6,738 research outputs found
Conservation Tillage Increases Water Use Efficiency of Spring Wheat by Optimizing Water Transfer in a Semi-Arid Environment
Water availability is a major constraint for crop production in semiarid environments.
The impact of tillage practices on water potential gradient, water transfer resistance, yield, and water
use e�ciency (WUEg) of spring wheat was determined on the western Loess Plateau. Six tillage
practices implemented in 2001 and their e�ects were determined in 2016 and 2017 including
conventional tillage with no straw (T), no-till with straw cover (NTS), no-till with no straw (NT),
conventional tillage with straw incorporated (TS), conventional tillage with plastic mulch (TP),
and no-till with plastic mulch (NTP). No-till with straw cover, TP, and NTP significantly improved
soil water potential at the seedling stage by 42, 47, and 57%, respectively; root water potential at the
seedling stage by 34, 35, and 51%, respectively; leaf water potential at the seedling stage by 37, 48,
and 42%, respectively; tillering stage by 21, 24, and 30%, respectively; jointing stage by 28, 32, and 36%,
respectively; and flowering stage by 10, 26, and 16%, respectively, compared to T. These treatments
also significantly reduced the soil–leaf water potential gradient at the 0–10 cm soil depth at the
seedling stage by 35, 48, and 35%, respectively, and at the 30–50 cm soil depth at flowering by 62,
46, and 65%, respectively, compared to T. Thus, NTS, TP, and NTP reduced soil–leaf water transfer
resistance and enhanced transpiration. Compared to T, the NTS, TP, and NTP practices increased
biomass yield by 18, 36, and 40%; grain yield by 28, 22, and 24%; and WUEg by 24, 26, and 24%,
respectively. These results demonstrate that no-till with straw mulch and plastic mulching with
either no-till or conventional tillage decrease the soil–leaf water potential gradient and soil–leaf water
transfer resistance and enhance sustainable intensification of wheat production in semi-arid areas
Optical band edge shift of anatase cobalt-doped titanium dioxide
We report on the optical properties of magnetic cobalt-doped anatase phase
titanium dioxide Ti_{1-x}Co_{x}O_{2-d} films for low doping concentrations, 0
<= x <= 0.02, in the spectral range 0.2 to 5 eV. For well oxygenated films (d
<< 1) the optical conductivity is characterized by an absence of optical
absorption below an onset of interband transitions at 3.6 eV and a blue shift
of the optical band edge with increasing Co concentration. The absence of below
band gap absorption is inconsistent with theoretical models which contain
midgap magnetic impurity bands and suggests that strong on-site Coulomb
interactions shift the O-band to Co-level optical transitions to energies above
the gap.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; Version 2 - major content revisio
Nanoscale Mechanical Drumming Visualized by 4D Electron Microscopy
With four-dimensional (4D) electron microscopy, we report in situ imaging of the mechanical drumming of a nanoscale material. The single crystal graphite film is found to exhibit global resonance motion that is fully reversible and follows the same evolution after each initiating stress pulse. At early times, the motion appears “chaotic” showing the different mechanical modes present over the micron scale. At longer time, the motion of the thin film collapses into a well-defined fundamental frequency of 1.08 MHz, a behavior reminiscent of mode locking; the mechanical motion damps out after ∼200 μs and the oscillation has a “cavity” quality factor of 150. The resonance time is determined by the stiffness of the material, and for the 75 nm thick and 40 μm square specimen used here we determined Young’s modulus to be 1.0 TPa for the in-plane stress−strain profile. Because of its real-time dimension, this 4D microscopy should have applications in the study of these and other types of materials structures
Bell's inequalities in the tomographic representation
The tomographic approach to quantum mechanics is revisited as a direct tool
to investigate violation of Bell-like inequalities. Since quantum tomograms are
well defined probability distributions, the tomographic approach is emphasized
to be the most natural one to compare the predictions of classical and quantum
theory. Examples of inequalities for two qubits an two qutrits are considered
in the tomographic probability representation of spin states.Comment: 11 pages, comments and references adde
The BAF and PRC2 Complex Subunits Dpf2 and Eed Antagonistically Converge on Tbx3 to Control ESC Differentiation.
BAF complexes are composed of different subunits with varying functional and developmental roles, although many subunits have not been examined in depth. Here we show that the Baf45 subunit Dpf2 maintains pluripotency and ESC differentiation potential. Dpf2 co-occupies enhancers with Oct4, Sox2, p300, and the BAF subunit Brg1, and deleting Dpf2 perturbs ESC self-renewal, induces repression of Tbx3, and impairs mesendodermal differentiation without dramatically altering Brg1 localization. Mesendodermal differentiation can be rescued by restoring Tbx3 expression, whose distal enhancer is positively regulated by Dpf2-dependent H3K27ac maintenance and recruitment of pluripotency TFs and Brg1. In contrast, the PRC2 subunit Eed binds an intragenic Tbx3 enhancer to oppose Dpf2-dependent Tbx3 expression and mesendodermal differentiation. The PRC2 subunit Ezh2 likewise opposes Dpf2-dependent differentiation through a distinct mechanism involving Nanog repression. Together, these findings delineate distinct mechanistic roles for specific BAF and PRC2 subunits during ESC differentiation
Near-infrared, mode-locked waveguide lasers with multi-GHz repetition rates
In this work, we discuss mode-locking results obtained with low-loss, ion-exchanged waveguide lasers. With Yb3+-doped phosphate glass waveguide lasers, a repetition rate of up to 15.2 GHz was achieved at a wavelength of 1047 nm with an average power of 27 mW and pulse duration of 811 fs. The gap between the waveguide and the SESAM introduced negative group velocity dispersion via the Gires Tournois Interferometer (GTI) effect which allowed the soliton mode-locking of the device. A novel quantum dot SESAM was used to mode-lock Er3+, Yb3+-doped phosphate glass waveguide lasers around 1500 nm. Picosecond pulses were achieved at a maximum repetition rate of 6.8 GHz and an average output power of 30 mW. The repetition rate was tuned by more than 1 MHz by varying the pump power
Benchmarking Materials Property Prediction Methods: The Matbench Test Set and Automatminer Reference Algorithm
We present a benchmark test suite and an automated machine learning procedure
for evaluating supervised machine learning (ML) models for predicting
properties of inorganic bulk materials. The test suite, Matbench, is a set of
13 ML tasks that range in size from 312 to 132k samples and contain data from
10 density functional theory-derived and experimental sources. Tasks include
predicting optical, thermal, electronic, thermodynamic, tensile, and elastic
properties given a materials composition and/or crystal structure. The
reference algorithm, Automatminer, is a highly-extensible, fully-automated ML
pipeline for predicting materials properties from materials primitives (such as
composition and crystal structure) without user intervention or hyperparameter
tuning. We test Automatminer on the Matbench test suite and compare its
predictive power with state-of-the-art crystal graph neural networks and a
traditional descriptor-based Random Forest model. We find Automatminer achieves
the best performance on 8 of 13 tasks in the benchmark. We also show our test
suite is capable of exposing predictive advantages of each algorithm - namely,
that crystal graph methods appear to outperform traditional machine learning
methods given ~10^4 or greater data points. The pre-processed, ready-to-use
Matbench tasks and the Automatminer source code are open source and available
online (http://hackingmaterials.lbl.gov/automatminer/). We encourage evaluating
new materials ML algorithms on the MatBench benchmark and comparing them
against the latest version of Automatminer.Comment: Main text, supplemental inf
Responses to Increased Moisture Stress and Extremes: Whole Plant Response to Drought under Climate Change
In this chapter, we tackle the physiology of
plant water use from the angle of how this will
be modified in a context of a changing climate.
Two recent reviews cover a number of innovative
aspects to drought research, in particular in relation
to research on roots, and advocate the need
to look at the soil–root–shoot–atmosphere water
management in a comprehensive and dynamic
manner (Vadez et al. 2007, 2008). In the present
chapter, we revisit some of these aspects from
the perspective of changing climatic conditions
and explore the major issues that climate change will bring about, and how it will affect crop
production and in particular under water-limited
conditions. These issues can be broadly grouped
into two categories: (1) thermodynamic aspects
of the soil–plant–atmosphere water relations and
(2) growth and development aspects
Search for sterile neutrino mixing in the MINOS long-baseline experiment
A search for depletion of the combined flux of active neutrino species over a 735 km baseline is reported using neutral-current interaction data recorded by the MINOS detectors in the NuMI neutrino beam. Such a depletion is not expected according to conventional interpretations of neutrino oscillation data involving the three known neutrino flavors. A depletion would be a signature of oscillations or decay to postulated noninteracting sterile neutrinos, scenarios not ruled out by existing data. From an exposure of 3.18×1020 protons on target in which neutrinos of energies between ~500¿¿MeV and 120 GeV are produced predominantly as ¿µ, the visible energy spectrum of candidate neutral-current reactions in the MINOS far detector is reconstructed. Comparison of this spectrum to that inferred from a similarly selected near-detector sample shows that of the portion of the ¿µ flux observed to disappear in charged-current interaction data, the fraction that could be converting to a sterile state is less than 52% at 90% confidence level (C.L.). The hypothesis that active neutrinos mix with a single sterile neutrino via oscillations is tested by fitting the data to various models. In the particular four-neutrino models considered, the mixing angles ¿24 and ¿34 are constrained to be less than 11° and 56° at 90% C.L., respectively. The possibility that active neutrinos may decay to sterile neutrinos is also investigated. Pure neutrino decay without oscillations is ruled out at 5.4 standard deviations. For the scenario in which active neutrinos decay into sterile states concurrently with neutrino oscillations, a lower limit is established for the neutrino decay lifetime t3/m3>2.1×10-12¿¿s/eV at 90% C.L
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