Applications of dry chain technology to maintain high seed viability in tropical climates.

Seed storage life in tropical areas is shortened by high humidity and temperature and the general inaccessibility to dehumidifying and refrigeration systems, resulting in rapid decreases in seed viability in storage as well as a high incidence of fungal and insect infestations. The dry chain, based on rapid and deep drying of seeds after harvest followed by packaging in moisture-proof containers, has been proposed as an effective method to maintain seed quality during medium-term storage in humid climates, even without refrigeration. In addition, seed drying with zeolite drying beads can be more effective and economical than sun or heated-air drying under these warm, humid conditions.

Non-wounding contact-based Inoculation of fruits with fungal pathogens in postharvest.

Background: Fungal pathogens significantly impact the quality of fruits and vegetables at different stages of the supply chain, leading to substantial food losses. Understanding how these persistent fungal infections occur and progress in postharvest conditions is essential to developing effective control strategies.

Results: In this study, we developed a reliable and consistent inoculation protocol to simulate disease spread from infected fruits to adjacent healthy fruits during postharvest storage.

Argument-based inductive logics, with coverage of compromised perception.

Formal deductive logic, used to express and reason over declarative, axiomatizable content, captures, we now know, essentially all of what is known in mathematics and physics, and captures as well the details of the proofs by which such knowledge has been secured. This is certainly impressive, but deductive logic alone cannot enable rational adjudication of arguments that are at variance (however much additional information is added). After affirming a fundamental directive, according to which argumentation should be the basis for human-centric AI, we introduce and employ both a deductive and-crucially-an inductive .

Attentional Strategies and the Transition From Subitizing to Estimation in Numerosity Perception.

The common view of the transition between subitizing and numerosity estimation regimes is that there is a hard bound on the subitizing range, and beyond this range, people estimate. However, this view does not adequately address the behavioral signatures of enumeration under conditions of attentional load or in the immediate post-subitizing range. The possibility that there might exist a numerosity range where both processes of subitizing and estimation operate in conjunction has so far been ignored.