No tillage affects the phosphorus status,isotopic composition and crop yield of Phaseolus vulgaris in a rain‐fed farming system

BACKGROUND: Conservation tillage promotes the accretion of soil organic matter and often leads to improved soil fertility and moisture availability. However, few studies have looked at the physiological response of crop plants to different tillage practices. It was therefore hypothesised that measuring the nutrient concentrations and stable isotope composition (δ¹³C, δ¹⁸O, δ¹⁵N) of shoots could help evaluate the physiological response of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) to different tillage treatments (no tillage (NT) and mouldboard ploughing (MP)) in a rain‐fed farming system in northern Mexico. RESULTS: NT significantly enhanced shoot phosphorus concentration in bean plants. Tillage exerted a negative effect on the extent of root colonisation (%) by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). Lower shoot δ¹⁸O but unchanged δ¹³C values in plants from the NT system suggest enhanced stomatal conductance but also enhanced photosynthetic rate, which overall resulted in unchanged water use efficiency. Bean plants in the NT system showed lower shoot δ¹⁵N values, which suggests that a larger proportion of total plant nitrogen was obtained through atmospheric nitrogen fixation in this treatment. CONCLUSION: Greater diversity of AMF soil communities and heavier colonisation of roots by AMF in the NT compared with the MP system appeared to contribute to improved crop nutrition, water relations and yield in this rain‐fed agroecosystem. Copyright © 2010 Society of Chemical Industry     

Piezoelectricity in Monolayer Hexagonal Boron Nitride

2D hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a wide-bandgap van der Waals crystal with a unique combination of properties, including exceptional strength, large oxidation resistance at high temperatures, and optical functionalities. Furthermore, in recent years hBN crystals have become the material of choice for encapsulating other 2D crystals in a variety of technological applications, from optoelectronic and tunneling devices to composites. Monolayer hBN, which has no center of symmetry, is predicted to exhibit piezoelectric properties, yet experimental evidence is lacking. Here, by using electrostatic force microscopy, this effect is observed as a strain-induced change in the local electric field around bubbles and creases, in agreement with theoretical calculations. No piezoelectricity is found in bilayer and bulk hBN, where the center of symmetry is restored. These results add piezoelectricity to the known properties of monolayer hBN, which makes it a desirable candidate for novel electromechanical and stretchable optoelectronic devices, and pave a way to control the local electric field and carrier concentration in van der Waals heterostructures via strain. The experimental approach used here also shows a way to investigate the piezoelectric properties of other materials on the nanoscale by using electrostatic scanning probe techniques.     

On the synthesis of metadata tags for HTML files

RDFa, JSON-LD, Microdata, and Microformats allow to endow the data in HTML files with metadata tags that help software agents understand them. Unluckily, there are many HTML files that do not have any metadata tags, which has motivated many authors to work on proposals to synthesize them. But they have some problems: the authors either provide an overall picture of their designs without too many details on the techniques behind the scenes or focus on the techniques but do not describe the design of the software systems that support them; many of them cannot deal with data that are encoded using semistructured formats like forms, listings, or tables; and the few proposals that can work on tables can deal with horizontal listings only. In this article, we describe the design of a system that overcomes the previous limitations using a novel embedding approach that has proven to outperform four state-of-the-art techniques on a repository with randomly selected HTML files from 40 different sites. According to our experimental analysis, our proposal can achieve an F₁ score that outperforms the others by 10.14% ; this difference was confirmed to be statistically significant at the standard confidence level.     

Automatic analysis of speckle photography fringes

Speckle interferometry is a technique adequate to metrological problems such as the measurement of object deformation. An automatic system of analysis of such measurements is given; it consists of a motorized x-y plate positioner controlled by computer, a CCD video camera, and software for image analysis. A fringe-recognition algorithm determines the spacing and orientation of the fringes and permits the calculation of the magnitude and direction of the displacement of the analyzed object point in images with variable degrees of illumination. For a 256 x 256 pixel image resolution, the procedure allows one to analyze from three fringes to a number of fringes that corresponds to 3 pixels/fringe.     

Ratiometric Nanothermometer Based on a Radical Excimer for In Vivo Sensing (Small 32/2023)

Ratiometric fluorescent nanothermometers with near-infrared emission play an important role in in vivo sensing since they can be used as intracellular thermal sensing probes with high spatial resolution and high sensitivity, to investigate cellular functions of interest in diagnosis and therapy, where current approaches are not effective. Herein, the temperature-dependent fluorescence of organic nanoparticles is designed, synthesized, and studied based on the dual emission, generated by monomer and excimer species, of the tris(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)methyl radical (TTM) doping organic nanoparticles (TTMd-ONPs), made of optically neutral tris(2,4,6-trichlorophenyl)methane (TTM-αH), acting as a matrix. The excimer emission intensity of TTMd-ONPs decreases with increasing temperatures whereas the monomer emission is almost independent and can be used as an internal reference. TTMd-ONPs show a great temperature sensitivity (3.4% K⁻¹ at 328 K) and a wide temperature response at ambient conditions with excellent reversibility and high colloidal stability. In addition, TTMd-ONPs are not cytotoxic and their ratiometric outputs are unaffected by changes in the environment. Individual TTMd-ONPs are able to sense temperature changes at the nano-microscale. In vivo thermometry experiments in Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) worms show that TTMd-ONPs can locally monitor internal body temperature changes with spatio-temporal resolution and high sensitivity, offering multiple applications in the biological nanothermometry field.     

Engineering DNA-Grafted Quatsomes as Stable Nucleic Acid-Responsive Fluorescent Nanovesicles

The development of artificial vesicles into responsive architectures capable of sensing the biological environment and simultaneously signaling the presence of a specific target molecule is a key challenge in a range of biomedical applications from drug delivery to diagnostic tools. Herein, the rational design of biomimetic DNA-grafted quatsome (QS) nanovesicles capable of translating the binding of a target molecule to amphiphilic DNA probes into an optical output is presented. QSs are synthetic lipid-based nanovesicles able to confine multiple organic dyes at the nanoscale, resulting in ultra-bright soft materials with attractiveness for sensing applications. Dye-loaded QS nanovesicles of different composition and surface charge are grafted with fluorescent amphiphilic nucleic acid-based probes to produce programmable FRET-active nanovesicles that operate as highly sensitive signal transducers. The photophysical properties of the DNA-grafted nanovesicles are characterized and the highly selective, ratiometric detection of clinically relevant microRNAs with sensitivity in the low nanomolar range are demonstrated. The potential applications of responsive QS nanovesicles for biosensing applications but also as functional nanodevices for targeted biomedical applications is envisaged.     

Familial study of patients with hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia

Rendu-Osler-Weber's disease or Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HTT) is an autosomal dominant hereditary clinical entity characterized by the presence of telangiectasias on skin, mucous membranes and internal organs. The incidence of hepatic, pulmonary or cerebral complications justifies an early diagnostic. A familiar study of patients previously diagnosed of HTT in our hospital was made, establishing a protocol for the identification of asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic cases. Fourteen patients were studied: 6 with a previous diagnostic, and 8 familiar contacts. Penetrance was of 85%. Epistaxis (80%) and telangiectasias on skin were the most frequent clinical findings. The visceral lesions found were gastrointestinal (28%), hepatic (15%), urological (15%) and pulmonary (7%). All patients were included in an hepatitis B virus vaccination program. It was also made a morphological study with Werhoeff's staining of the elastic layer, that allowed to distinguish both arterial and venous alterations.     

The Effectiveness of Single Oxidants and AOPs in the Degradation of Emerging Contaminants in Waters: A Comparison Study

The effectiveness of single oxidants and several AOPs was studied for the degradation of five selected emerging contaminants: Benzotriazole, N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide or DEET, Chlorophene, 3-Methylindole and Nortriptyline HCl. First-order rate constants and half-life times for the degradation of each compound in ultra-pure water were deduced and compared. The AOPs were later applied to the degradation of these ECs present in three real waters: public reservoir water, and two secondary effluents from municipal wastewater plants. The effect of the variables on the ECs elimination was established. Finally, a cost estimation based on the operating costs was established for the degradation of 3-Methylindole by the single oxidants and AOPs tested.