude of the second class of sources, using long-term measurements of atmospheric ethane as a tracer for thermogenic methane emissions. In 2007, after years of weak decline, the Zugspitze ethane time series shows the sudden onset of a significant positive trend (2.3 [1.8, 2.8] × 10−2 ppb yr−1 for 2007–2014), while a negative trend persists at Lauder after 2007 (−0.4 [−0.6, −0.1] × 10−2 ppb yr−1). Zugspitze methane and ethane time series are significantly correlated for the period 2007–2014 and can be assigned to thermogenic methane emissions with an ethane-to-methane ratio (EMR) of 12–19 %. We present optimized emission scenarios for 2007–2014 derived from an atmospheric two-box model. From our trend observations we infer a total ethane emission increase over the period 2007–2014 from oil and natural gas sources of 1–11 Tg yr−1 along with an overall methane emission increase of 24–45 Tg yr−1. Based on these results, the oil and natural gas emission contribution (C) to the renewed methane increase is deduced using three different emission scenarios with dedicated EMR ranges. Reference scenario 1 assumes an oil and gas emission combination with EMR = 7.0–16.2 %, which results in a minimum contribution C > 39 % (given as lower bound of 95 % confidence interval). Beside this most plausible scenario 1, we consider two less realistic limiting cases of pure oil-related emissions (scenario 2 with EMR = 16.2–31.4 %) and pure natural gas sources (scenario 3 with EMR = 4.4–7.0 %), which result in C > 18 % and C > 73 %, respectively. Our results suggest that long-term observations of column-averaged ethane provide a valuable constraint on the source attribution of methane emission changes and provide basic knowledge for developing effective climate change mitigation strategies
Can the initial singularity be detected by cosmological tests?
In the present paper we raise the question whether initial cosmological
singularity can be proved from the cosmological tests. The classical general
relativity predict the existence of singularity in the past if only some energy
conditions are satisfied. On the other hand the latest quantum gravity
applications to cosmology suggest of possibility of avoiding the singularity
and replace it with the bounce. The distant type Ia supernovae data are used to
constraints on bouncing evolutional scenario where square of the Hubble
function is given by formulae
, where are density parameters and . We show that the on the
base of the SNIa data standard bouncing models can be ruled out on the
confidence level. If we add the cosmological constant to the standard
bouncing model then we obtain as the best-fit that the parameter
is equal zero which means that the SNIa data do not support the bouncing term
in the model. The bounce term is statistically insignificant the present epoch.
We also demonstrate that BBN offer the possibility of obtaining stringent
constraints of the extra term . The other observational test
methods like CMB and the age of oldest objects in the Universe are used. We
also use the Akaike informative criterion to select a model according to the
goodness of fit and we conclude that this term should be ruled out by Occam's
razor, which makes that the big bang is favored rather then bouncing scenario.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures improved versio
Age-Related Gene Expression Differences in Monocytes from Human Neonates, Young Adults, and Older Adults.
A variety of age-related differences in the innate and adaptive immune systems have been proposed to contribute to the increased susceptibility to infection of human neonates and older adults. The emergence of RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) provides an opportunity to obtain an unbiased, comprehensive, and quantitative view of gene expression differences in defined cell types from different age groups. An examination of ex vivo human monocyte responses to lipopolysaccharide stimulation or Listeria monocytogenes infection by RNA-seq revealed extensive similarities between neonates, young adults, and older adults, with an unexpectedly small number of genes exhibiting statistically significant age-dependent differences. By examining the differentially induced genes in the context of transcription factor binding motifs and RNA-seq data sets from mutant mouse strains, a previously described deficiency in interferon response factor-3 activity could be implicated in most of the differences between newborns and young adults. Contrary to these observations, older adults exhibited elevated expression of inflammatory genes at baseline, yet the responses following stimulation correlated more closely with those observed in younger adults. Notably, major differences in the expression of constitutively expressed genes were not observed, suggesting that the age-related differences are driven by environmental influences rather than cell-autonomous differences in monocyte development
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