Increasing grain yield and improving grain quality are two important goals for rice breeding. A better understanding of the factors that contribute to the overall grain quantity and nutritional quality of rice will lay the foundation for developing new breeding strategies. RAG2 is a member of 14-to-16-kDa α-amylase/trypsin inhibitors in rice, which belong to the albumin of seed storage proteins...

Es t ima te s of snow grain size for the near-surface snow layer were calculated for the Tioga Pass region and Mammoth Mountain in the Sierra Nevada, California, using an inversion technique and data collected by the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (A VIRIS). The inversion method takes advantage of the sensitivity of near-infrared snowpack reflectance to snow grain size. The Tiog...

The underlying cause of stagnation of grain growth in thin metallic films remains a puzzle. Here it is re-visited by means of detailed comparison of experiments and simulations, using a broad range of metrics that, in addition to grain size, includes the number of sides and the average side class of nearest neighbors. The experimental grain size data reported is large and comprises nearly 35,00...

Severe surface roughening during the hydroforming of aluminum alloy parts can produce surface defects that severely restrict their application in the automobile and aerospace industry. To understand the relation between strain, grain size and surface roughness under biaxial stress conditions, hydro-bulging tests of aluminum alloy tubes were carried out, and the tubes with different grain sizes ...

Plastic deformation of nanocrystalline Fe was investigated by nanoindentation. Samples, synthesized by mechanical attrition, consisted of powder particles with diameters greater than 30 mm. The average grain diameters within the particles of different samples ranged from 10 nm to 10 mm. To avoid potential artifacts, samples were prepared without use of heat treatment, and measurements were cond...

Yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystals (Y-TZP) have proved to be important structural ceramics. High strength and fracture toughness make them attractive candidates for a number of demanding applications. It was established that these advantageous properties are strongly influenced by the ceramic microstructure [1]. The relationships between microstructure and mechanical properties ...

The characterization and measurement of grain structures is of great importance to materials scientists because not only does grain size strongly affect the mechanical properties, but it also has an influence on physical properties, surface properties and phase transformations [1]. The ability to locate the grain boundaries in materials is critical for a wide number of applications, e.g. proces...

The grain size effects on the bremsstrahlung emission spectrum due to nonrelativisitc electrondust grain collisions are investigated in dusty plasmas. Using the Born approximation for the initial and final states of the projectile electron, the bremsstranhlung radiation cross section is obtained as a function of the grain size, dust charge, Debye radius, collision energy, and radiation photon e...