Organic production in Norway

Present status of the Norwegian organic sector: -Official target of 10% organic production in 2010. -Organic production receives public subsidies -Marketing and production of plant products successful and growing -Marketing of livestock products successful and growing -Large portion of ecological products are sold unmarked together with other product

Ozonvann mot gråskimmel i jordbær

I dette prosjektet er det blitt testet om bruk av ozonholdig vann kan kontrollere gråskimmel i et jordbærfelt. Ozonholdig vann ble sprøytet direkte på plantene i et felt og resultatene sammenlignet med effekten av bruk av fungicider og vann uten tilsetning. Resultatene viste at ozoholdig vann har en effekt på gråskimmelsoppen men mer forskning må til for å optimaleisere metoden for å utvikle en ny plantevernstrategi

Kartlegging av kunnskap om muligheter for bruk av ozonholdig vann som plantevernmiddel mot gråskimmel i jordbær

Innen jordbærproduksjon kan det oppstå store avlingstap forårsaket av soppsykdommen gråskimmel. Både konvensjonelle og økologiske produsenter etterspør nye tiltak. Et mulig virkemiddel er bruk av ozonert vann. Ozon er et sterkt oksidasjonsmiddel som brukes til å desinfisere teknisk utstyr for blant annet havbruksnæringa, meieriindustrien og helsevesenet. Det er også en internasjonal interesse for å bruke ozonert vann til å inaktivere patogener fra soppsykdommer innen matproduksjon. Egen forskning her i Norge viser at det kan være mulig å kontrollere gråskimmel i jordbærfelt på friland ved bruk av ozonert vann. Utprøvninger i Italia viser at ozonert vann også kan brukes for å kontrollere soppsykdommer på jordbær i veksthus. Imidlertid må det til mer forskning for å utvikle appliseringsmetoden og for å sikre at andre organismer i nærmiljøet ikke tar skade. Lovgivningen som regulerer bruk av ozonert vann til plantevern i matproduksjon er også et hinder før denne metoden kan kommersialiseres

Ozon (O3)-behandling av potet mot tørråte

This hand-out was presented to participants at a field demonstration in an experimental field with potatoes, where varouious concentrations and applications of water enriched with ozone(O3) was tested as a means to control late blight

The role of production sharing and trade in the transmission of the great recession

The great recession of 2008-2009 resulted in a large fall in trade relative to output. Real trade fell roughly three times more than real GDP in the U.S. and Mexico, and by a factor of five in Canada. The decline in trade and output was particularly large in sectors with high levels of production sharing (goods produced in multiple, sequential stages in more than one country). Motivated by these observations, this paper asks two quantitative questions: 1) What was the role of trade in the transmission of the recession in North America? 2) What was the contribution of production sharing to the large fall in trade? To answer these questions this paper develops a quantitative open economy model of production sharing. The benchmark calibration can account for 72% of the fall in output in Canada, 19% of the fall in output in Mexico, and about two-thirds of the fall in trade for both countries. In the quantitative exercises production sharing can account for 40% of the fall in trade

Polygamy in the Marsh Harrier, Circus aeruginosus: Individual Variation in Hunting Performance and Number of Mates

1. Theories postulating that sexual task differentiation may lead to polygamy such that the sex investing the least effort in raising the offspring, engages in simultaneous matings, contrast with polygyny in raptors where the male provides most of the food for its females and nestlings. A field study was undertaken to describe parental effort and success in marsh harriers of different mating status to elucidate this controversy. 2. Data on clutch size and laying date were collected on 421 nests in two Dutch land reclamations, Flevoland and Lauwersmeer. 156 nests were known to have monogamous parents, 30 males had two females and nests. Bigamous males raised on average twice as many fledglings (5.7) than monogamous males (3.0). However, their primary females had more success (3.5) than secondary females (2.3), related to increased nestling mortality in secondary nests. Male fledglings were significantly heavier in primary than in secondary nests. 3. Nest observations made on 22 nests (5 of monogamous, 17 of polygamous males) revealed that daily prey deliveries by males were fewer in mono- than in bigamous males. The latter delivered prey by preference to their primary nests. The prey delivered by a trigamous male were consistently larger than those of a bigamous and monogamous male in the same area. 4. Time budget observations revealed that hunting effort was maximal in the nestling phase (ca 8 hrs foraging per day for all three males observed; at other times of year foraging was reduced in early morning and late afternoon. Net hunting yield (prey brought to nests per hour of hunting) increased in three males with their number (1, 2, or 3) of mates. With progress of the breeding season, male hunting ranges extended further outside the breeding territories and had a great measure of overlap, suggesting that territory quality was not a major factor in male hunting yield. 5. Secondary females participated in provisioning for the nestlings more than primary or monogamy-females, thus compensating for reduced male prey deliveries. 6. Classical polygyny theory addresses the question of female choice: which benefits compensate a secondary female for reduced breeding success by mating with an already paired male? Several hypotheses (enhanced offspring survival, offspring genetic quality, parent chances of future reproduction) are discussed, but evidence is nearly completely lacking. 7. An alternative approach stresses the male's role in the decision process. Males may have more interindividual variation in their capacity to bring food than females in their capacity to lay and incubate eggs. Optimal strategies for males would then range with increasing quality from non-breeding via polyandry and monogamy to polygyny. In species like harriers, non-breeding may be optimal for yearling males with submaximal hunting skills, thus creating a skewed sex ratio forcing some females to accept secondary status as mate of older, high quality males. Polygyny is then associated with slower male than female maturation. The evolution of polyandrous traits in species living isolated in poor environments is likewise explained by this model.

Advances and challenges in innovation studies

The article discusses recent advances and future challenges in innovation studies. First, it separately considers four main strands of research, studying innovation at the organisational, systemic, sectoral and macroeconomic levels. Then, considering the field as a whole, the article points to the existence of important neglected topics and methodological challenges for future research. In fact, several fundamental issues are still unexplored, such as the co-evolution between technological and institutional change; the role of demand; and the impacts of innovation on individual and collective welfare. There are also important methodological challenges, such as the need for more systematic interactions between the different levels of analysis; the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of technological and institutional changes; and the search for a combination of contingent explanations based on case studies with general analytical results based on econometric and formal models.Innovation; Innovation management; innovation systems; innovation and growth

Resource-Efficient Chemistry on Quantum Computers with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver and the Double Unitary Coupled-Cluster Approach.

Applications of quantum simulation algorithms to obtain electronic energies of molecules on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices require careful consideration of resources describing the complex electron correlation effects. In modeling second-quantized problems, the biggest challenge confronted is that the number of qubits scales linearly with the size of the molecular basis. This poses a significant limitation on the size of the basis sets and the number of correlated electrons included in quantum simulations of chemical processes. To address this issue and enable more realistic simulations on NISQ computers, we employ the double unitary coupled-cluster (DUCC) method to effectively downfold correlation effects into the reduced-size orbital space, commonly referred to as the active space. Using downfolding techniques, we demonstrate that properly constructed effective Hamiltonians can capture the effect of the whole orbital space in small-size active spaces. Combining the downfolding preprocessing technique with the variational quantum eigensolver, we solve for the ground-state energy of H2, Li2, and BeH2 in the cc-pVTZ basis using the DUCC-reduced active spaces. We compare these results to full configuration-interaction and high-level coupled-cluster reference calculations

Chemistry on quantum computers with virtual quantum subspace expansion

Several novel methods for performing calculations relevant to quantum chemistry on quantum computers have been proposed but not yet explored experimentally. Virtual quantum subspace expansion [T. Takeshita et al., Phys. Rev. X 10, 011004 (2020)] is one such algorithm developed for modeling complex molecules using their full orbital space and without the need for additional quantum resources. We implement this method on the IBM Q platform and calculate the potential energy curves of the hydrogen and lithium dimers using only two qubits and simple classical post-processing. A comparable level of accuracy would require twenty qubits with previous approaches. We also develop an approach to minimize the impact of experimental noise on the stability of a generalized eigenvalue problem that is a crucial component of the algorithm. Our results demonstrate that virtual quantum subspace expansion works well in practice

Bekæmpelse af hindbærsnudebillen

Without effective means the strawberry blossom weevil can cause great yield losses in strawberry production. The weevils lay eggs in flower buds and partially severs the bud from the plant. By developing traps baited with pheromones and plant volatiles we search to manage weevil populations to reduce damage on the strawberry plants