Transformation towards more sustainable soil management on Dutch arable farms

Currently a debate is ongoing in the Netherlands on how to increase soil sustainable management in general and specifically in short term lease. Sustainable practices may not be adopted by farmers because of an interplay between EU, national and provincial legislation, short-term land lease system, and social and economic aspects. Wageningen Plant Research requested students from Wageningen University to research this topic. The purpose of this project is to develop a Sustainable Soil Management Framework that integrates the legislation, economic and social factors, and Ecosystem Services in order to enable farmers to adopt sustainable soil management practices.Through a literature study key issues were collected on each of the aspects in the framework. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with farmers, land funds, provinces and experts. The interviewees provided additional key issues as well as input to potential solutions to those issues.The main key issues concern the absence of an evaluation and rewarding system of sustainable practices within lease agreements, the (short) duration of lease agreements, and insufficient knowledge transfer and exchange on soil sustainable management practices between farmers and other stakeholders. Based on these main key issues we propose a set of solutions for each aspect within the Sustainable Soil Management Framework

Effect of Fertilizer on the Growth of Local Aromatic Rice Varieties

A pot experiment was conducted at the experimental net house of the Department of Soil Science, Sylhet Agricultural University, Sylhet, Bangladesh to observe the effect of fertilizers on growth of local aromatic rice varieties during the aman (summer) season of 2015. The experiment was laid out in a Randomized Complete Block Design with three replications. Five aromatic rice varieties (Kalizira: V1, Muktasail: V2, Nagrasail: V3, Maloti: V4 and Chinigura: V5) and four levels of fertilizer (Recommended dose: F1 i.e. 45-10-20-10-0.5 kg ha-1 of N-P-K-S-Zn, 2/3rd of recommended dose: F2, 1/3rd of recommended dose: F3, and Control: F4) were used. All fertilizers were applied as basal during final pot preparation while urea was applied in two equal splits. With few exceptions, all of the growth characters of the aromatic rice varieties were significantly affected due to the application of different fertilizer doses. The longest plant (124.5 cm) at harvest was found in Muktasail with recommended dose of fertilizers whereas the shortest plant (91.40 cm) was noted in Kalizira variety in control treatment. Similarly, recommended dose of fertilizers gave the highest tillers number hill-1 (25.00) in Kalizira at and the lowest number of tillers hill-1 (8.67) was noticed in Chinigura variety at control treatment. The highest grain yield was recorded in Nagrasail variety (65.33 g pot-1) followed by Kalizira (65.26 g pot-1) with recommended dose of fertilizers while the lowest yield (24.31 g pot-1) was observed in Maloti in control treatment. The overall results indicated that recommended dose of fertilizers influenced the growth characters of aromatic rice varieties

A Multilingual Handwriting Learning System for Visually Impaired People

Visually impaired people have previously been brought into learning and educational systems through various forms of assistive technology, such as haptic feedback systems. Haptic systems generally need expensive equipment and support from sighted teachers. Moreover, the learning has always been carried out with letters of different alphabets mapped into some tactile pattern. Writing is a big concern for the visually impaired as most official work, like signing, is still carried out by conventional handwriting methods. Most of the existing systems are limited to teaching a single language’s alphabet and basic grammar or may not provide feedback to let the learners know of their learning progress. Therefore, the objectives of this research are to develop an efficient system that includes voice-over guidance to teach writing in multiple alphabets to visually impaired people and to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. As such, a system was developed for teaching multilingual alphabets to visually impaired people with voice instructions. With the aid of a voice-over guide, learners were able to write letters with a stylus on a graphics pad. The progress assessment of the learners is carried out by an image processing algorithm and scored by a machine learning (ML) model. The Random Forest model was used due to its high accuracy (f1-score of 99.8% on test data) among the existing ten different ML algorithms. Finally, the performance and usability of this system were evaluated through an empirical study replicated with 16 participants, including four teachers and twelve visually impaired people. It was found that visually impaired people made fewer attempts to learn handwriting with the proposed system than with the normal handwriting teaching system. 100% of the participants agreed to recommend the system in the future

Mass Psychogenic Illness: Demography and Symptom Profile of an Episode

Background. Mass psychogenic illness has been a recurrent phenomenon in Bangladesh over recent times. Objectives. This study was aimed at investigating the demographic characteristics and symptom profile of an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness occurring in a girls’ high school. Methods and Materials. In 14 April 2013, a total of 93 students of a girls’ high school suddenly developed various symptoms following intake of tiffin cake which resulted in panic and hospital admission. A descriptive, cross-sectional observational survey was done to define various characteristics of the outbreak. Results. No organic explanation for the reported illnesses was found. 93 female students were included who were hospitalized during the incident. Trigger factor was found in 98% of students. Most of the students were 13 years old. Average interval between exposure to the trigger and onset of symptoms was 151.5 minutes. Commonest symptoms were abdominal pain (83%), headache (73%), chest pain (69%), body ache (63%), nausea (69%), and generalized weakness and fatigue (61%). Hospital stay following the incident was about 12 hours on average. Conclusion. To avoid unnecessary panic in the community a prompt, coordinated response is important in resolving widespread community anxiety surrounding these episodes

Efficacy of colchicine in patients with moderate COVID-19: A double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection may cause severe life-threatening diseases called acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) owing to cytokine storms. The mortality rate of COVID-19-related ARDS is as high as 40% to 50%. However, effective treatment for the extensive release of acute inflammatory mediators induced by hyperactive and inappropriate immune responses is very limited. Many anti-inflammatory drugs with variable efficacies have been investigated. Colchicine inhibits interleukin 1 beta (IL-1β) and its subsequent inflammatory cascade by primarily blocking pyrin and nucleotide-binding domain leucine-rich repeat and pyrin domain containing receptor 3 (NLRP3) activation. Therefore, this cheap, widely available, oral drug might provide an added benefit in combating the cytokine storm in COVID-19. Here, we sought to determine whether adding colchicine to other standards of care could be beneficial for moderate COVID-19 pneumonia in terms of the requirement for advanced respiratory support and mortality. METHODS AND FINDINGS: This blinded placebo-controlled drug trial was conducted at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. A total of 300 patients with moderate COVID-19 based on a positive RT-PCR result were enrolled based on strict selection criteria from June 2020 to November 2020. Patients were randomly assigned to either treatment group in a 1:1 ratio. Patients were administered 1.2 mg of colchicine on day 1 followed by daily treatment with 0.6 mg of colchicine for 13 days or placebo along with the standard of care. The primary outcome was the time to clinical deterioration from randomization to two or more points on a seven-category ordinal scale within the 14 days post-randomization. Clinical outcomes were also recorded on day 28. The primary endpoint was met by 9 (6.2%) patients in the placebo group and 4 (2.7%) patients in the colchicine group (P = 0.171), which corresponds to a hazard ratio (95% CI) of 0.44 (0.13–1.43). Additional analysis of the outcomes on day 28 revealed significantly lower clinical deterioration (defined as a decrease by two or more points) in the colchicine group, with a hazard ratio [95%CI] of 0.29 [0.098–0.917], (P = 0.035). Despite a 56% reduction in the need for mechanical ventilation and death with colchicine treatment on day 14, the reduction was not statistically significant. On day 28, colchicine significantly reduced clinical deterioration measured as the need for mechanical ventilation and all-cause mortality. CONCLUSION: Colchicine was not found to have a significant beneficial effect on reducing mortality and the need for mechanical ventilation. However, a delayed beneficial effect was observed. Therefore, further studies should be conducted to evaluate the late benefits of colchicine. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical trial registration no: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04527562 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=NCT04527562

Clinical outcome at day 14.

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Comparison of baseline and follow up blood biomarkers between colchicine and placebo.

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Comparison of adverse events between colchicine and placebo.

Comparison of adverse events between colchicine and placebo.</p

Baseline characteristics of the study participants.

Baseline characteristics of the study participants.</p

Clinical outcome at day 28.

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