Poverty in developing countries is usually linked to low agricultural productivity. Inadequate quantity and quality of food impacts human development potential, physically and mentally. Reduced immunity to disease due to poor nutrition increases the burden and kills. Current technologies (fertiliser, improved seed, irrigation, pesticides) correctly applied can sustainably and safely increase cr...

This study aimed to investigate effects of varying doses of Nigella sativa seed powder or acetone extracts in diet on feed intake, mortality, serum lipid profiles and population of intestinal microflora of broilers. A total 168, day-old broiler chicks (Cobb 500) were ad-libitium manually prepared feeds supplemented with 0, 1.5, 2.5, 3.0% seed powder or 0, 0.2, 0.4% acetone extracts of N. sativa...

The world is facing an explosive increase in the incidence of diabetes mellitus and cost-effective complementary therapies are needed. The effects of Eugenia jambolana, a household remedy for diabetes, were studied. Streptozotocin diabetic female albino Wistar rats weighing 150-200 g (N = 6) were fed E. jambolana seed powder (250, 500 or 1000 mg/kg) for 15 days. Diabetic rats fed 500 and 1000 m...

In a warming climate, temperature-sensitive plants must move toward colder areas, that is, higher latitude or altitude, by seed dispersal [1]. Considering that the temperature drop with increasing altitude (-0.65°C per 100 m altitude) is one hundred to a thousand times larger than that of the equivalent latitudinal distance [2], vertical seed dispersal is probably a key process for plant escape...

Due to increasing demand for medicinal and horticultural uses, the Orchidaceae is in urgent need of innovative and novel propagation techniques that address both market demand and conservation. Traditionally, restoration techniques have been centered on ex situ asymbiotic or symbiotic seed germination techniques that are not cost-effective, have limited genetic potential and often result in low...

The removal of heavy metals, especially from wastewater, has attracted significant interest because of their toxicity, tendency to bioaccumulate, and the threat they pose to human life and the environment. Many low-cost sorbents have been investigated for their biosorption capacity toward heavy metals. However, there are no reports available on the removal of Pb(II) from aqueous solution by of ...

In this paper, we propose a method for extracting an object region from an image. First, we investigate the properties of the Intelligent Scissors (IS) method, which has been proposed as a method for extracting contours. As a result, we verify that the IS method’s route search according to total cost requires multiple seed points to extract a complex contour. Next, we show that this problem can...

Superoxide generated during the early imbibition is an excellent marker for evaluating seed vigor. In this paper, a new principle biosensor for non-invasive detection of seed vigor based on quantitative measurement of superoxide via selective probe 2-methyl-6-(p-methoxyphenyl)-3,7-dihydroimidazo [1,2alpha] pyrazin-3-one (MCLA)-mediated chemiluminescence (CL) was developed. The biosensor, which ...

Seeds dispersed by vertebrates can face potentially very different seed fate pathways. One of these is via vertebrates that pose little threat to the seed itself, either dropping the seed in the course of fruit handling or passing the seed relatively unharmed through the gut (‘benign dispersers’ or ‘legitimate’ dispersers of Schupp (1993)). Alternatively, seeds could be dispersed by vertebrates...

The problem of Byzantine Broadcast (BB) and Byzantine Agreement (BA) are of interest to both distributed computing and cryptography community. Often, these primitives require prohibitive communication and round complexity. The extension protocols have been introduced to handle long messages at the cost of small number of broadcasts for bit. The latter are referred to as seed broadcasts and the ...