Total Cell Wall and Fiber Concentrations of Perennial Glandular-Haired and Eglandular Medicago Populations

Host-plant resistance in alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is insufficient for control of the alfalfa weevil (Hypera postica) or the potato leafhopper (Empoasca fabae), two of the most important insect pests of alfalfa. Some wild Medicago species, which have erect glandular hairs, possess adequate host-plant resistance for control of both pests. We established a field trial (Wymore silty clay loam) in 1985 to determine the effects of erect glandular hairs on forage quality of several perennial Medicago species. Glandular and eglandular (without erect glandular hairs) plant populations were selected from the diploids, M. prostrata Jacq. and M. glandulosa David, and the tetraploids, M. glutinosa Bieb., M. sativa × M. glutinosa, and M. sativa × M. prostrata. Eglandular M. sativa ’Riley’ and M. sativa subsp. caerulea (Less, ex Ledeb.) Schmalh. were included as controls. Foliar diseases and insects were controlled. Leaves and stems were separated for three harvests in 1985 and one in 1986. The presence of erect glandular hairs did not significantly affect concentrations of neutral or acid detergent fibers, hemicellulose, lignin, or cellulose of leaves or stems within the species or hybrids tested. Neutral and acid detergent fibers and cellulose concentrations were generally lower in stems and higher in leaves of diploids than in corresponding parts of the tetraploid alfalfa cultivar Riley

Adiabatic Dynamics of Superconducting Quantum Point Contacts

Starting from the quasiclassical equations for non-equilibrium Green's functions we derive a simple kinetic equation that governs ac Josephson effect in a superconducting quantum point contact at small bias voltages. In contrast to existing approaches the kinetic equation is valid for voltages with arbitrary time dependence. We use this equation to calculate frequency-dependent linear conductance, and dc $I\!-\!V$ characteristics with and without microwave radiation for resistively shunted quantum point contacts. A novel feature of the $I\!-\!V$ characteristics is the excess current $2I_c/\pi$ appearing at small voltages. An important by-product of our derivation is the analytical proof that the microscopic expression for the current coincides at arbitrary voltages with the expression that follows from the Bogolyubov-de Gennes equations, if one uses appropriate amplitudes of Andreev reflection which contain information about microscopic structure of the superconductors.Comment: 12 Pages, REVTEX 3.0, 3 figures available upon reques

SLayR: Scene Layout Generation with Rectified Flow

We introduce SLayR, Scene Layout Generation with Rectified flow.State-of-the-art text-to-image models achieve impressive results. However, theygenerate images end-to-end, exposing no fine-grained control over the process.SLayR presents a novel transformer-based rectified flow model for layoutgeneration over a token space that can be decoded into bounding boxes andcorresponding labels, which can then be transformed into images using existingmodels. We show that established metrics for generated images are inconclusivefor evaluating their underlying scene layout, and introduce a new benchmarksuite, including a carefully designed repeatable human-evaluation procedurethat assesses the plausibility and variety of generated layouts. In contrast toprevious works, which perform well in either high variety or plausibility, weshow that our approach performs well on both of these axes at the same time. Itis also at least 5x times smaller in the number of parameters and 37% fasterthan the baselines. Our complete text-to-image pipeline demonstrates the addedbenefits of an interpretable and editable intermediate representation.<br

Limiting nutrients for bean production on contrasting soil types of Lake Victoria Crescent of Uganda

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is one of the most important grain legumes in East Africa, but its yield has remained below the genetic potential. Declining soil fertility is among the primary constraints to bean production in most East African bean producing regions. Often existing recommendations are generic and inept to guide farm level decision making on nutrient replenishment. A greenhouse nutrient omission study was conducted to determine the limiting nutrients in three soils of Masaka District, commonly cropped to beans: “Liddugavu” a Phaeozem, “Limyufumyufu” a Cambisol and “Luyinjayinga” an Umbrisol soil. Nine treatments; (i) complete nutrient treatment, (ii) N omitted, (iii) P omitted, (iv) K omitted, (v) Mg omitted, (vi) S omitted, (vii) Ca omitted, (viii) Micronutrients omitted and (ix) control without nutrients. Each treatment was randomly assigned to the three soils and replicated three times using a completely randomised design. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium were limiting nutrients for bean production in Umbrisol (Luyinjayinja) while in Cambisol (‘Limyufumyufu), common bean production was most limited by soil acidity. The performance varied with soil types, with beans grown on the Phaeozem registering greater leaf number and growth, confirming both scientist’s and local farmer’s knowledge that this soil has greater potential than the other two soils

Dissipative Electron Transport through Andreev Interferometers

We consider the conductance of an Andreev interferometer, i.e., a hybrid structure where a dissipative current flows through a mesoscopic normal (N) sample in contact with two superconducting (S) "mirrors". Giant conductance oscillations are predicted if the superconducting phase difference $\phi$ is varied. Conductance maxima appear when $\phi$ is on odd multiple of $\pi$ due to a bunching at the Fermi energy of quasiparticle energy levels formed by Andreev reflections at the N-S boundaries. For a ballistic normal sample the oscillation amplitude is giant and proportional to the number of open transverse modes. We estimate using both analytical and numerical methods how scattering and mode mixing --- which tend to lift the level degeneracy at the Fermi energy --- effect the giant oscillations. These are shown to survive in a diffusive sample at temperatures much smaller than the Thouless temperature provided there are potential barriers between the sample and the normal electron reservoirs. Our results are in good agreement with previous work on conductance oscillations of diffusive samples, which we propose can be understood in terms of a Feynman path integral description of quasiparticle trajectories.Comment: 24 pages, revtex, 12 figures in eps forma