Observation of Plasma Hole in an ECR Ar Plasma

The first experimental observation of a plasma hole structure in an ECR argon plasma is reported. The plasma hole is a cylindrical density cavity, which is formed spontaneously in the center of the plasma. The steep density gradient between the hole plasma and the ambient plasma is sustained by a thin interfacial layer, the width of which is a few ion Larmor radii. Supersonic rotation is found over the large cross-sectional area of Ar plasma hole. The axial flow can also exceed ion sound speed. Spectral measurements revealed that the neutral density profile exhibits a hole structure as well as that in ion density, the diameter of which is much shorter than the mean free path of neutral particles

Monoterpenes of Salvia leucophylla

The “ Salvia phenomenon” is one of the most famous examples of allelopathic interaction between higher plants. The Salvia thickets are surrounded by zones of bare soil (“bare zone”, 1-3 m in width), which merge into areas of inhibited grassland (“zone of inhibition”) and finally undisturbed grassland at a distance of 3-9 m. This characteristic vegetation pattern was attributed to monoterpenes, especially 1,8-cineole and camphor, which volatilized from S. leucophylla leaves, got adsorbed in the soil around the Salvia thickets, and inhibited germination and seedling growth of annual herbs. Initially, continuity of hydrophobic environment (clay soil particles – cuticular waxes on the seed/seedling surfaces – plasmodesmata - plasma membrane) was regarded to be important for the lipophilic compounds to enter the target cells. However, monoterpenes can reach the target cells via aqueous route as well. Because monoterpenes produced by S. leucophylla all induce similar symptoms in the seedlings of target plants, their mode of action appears to be essentially common. They exert various deteriorating effects on the cells of target plants, which might be totally explained if the primary point of action resides in mitochondrial function (respiratory ATP synthesis) and/or generation of reactive oxygen species. In contrast to the previous belief that cuticular waxes act as the pathway of lipophilic monoterpene to enter the site of action or reservoir of the inhibitors, they may act as “adsorptive barrier” to prevent the entering of monoterpenes inside the cell wall

Identification and Mapping of a Gene for Rice Slender Kernel Using Oryza Glumaepatula Introgression Lines

World demand for superior rice grain quality tends to increase. One of the criteria of appearance quality of rice grain is grain shape. Rice consumers exhibit wide preferences for grain shape, but most Indonesian rice consumers prefer long and slender grain. The objectives of this study were to identify and map a gene for rice slender kernel trait using Oryza glumaepatula introgression lines with O. sativa cv. Taichung 65 genetic background. A segregation analysis of BC4F2 population derived from backcrosses of a donor parent O. glumaepatula into a recurrent parent Taichung 65 showed that the slender kernel was controlled by a single recessive gene. This new identified gene was designated as sk1 (slender kernel 1). Moreover, based on the RFLP analyses using 14 RFLP markers located on chromosomes 2, 8, 9, and 10 in which the O. glumaepatula chromosomal segments were retained in BC4F2 population, the sk1 was located between RFLP markers C679 and C560 on the long arm of chromosome 2, with map distances of 2.8 and 1.5 cM, respectively. The wild rice O. glumaepatula carried a recessive allele for slender kernel. This allele may be useful in breeding of rice with slender kernel types. In addition, the development of plant materials and RFLP map associated with slender kernel in this study is the preliminary works in the effort to isolate this important grain shape gene

Local Positional Encoding for Multi-Layer Perceptrons

A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is a type of neural networks which has a long history of research and has been studied actively recently in computer vision and graphics fields. One of the well-known problems of an MLP is the capability of expressing high-frequency signals from low-dimensional inputs. There are several studies for input encodings to improve the reconstruction quality of an MLP by applying pre-processing against the input data. This paper proposes a novel input encoding method, local positional encoding, which is an extension of positional and grid encodings. Our proposed method combines these two encoding techniques so that a small MLP learns high-frequency signals by using positional encoding with fewer frequencies under the lower resolution of the grid to consider the local position and scale in each grid cell. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by applying it to common 2D and 3D regression tasks where it shows higher-quality results compared to positional and grid encodings, and comparable results to hierarchical variants of grid encoding such as multi-resolution grid encoding with equivalent memory footprint

Identification of a Notched Kernel Gene Associated with Pre-Harvest Sprouting Using Oryza glumaepatula Introgression Lines in Rice

Pre-harvest sprouting in rice is related to the lack of a normal dormancy level during seed development and maturation. The prominent effects of pre-harvest sprouting are lower yield due to harvest losses and end-product quality reduction. A single novel gene (nk2) for notched kernel was identified at backcross segregating population (BC4F2) of Oryza glumaepatula to Oryza sativa cv. Taichung 65 as recurrent parent. The nk2 gene was closely associated to pre-harvest sprouting character, and mapped on the long arm of chromosome 5 with 3.5 cM and 3.6 cM distance to G1103 and R521 RFLP markers, respectively.   Key words :  Notched kernel, pre-harvest sprouting, genetic map, ric

DynamicISP: Dynamically Controlled Image Signal Processor for Image Recognition

Image signal processor (ISP) plays an important role not only for human perceptual quality but also for computer vision. In most cases, experts resort to manual tuning of many parameters in the ISPs for perceptual quality. It failed in sub-optimal, especially for computer vision. Aiming to improve ISPs, two approaches have been actively proposed; tuning the parameters with machine learning, or constructing an ISP with DNN. The former is lightweight but lacks expressive powers. The latter has expressive powers but it was too heavy to calculate on edge devices. To this end, we propose DynamicISP, which consists of traditional simple ISP functions but their parameters are controlled dynamically per image according to what the downstream image recognition model felt to the previous frame. Our proposed method successfully controlled parameters of multiple ISP functions and got state-of-the-art accuracy with a small computational cost