Management is an effective tool for increasing the productivity of Mongolian pine (Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica). This species has been widely planted in China, especially in sandy lands. However, optimization of management practices had not been fully explored. We established a system dynamic model to evaluate the effects of thinning and of manipulation of water supply on the productivity a...

Fruit thinning is defined as the removal of certain flowers or clusters of flowers or individual fruitlets after fruit set and natural dropping have occurred.it improves fruit yield and quality and return bloom for the following year.There are three types of thinning namely:hand,mechanical and chemical.Chemical thinning is the most common type of thinning.Various chemicals are used for thinning...

the following study was conducted at the research station of horticultural sciences (university of tehran, karaj) to investigate the effect of different irrigation levels and fruit site on the stalk upon the traits of: sink-source relationship, yield, and fruit quality in two iranian melon cultivars. the statistical design was a split split-plot of  three replications. treatments consisted of a...

Thinning is a widely used technique to obtain skeleton-like shape features (i.e., centerlines and medial surfaces) from digital binary objects. Conventional thinning algorithms preserve endpoints to provide important geometric information relative to the object to be represented. An alternative strategy is also proposed that preserves isthmuses (i.e., generalization of curve/surface interior po...

A 3D thinning algorithm erodes a 3D binary image layer by layer to extract the skeletons. This paper presents a correction to Ma and Sonka’s thinning algorithm, ‘A fully parallel 3D thinning algorithm and its applications’, which fails to preserve connectivity of 3D objects. We start with Ma and Sonka’s algorithm and examine its verification of connectivity preservation. Our analysis leads to a...

Thinning is a well-known technique for producing skeleton-like shape features from digital binary objects in a topology preserving way. Most of the existing thinning algorithms presuppose that the input images are sampled on orthogonal grids. This paper presents new sufficient conditions for topology preserving reductions working on hexagonal grids (or triangular lattices) and eight new 2D hexa...

Mutations in developmental regulatory genes have been found to be responsible for some cases of congenital heart defects. One such regulatory gene is Gata4, a zinc finger transcription factor. In order to circumvent the early embryonic lethality of Gata4-null embryos and to investigate the role of myocardial Gata4 expression in cardiac development, we used Cre/loxP technology to conditionally d...

Keratoconus has been recognized and investigated for more than 150 years (1). Historically, ophthalmologists have described keratoconus as a bilateral, progressive, non-inflammatory disorder of the cornea that is associated with corneal steepening and thinning (1,2). The Global Panel on Keratoconus and Ectatic Diseases recently stated that ‘abnormal posterior ectasia, abnormal corneal thickness...

an important issue in power generation and petrochemical industries is the monitoring of pipe wall thickness and corrosion/erosion rate. the pipes are usually subject to erosive and/or corrosive environments and any failure could be catastrophic. while periodic manual ultrasonic thickness measurement is the common practice in many industries, in certain cases, where higher accuracies are requir...

Mutant cDNAs coding for dominant-negative forms of the fibroblast growth factor receptors 1 (FGFR-1) and 2 (FGFR-2) that lack tyrosine kinase activity were ligated to a 2.2 kb DNA fragment containing the bovine rhodopsin promoter and used to generate transgenic mice. Six independent lines were generated with the FGFR-1 construct, and five were generated with the FGFR-2 construct. Five of the si...