This is a philosophical ‘position paper’, starting from the observation that we have an intuitive grasp of a family of related concepts of “possibility”, “causation” and “constraint” which we often use in thinking about complex mechanisms, and perhaps also in perceptual processes, which according to Gibson are primarily concerned with detecting positive and negative affordances, such as support...

In the present study, variation among different bacterial strains was observed in the plaques of tobacco chewers (TC) as compared to those from normal persons (non tobacco chewers) (NTC). Bacterial strain J1 (dominant in the plaques of NTC) did not initiate the process of adhesion (biofilm formation) until it appeared to have reached a required population density necessary for the production of...

International competition within the wine market, consumer demands for newer styles of wines and increasing concerns about the environmental sustainability of wine production are providing new challenges for innovation in wine fermentation. Within the total production chain, the alcoholic fermentation of grape juice by yeasts is a key process where winemakers can creatively engineer wine charac...

Progress in animal nutrition, reproduction, quantitative genetics, and the development of molecular genetics, proteomics, and functional genomics open new perspectives for the meat sector. The most promising developments include a wider utilisation of molecular markers, the possibilities of semen sexing and the targeted use of nutrition to modify the composition of meat. The increased use of bi...

The average lifetime of sows as observed in production herds is primarily influenced by management decisions. Usually the farmer decides to cull a sow, either because he expects that a gilt's average productivity is higher than the marginal productivity of the sow, or because the current number of sows exceeds the production capacity, e.g. in the farrowing department. Several studies have shown...

CO(2) conversion will be at the core of the future of low-carbon chemical and energy industry. This review gives a glimpse into the possibilities in this field by discussing (i) CO(2) circular economy and its impact on the chemical and energy value chain, (ii) the role of CO(2) in a future scenario of chemical industry, (iii) new routes for CO(2) utilization, including emerging biotechnology ro...

Process control is based more and more on computers. Fault-tolerance techniques are applied for critical processes to guarantee safety and/or minimize production losses and equipment damage. The increasing safety and production requirements, the constantly dropping hardware prices, the increasing digitalization and the constantly growing capabilities of integrated circuits will widen the applic...

The cross section for central diffractive Higgs production is calculated, for the LHC range of energies. The graphs for the possible mechanisms for Higgs production, through pomeron fusion and photon fusions are calculated for all possibilities allowed by the standard model. The cross section for central diffractive Higgs production through pomeron fusion, must be multiplied by a factor for the...

In this paper, we extend the problem of decentralization of Pareto optima in an economy with production externalities to the case where the production capacities upon which Pareto optimality is defined may differ from the aggregate of the firms expectations about their production possibilities. This issue is raised in order to deal with the seemingly diiferent exectations of firms and governmen...

Plants are considered as an alternative platform for recombinant monoclonal antibody (mAb) production due to the improvement and diversification of transgenic techniques. The diversity of plant species offers a multitude of possibilities for the valorization of genetic resources. Moreover, plants can be propagated indefinitely, providing cheap biomass production on a large scale in controlled c...