The repellent effect of Lantana camara flowers was evaluated against Aedes mosquitoes. Lantana flower extract in coconut oil provided 94.5% protection from Aedes albopictus and Ae. aegypti. The mean protection time was 1.9 h. One application of Lantana flower can provide more than 50% protection up to 4 h against the possible bites of Aedes mosquitoes. No adverse effects of the human volunteers...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of soil moisture condition and irrigation regime on the bioelectric potential of crops with different growth stages. The bioelectric potential of broccoli (Brassica oleracea var. italica) plants at the initial and mid-growth stages was measured under different soil moisture conditions and irrigation regimes using pot experiments. The result...

Moisture is one of the most important factors affecting grain quality in storage. The grain must be dried as soon as possible after harvesting to lower moisture to a standard level. It is difficult to obtain satisfactory measurement effect on precision in capacitive grain’s moisture measurement due to many influencing factors, such as temperature, species and weight. The data confusion method o...

This study investigates the effect of moisture conditioning on the Indirect Tensile Strength (ITS) of asphalt concrete. As a first step, cylindrical samples of 100 mm diameter and 50 mm thick were prepared using a Superpave gyratory compactor. Next, the samples were conditioned using Moisture Induced Susceptibility Test (MIST) device at different numbers of moisture conditioning cycles. In the ...

Very simple organisms, such as the single-celled amoeboid slime mould Physarum polycephalum possess no neural tissue yet, despite this, are known to exhibit complex biological and computational behaviour. Given such limited resources, can environmental stimuli play a role in generating the complexity of slime mould’s behaviour? We use a multi-agent collective model of slime mould to explore a t...

Bites Bites of mosquitoes belonging to the genera Anopheles Meigen, Aedes Meigen, Culex L. and Haemagogus L. are a general nuisance and are responsible for the transmission of important tropical diseases such as malaria, hemorrhagic dengue and yellow fevers and filariasis (elephantiasis). Plants are traditional sources of mosquito repelling essential oils (EOs), glyceridic oils and repellent an...

We synthesized a series of fluorinated compounds and tested them in an easy assay for their repellent activity against the ant Myrmica rubra. Depending on their chain length and pattern of fluorination these molecules are efficient repellents for this ant. Fluorinated compounds are stronger repellents than their unfluorinated analogs. 1,1,1-Trifluorotridecan-2-one (4) is an even better repellen...

Moisture content is an important factor in corn breeding and cultivation. A corn breed with low moisture at harvest is beneficial for mechanical operations, reduces drying and storage costs after harvesting and, thus, reduces energy consumption. Nondestructive measurement of kernel moisture in an intact corn ear allows us to select corn varieties with seeds that have high dehydration speeds in ...

Subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) weather forecasting has improved in recent years, thanks partly to better representation of physical variables in models. For instance, realistic initializations of snow and soil moisture in models yield enhanced predictability on S2S time scales. Snow depth and soil moisture also mediate month-to-month persistence of near-surface air temperature. Here the role of ...