Since 1999, China has spent RMB 50 billion (about US$7 billion) to implement the ‘Grain for Green’ programme, the largest land retirement programme in the developing world. From 1999 to 2003, over 7.2 million hectares of agricultural land were retired under the programme. However, many farmers report that they did not receive the compensation promised under the programme in exchange for plantin...

Organometallic halide perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have shown great promise as a low-cost, high-efficiency photovoltaic technology. Structural and electro-optical properties of the perovskite absorber layer are most critical to device operation characteristics. Here we present a facile fabrication of high-efficiency PSCs based on compact, large-grain, pinhole-free CH3NH3PbI3-xBrx (MAPbI3-xBrx)...

Bulk SmCo5/a-Fe nanocomposite magnets have been prepared using a Joule-heating compaction technique. Nearly fully dense bulk magnets are obtained by compacting the milled powders under a pressure of 2 GPa at temperatures above 400 C. Structural analysis shows that the grain size of both the SmCo5 and the a-Fe phases is in the range of 10 to 15 nm when the compaction temperature is lower than 50...

In a Grid environment applications are executed on distributed resources. Applications can be divided into separate parts for distributed and sequential execution. Typically, complete applications consisting of many parts may be executed on both local and remote resources. Computing resources may expect some form of payment in exchange for services used. In this situation there are two scenario...

In this paper we propose a new method for the study and visualization of dynamic processes in magnetic nanostructures, and for the accurate calculation of rates for such processes. The method is illustrated for the case of switching of a grain of an exchange-coupled recording medium, which switches through domain wall nucleation and motion, but is generalizable to other rate processes such as v...

In cereals, ADP-glucose transporter protein plays an important role in starch biosynthesis. It acts as a main gate for the transport of ADP-glucose, the main precursor for starch biosynthesis during grain filling, from the cytosol into the amyloplasts of endospermic cells. In this study, we have shed some light on the molecular and biochemical characteristics of barley plastidial ADP-glucose tr...

The study of the oxygen incorporation and diffusion in lanthanum manganite thin films is presented by means novel isotope-exchange atom probe tomography, allowing a direct quantification enhancement grain boundaries' kinetics.