Growth responses of Atriplex lentiformis and Medicago arborea in three soil types treated with saline water irrigation.

Large amounts of industrial wastewater, often of high in salt content, are produced by urban activities or industries which require reuse or disposal and thus can be potentially used in agriculture to ease the pressure on freshwater supply for irrigation. At the same time, plant performance in the field may be determined not only by salt concentration per se but also by confounding effects associated with soil physical and chemical properties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of saline water irrigation (0–16 dS/m range) on the performance of two plant species, Atriplex lentiformis (xero halophyte) and Medicago arborea (glycophyte) grown in three soil texture setups – (1) clay, (2) sandy loam and (3) sandy loam over clay (texture-contrast) – under glasshouse conditions. Both plant species yielded higher biomass in the clay texture compared to other soil texture setups under all irrigation treatments. There was no significant variation in chlorophyll fluorescence with salt treatments but stomatal conductance was significantly reduced (up to 70%) by salinity in M. arborea. Overall, leaf ion content (Na+ and Cl _) also increased with increasing salinity treatment in both plants, but significant effects were seen only in sandy loam soil for both species. Both osmotic effect and specific ionic toxicity impacted physiological performance in M. arborea while A. lentiformis plants were insensitive to both components of salt stress. Plant performance in the sandy soil was not as good as in clay, indicating that soil texture and structure may have a significant role in the salt stress process under saline irrigation

Cross-modal Contrastive Learning with Asymmetric Co-attention Network for Video Moment Retrieval

Video moment retrieval is a challenging task requiring fine-grained interactions between video and text modalities. Recent work in image-text pretraining has demonstrated that most existing pretrained models suffer from information asymmetry due to the difference in length between visual and textual sequences. We question whether the same problem also exists in the video-text domain with an auxiliary need to preserve both spatial and temporal information. Thus, we evaluate a recently proposed solution involving the addition of an asymmetric co-attention network for video grounding tasks. Additionally, we incorporate momentum contrastive loss for robust, discriminative representation learning in both modalities. We note that the integration of these supplementary modules yields better performance compared to state-of-the-art models on the TACoS dataset and comparable results on ActivityNet Captions, all while utilizing significantly fewer parameters with respect to baseline

Synthesis and characterization of Sn‑doped TiO2 flm for antibacterial applications

Simple sol–gel method has been exploited to deposit Sn-doped TiO2 thin flms on glass substrates. The resultant coatings were characterized by X-ray difraction (XRD), UV–visible techniques (UV–Vis), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and photoluminescence analysis (PL). The XRD pattern reveals an increase in crystallite size of the prepared samples with the increasing doping concentration. A decrease in doping concentrating resulted in the decrease in bandgap values. The diferent chemical bonds on these flms were identifed from their FTIR spectra. The photoluminescence analysis shows an increase in the emission peak intensity with increasing dopant concentration, and this can be attributed to the efect created due to surface states. The prepared samples were tested as antibacterial agent toward both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria like S.aureus (Staphylococcus aureus) and E.coli (Escherichia coli), respectively. The size of the inhibition zones indicates that the sample shows maximum inhibitory property toward E.coli when compared to S.aureus

Spatial distribution of histological subtypes of Meningioma: A 14-Year longitudinal study in a developing country

Background: Meningiomas are extra-axial tumors that arise from meningothelial cells, accounting for about one-third of primary central nervous system malignancies. While they are often classified by location and histology, the role of the molecular profile in their development and progression is significant. The topographic distribution of meningiomas has not been extensively studied, and it is unclear whether specific histological subtypes have predilection sites. Therefore, this study analyzes the preferred locations of meningiomas according to different biological characteristics and their association with different gradings. Methods: This is a retrospective chart review of patients in tertiary institutes over 14 years. The data were retrieved from medical and pathological record archives. An association between the biological nature of tumors and the location of meningiomas was analyzed. SPSS version 25 was used to analyze the data. Results: Out of 272 patients, the predominant location for meningioma distribution was convexity (33.5%), followed by parafalcine (12.5%). WHO Grade I meningiomas were the most common, accounting for 84.2% of all meningiomas. The transitional histological subtype is the common variant (34.6%). The distribution of the histological subtype of meningioma in relation to tentorium was statistically significant. However, that was not the case with the skull base. Conclusion: The spatial distribution of meningiomas within the brain is not uniform. The most frequent locations for meningiomas were found to be convexity and parafalcine. Transitional and fibroblastic meningiomas were the predominant subtypes

Halophyte agriculture: success stories

The world's food production will need to increase by up to 70% by 2050 to match the predicted population growth. Achieving this goal will be challenging due to the decreased availability of arable land, resulting from urbanization and land degradation. Soil salinity is a major factor contributing to the latter process. While some improvement in crop yields in saline soils may be achieved as a consequence of single gene transfers, the real progress may be achieved only via a painfully slow “pyramiding” of essential physiological traits. Given the time constraints, a safer solution to meet the 2050 challenge may be to find alternative crop and forage species for farming in salt-affected conditions and to restore salt-affected areas. This review focuses on the suitability of halophytes to become important components of 21st century farming systems. We provide a comprehensive summary of the current use of halophytes for human food consumption, for forage and animal feeds, as oilseed and energy crops, and for desalination and phytoremediation purposes. We argue that the use of halophytes may be a viable commercial alternative to ease pressure on the requirement of good quality land and water for conventional cropping systems and the utilization of land degraded by salinity