Impact of fungicide application on taro leaf blight disease in three regions of Cameroon

Open Access JournalThe study was conducted in the research field sites of the Institute of Agricultural Research (IRAD), Bambui, North West Region, (IRAD), Ekona South West Region and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Nkolbisson, Yaoundé, Center Region of Cameroon. Four cultivars of taro (Dark green petiole with small leaves (L1), Red petiole with small leaves (L2), Light green petiole with large leaves (L3) and Light green petiole with small leaves(L4)) were planted in four seasons, for two years, in the months of March and July 2015, March and July 2016 in all the research farms. Ninety corms of the each cultivar were treated before planting with fungiforce at 0.33% concentration while others were not treated. Fungiforce is a contact and systemic fungicide containing high levels of copper oxide (600 grams) and mild levels of metalaxyl (120 grams), various concentrations of 0.4%, 0.33%, 0.27%, at the onset of the first symptom of leaf blight on the leaves using knapsack sprayer of 15 litres at two weeks interval, while the control experiment consisted of unsprayed taro leaves. Data for the disease incidence of taro leaf blight was recorded from the onset of disease in fields and continued at two weeks interval for 6 weeks. The results of planting taro in four seasons in three experimental field sites revealed that there was a decrease in disease incidence in fields sprayed with fungiforce than in the control field. Plots sprayed with fungicide at different concentrations showed no variation on the 4 cultivars in the different field sites. The disease incidence ranged from 10% to 100% in the 4 seasons, at the three experimental field sites. The variation in disease incidence in the three planting sites is an indication of possible genotypes by environment (GXE) interaction that may have significant influence on the taro leaf blight resistance potential

Open data from the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO

The global network of gravitational-wave observatories now includes five detectors, namely LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO 600. These detectors collected data during their third observing run, O3, composed of three phases: O3a starting in 2019 April and lasting six months, O3b starting in 2019 November and lasting five months, and O3GK starting in 2020 April and lasting two weeks. In this paper we describe these data and various other science products that can be freely accessed through the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center at https://gwosc.org. The main data set, consisting of the gravitational-wave strain time series that contains the astrophysical signals, is released together with supporting data useful for their analysis and documentation, tutorials, as well as analysis software packages

Optimal Localization and Image Fusion for DSA/CT/MRI using Leksell Frame

Optimal Localization is needed to remove the hazard generated in patient treatment through distortion correction, automatic detection method for fiduciary markers and target tumor

Monte Carlo Analyses of X-Ray Absorption, Noise, and Detective Quantum Efficiency Considering Therapeutic X-Ray Spectrum in Portal Imaging Detector

The Bremsstrahlung spectrum from a 6-MV linear accelerator (LINAC) was obtained and used as an input X-ray source in the simulation to estimate several important physical quantities of the detector in a therapeutic X-ray portal imaging system, such as quantum and energy absorption efficiencies, Swank factor, and detective quantum efficiency (DQE). In addition, we have obtained a spatial distribution of energy deposit within the detector, resulting in a spatial-frequency-dependent DQE. From the simulation results, it is found that the use of metal plate largely enhances the energy absorption, leading to a large output signal. However, considering the noise properties, the presence of a metal plate degrades the DQE at nonzero spatial frequencies because the detector absorption noise is dominated by the quantum absorption. We have verified our simulation results by comparison with experimental measurements and results from other works

Poincaré Sphere and a Unified Picture of Wigner’s Little Groups

It is noted that the Poincaré sphere for polarization optics contains the symmetries of the Lorentz group. The sphere is thus capable of describing the internal space-time symmetries dictated by Wigner’s little groups. For massive particles, the little group is like the three-dimensional rotation group, while it is like the two-dimensional Euclidean group for massless particles. It is shown that the Poincaré sphere, in addition, has a symmetry parameter corresponding to reducing the particle mass from a positive value to zero. The Poincaré sphere thus the gives one unified picture of Wigner’s little groups for massive and massless particles