Here we report a facile immunoassay for detecting a synthetic peptide fragment of neurogenin3 (amino acid sequence: SKQRRSRRKKANDRERNRMH) by harnessing the aggregation-dependent fluorescence property of antibody-conjugated CdTe quantum dots in the presence of the target.

Optical components exploiting Pancharatnam-Berry phase are implemented by harnessing laser induced stress birefringence. Beam converters for obtaining beams with orbital angular momentum are demonstrated in glass and crystalline materials using this technique.

The agricultural sector, which is highly dependent on water, urged to build improved water management practices and explore available options match supply demand because of the scarcity risks a sustainable productive agri-food chain. Geothermal an energy source used generate electricity and/or heat. After harnessing its energy, remaining can be as for irrigation following treatment high ionic c...

In recent years, many pollinators have declined in abundance and diversity worldwide, presenting a potential threat to agricultural productivity, biodiversity and the functioning of natural ecosystems. One of the most debated factors proposed to be contributing to pollinator declines is exposure to pesticides, particularly neonicotinoids, a widely used class of systemic insecticide. Also, newly...

A wide class of problems in combinatorics, computer science and physics can be described along the following lines. There are a large number of variables ranging over a finite domain that interact through constraints that each bind a few variables and either encourage or discourage certain value combinations. Examples include the k-SAT problem or the Ising model. Such models naturally induce a ...

special series on agricultural advisory services Can agricultural extension1 systems deliver quality services to smallholder producers, often in remote areas? Yes, there is evidence that this is achieved in some developing and emerging economies. But this is by no means a common practice, and many extension systems continue to struggle with weak performance. This series of six papers seeks to u...

The design of distributed systems involves the partitioning of the system into components or partitions and the allocation of these components to physical nodes. Techniques have been proposed for both the partitioning and allocation process. However these techniques suffer from a number of limitations. For instance object replication has the potential to greatly improve the performance of an ob...

Synopsis. Organizations are too complex to “solve”. Consequently, corporate improvement programs are as likely to be deleterious as beneficial. Evolutionary mechanisms offer an alternative approach to organizational improvement. Organizational policies correspond to biological genes; policy innovation corresponds to genetic mutation; and learning corresponds to genetic recombination. These corr...

The syndrome of spatial neglect results from the combination of a number of deficits in attention, with patients demonstrating both spatially lateralized and non-lateralized impairments. Previous reports have hinted that there may be a motivational component to neglect and that modulating this might alleviate some of the debilitating symptoms. Additionally, recent work on the effects of reward ...

In our daily lives, organizing resources into a set of categories is a common task. Organizing resources into categories makes searching through those resources easier by limiting the focus to a specific category. Limiting the focus significantly reduces the amount of information one must search. Categorization becomes more useful as the collection of resources increases, when managing resource...