A laboratory study of the effects of water dissolved gypsum application on hydraulic conductivity of saline-sodic soil under intermittent ponding conditions

peer-reviewedReclamation of saline-sodic soils has great importance in agricultural management. The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the methods used to apply water and gypsum on hydraulic conductivity of a saline-sodic soil with an electrical conductivity of 28 dS/m and exchangeable sodium percentage of 46%. The experiment was conducted under laboratory conditions using disturbed and non-cropped soil columns. A total of 45 cm of water was applied to each column with 3, 6, or 9 separate water applications. Finely ground gypsum (< 0.5 mm maximum particle diameter) was either incorporated into the surface 2 to 3 cm of soil or was dissolved into the leaching water at a rate corresponding to 3.82 t/ha. Six or nine separate water applications of gypsum dissolved into leaching water significantly increased hydraulic conductivity (P < 0.01). Soil hydraulic conductivity increased (P < 0.01) with depth at separate applications of gypsum

Efecto de ciclos congelación-deshielo en la estabilidad de los agregados del suelo en diversas condiciones de salinidad y sodicidad

Freezing and thawing affect soil aggregate stability. Understanding the effects of freezing and thawing processes on aggregate stability is necessary for the development of strategies for managing saline-sodic soils. This study was performed to determine the effects of freezing and thawing cycles (two, four, and six) on wet aggregate stability in six soils of different salinity and sodicity (54 dS/m, 11.7%; 49 dS/m, 11.8%; 53 dS/m, 31.7%; 85 dS/m, 39.7%; 59 dS/m, 13.9%; 68 dS/m, 36.8%, respectively) and three different aggregate sizes (< 1, 1-2, and 2-4 mm). The experiments were conducted under laboratory conditions using disturbed and non-cropped soil samples. In soils with a high percentage of exchangeable sodium and high electrical conductivity, the effect of freeze-thaw cycles on the wet aggregate stability was not significant. However, when the electrical conductivity was high and the percentage exchangeable sodium relatively low, wet aggregate stability was significantly reduced by the freeze-thaw cycles. Moreover, for aggregate sizes of 1-2 and 2-4 mm, a significant reduction (PPara desarrollar estrategias de manejo de suelos salino-sódicos, es necesario entender los efectos de los procesos de congelación y deshielo sobre la estabilidad de los agregados. Se realizó este estudio para determinar los efectos de ciclos hielo-deshielo (dos, cuatro o seis ciclos) en la estabilidad en agua de agregados en seis suelos con diversos niveles de salinidad y sodicidad (54 dS/m, 11,7%; 49 dS/m, 11,8%; 53 dS/m, 31,7%; 85 dS/m, 39,7%; 59 dS/m, 13,9%; 68 dS/m, 36,8%, respectivamente) y en tres tamaños de agregados (< 1, 1-2, y 2-4 mm). Los experimentos se llevaron a cabo bajo condiciones de laboratorio, usando muestras de suelo disturbadas y no-cosechadas. En suelos con unos altos porcentajes tanto de sodio de cambio como de conductividad eléctrica, el efecto de ciclos hielo-deshielo en la estabilidad en agua de agregados no fue significativo; sin embargo, con una conductividad eléctrica alta y un porcentaje de sodio de cambio relativamente bajo, la estabilidad disminuyó a un nivel significativo. Por otra parte, para los tamaños agregados de 1-2 y 2-4 mm, se observó una disminución significativa (

Expanded Bodipy Dyes: Anion Sensing Using a Bodipy Analog with an Additional Difluoroboron Bridge

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Oxalyl-tethered pyrroles can be doubly bridged with two difluoroboron chelating units to yield bright orange dyes. Interestingly, in polar organic solvents, the addition of fluoride and cyanide result in reversible detachment of the otherwise stable difluoroboron bridges, resulting in sharp changes in color. Thus, this novel compound behaves as a highly selective chromogenic sensor for fluoride and cyanide ions

WEB BASED 3D VISUALISATION OF TIME-VARYING AIR QUALITY INFORMATION

Many countries where the industrial development and production rates are high face many side effects of low air quality and air pollution. There is an evident correlation between the topographic and climatic properties of a location and the air pollution and air quality on that location. As the variation of air quality is dependent on location, air quality information should be acquired, utilised, stored and presented in form of Geo-Information. On the other hand, as this information is related with the health concerns of public, the information should be available publicly, and needs to be presented through an easily accessible medium and through a commonly used interface. Efficient storage of time-varying air quality information when combined with an efficient mechanism of 3D web-based visualisation would help very much in dissemination of air quality information to public. This research is focused on web-based 3D visualisation of time-varying air quality data. A web based interactive system is developed to visualise pollutant levels that were acquired as hourly intervals from more than 100 stations in Turkey between years 2008 and 2017. The research also concentrated on visualisation of geospatial high volume data. In the system, visualisation can be achieved on-demand by querying an air pollutant information database of 10.330.629 records and a city object database with more than 700.000 records. The paper elaborates on the details of this research. Following a background on air quality, air quality models, and Geo-Information visualisation, the system architecture and functionality is presented. The paper concludes with results of usability tests of the system

Intersected EMG heatmaps and deep learning based gesture recognition

Hand gesture recognition in myoelectric based prosthetic devices is a key challenge to offering effective solutions to hand/lower arm amputees. A novel hand gesture recognition methodology that employs the difference of EMG energy heatmaps as the input of a specific designed deep learning neural network is presented. Experimental results using data from real amputees indicate that the proposed design achieves 94.31% as average accuracy with best accuracy rate of 98.96%. A comparison of experimental results between the proposed novel hand gesture recognition methodology and other similar approaches indicates the superior effectiveness of the new design

Recovering 6D Object Pose: A Review and Multi-modal Analysis

A large number of studies analyse object detection and pose estimation at visual level in 2D, discussing the effects of challenges such as occlusion, clutter, texture, etc., on the performances of the methods, which work in the context of RGB modality. Interpreting the depth data, the study in this paper presents thorough multi-modal analyses. It discusses the above-mentioned challenges for full 6D object pose estimation in RGB-D images comparing the performances of several 6D detectors in order to answer the following questions: What is the current position of the computer vision community for maintaining "automation" in robotic manipulation? What next steps should the community take for improving "autonomy" in robotics while handling objects? Our findings include: (i) reasonably accurate results are obtained on textured-objects at varying viewpoints with cluttered backgrounds. (ii) Heavy existence of occlusion and clutter severely affects the detectors, and similar-looking distractors is the biggest challenge in recovering instances' 6D. (iii) Template-based methods and random forest-based learning algorithms underlie object detection and 6D pose estimation. Recent paradigm is to learn deep discriminative feature representations and to adopt CNNs taking RGB images as input. (iv) Depending on the availability of large-scale 6D annotated depth datasets, feature representations can be learnt on these datasets, and then the learnt representations can be customized for the 6D problem

Challenges to the development of antigen-specific breast cancer vaccines

Continued progress in the development of antigen-specific breast cancer vaccines depends on the identification of appropriate target antigens, the establishment of effective immunization strategies, and the ability to circumvent immune escape mechanisms. Methods such as T cell epitope cloning and serological expression cloning (SEREX) have led to the identification of a number target antigens expressed in breast cancer. Improved immunization strategies, such as using dendritic cells to present tumor-associated antigens to T lymphocytes, have been shown to induce antigen-specific T cell responses in vivo and, in some cases, objective clinical responses. An outcome of successful tumor immunity is the evolution of antigen-loss tumor variants. The development of a polyvalent breast cancer vaccine, directed against a panel of tumor-associated antigens, may counteract this form of immune escape