Timber harvesting on steep terrain has always been, and will remain, a challenge in terms of economic viability, safety and environmental performance. For almost a century motor-manual felling coupled with cable yarding has been the most appropriate harvesting system, but new technologies and innovations have led to machines and systems being developed that are modernising the way we operate on...

multistage and semi-mechanized harvesting of rice in khouzestan province, iran, causes much loss. depending on available facilities and conditions, either spike-tooth or rasp-bar cylinders are employed with either direct or indirect combine harvesting methods. the present research studied the effect of these different harvesting methods on the amount of losses in two rice varieties in 2001-2002...

Fine grain products are harvested in two manual and mechanized forms. Nowadays, common combine harvesters are used, but fine grain products such as Rapeseed, Sesame and Sorghum cannot be harvested with conventional heads of combine harvesters due to the excessive grain loss in the head of the combine. Therefore, the necessity of design and fabricating machines and heads of combine harvesters be...

BACKGROUND To determine the possible genotoxic effect of exposure to the smoke generated by biomass burning on workers involved in manual sugar cane harvesting. METHODS The frequency of micronuclei in exfoliated buccal cells and peripheral blood lymphocytes was determined in sugarcane workers in the Barretos region of Brazil, during the harvest season and compared to a control population, com...

Recent new technologies enabling the genetic modification of human embryonic stem cells (hESC) and the derivation of patient-specific induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS cells) provide attractive opportunities for the development of new cell-based bioassays. Both technologies critically depend on the selection of pluripotent cell colonies. AVISO’s CellCelector enables automated colony detection...

Crystallization from lipidic mesophase matrices is a promising route to diffraction-quality crystals and structures of membrane proteins. The microfluidic approach reported here eliminates two bottlenecks of the standard mesophase-based crystallization protocols: (i) manual preparation of viscous mesophases and (ii) manual harvesting of often small and fragile protein crystals. In the approach ...

Manual time and motion studies are the most common method to collect forest harvesting machine performance data. However, manual methods require skilled observers and are generally limited in duration, making it difficult to obtain a sufficiently large sample for machines with long cycle times such as skidders and forwarders. Of the automated data capture techniques studied previously, few have...

Agricultural workers are exposed to various risks, including chemical agents, noise, and many other factors. One of the most characteristic and least known risk factors is constituted by the microclimatic conditions in the different phases of work (in field, in greenhouse, etc). A typical condition is thermal stress due to high temperatures during harvesting operations in open fields or in gree...