ABSTRACT Forage cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica Mill) is an important forage resource in the Northeast region of Brazil due to its adaptation edaphoclimatic conditions region, mainly drought periods. The objective this work was assess effects diets with combined different sources fibers on dry matter and water intakes, digestibility, microbial protein production, balance nitrogen compounds, perfor...

The cacti are well-known desert plants, widely recognized by their specialized growth form and essentially leafless condition. Pereskia, a group of 17 species with regular leaf development and function, is generally viewed as representing the "ancestral cactus," although its placement within Cactaceae has remained uncertain. Here we present a new hypothesis of phylogenetic relationships at the ...

Artificial environmental conditions in the tissue culture influence growth and induce aberration from the characteristic organization pattern. As CAM plants, cacti are particularly susceptible to altered growth environment. In vitro propagated Mammillaria plants spontaneously produce callus which regenerates normal and hyperhydric shoots without the addition of any growth regulator. In order to...

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) has been considered as a promising sensing technique to detect low-level analytes. However, its practical application was hindered owing to the lack of uniform SERS substrates for ultrasensitive and reproducible assay. Herein, inspired by the natural cactus structure, we developed a cactus-like 3D nanostructure with uniform and high-density hotspots for ...

In an effort to continue the development of a sterile insect release program against the invasive cactus moth, Cactoblastis cactorum (Berg), we released partially sterile males alone or in combination with fully sterile females at a 5:1 or 10:1 (treated:fertile) overßooding ratio inside large Þeld cages containing Opuntia stricta Haworth (Haworth) host plants. Insects were allowed to mate and l...

In this paper we derive a model and a method suitable for robot vision to determine the 3D–positions of single flat, not entirely convex objects from crowded scenes holding many fuzzy similar shaped objects. Preferably our approach aims to objects from natural scenes. We propose to use a fast feature based stereo algorithm to match feature positions we compute from the distance transform and th...

Survivable systems—that is, systems that can continue to provide service despite failures, intrusions, and other threats—are increasingly needed in a wide variety of civilian and military application areas. As a step toward realizing such systems, this paper advocates the use of redundancy and adaptation to build survivable services that can provide core functionality for implementing survivabi...

We introduce mirror symmetric circular planar electrical networks as the mirror symmetric subset of circular planar electrical networks studied by Curtis-Ingerman-Morrow [CIM] and Colin de Verdière-Gitler-Vertigan [dVGV]. These mirror symmetric networks can be viewed as type B generalization of circular planar electrical networks. We show that most of the properties of circular planar electrica...