Interspecific interactions between insect herbivores predominantly involve asymmetric competition. By contrast, facilitation, whereby herbivory by one insect benefits another via induced plant susceptibility, is uncommon. Positive reciprocal interactions between insect herbivores are even rarer. Here, we reveal a novel case of reciprocal feeding facilitation between above-ground aphids (Amphoro...

This paper presents the development of a portable system with the aim of allowing blind people to detect and recognize Euro banknotes. The developed device is based on a Raspberry Pi electronic instrument and a Raspberry Pi camera, Pi NoIR (No Infrared filter) dotted with additional infrared light, which is embedded into a pair of sunglasses that permit blind and visually impaired people to ind...

Smart cities seek to build the surveillance systems in order to improve the efficiency of urban spaces while reducing costs and resource consumption. There are several defects in the video surveillance system, such as: picture is indistinct, anomalies cannot be identified automatically, a lot of storage spaces are needed to save the surveillance information, and prices remain relatively high. T...

This work presents a low-cost robot, controlled by a Raspberry Pi, whose navigation system is based on vision. The strategy used consisted of identifying obstacles via optical flow pattern recognition. Its estimation was done using the Lucas-Kanade algorithm, which can be executed by the Raspberry Pi without harming its performance. Finally, an SVM-based classifier was used to identify patterns...

Data mining algorithms are essential tools to extract information from the increasing number of large datasets, also called Big Data. However, these algorithms demand huge amounts of computing power to achieve reliable results. Although conventional High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms can deliver such performance, they are commonly expensive and power-hungry. This paper presents a study ...

Food authenticity is an important and rapidly expanding area that requires development of molecular approaches to help avert fraudulent replacement of expensive food ingredients, and to ensure correct ingredient levels are present in prepacked foods. We report here on the development of a method that uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the DNA 1000 chip to distinguish between DNA derived f...

Raspberry ringspot virus (RpRSV), which has not occurred in Japan, infects many plants such as raspberry, gooseberry, cherry, grapevine, and strawberry. Biological assay, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) have been introduced for the detection of RpRSV in postentry quarantine in Japan. We studied reverse transcription loop-me...