This paper discusses the effect of commercial alternative and conventional farming systems on soil quality and farm profitability in several countries. Soil quality and farm profitability are two of several indices that measure agricultural sustainability. These studies indicated that the organic and biodynamic farming systems have soils of higher biological, physical, and in many cases chemica...

Mechanical systems can display topological characteristics similar to that of topological insulators. Here we report a large class of topological mechanical systems related to the BDI symmetry class. These are self-assembled chains of rigid bodies with an inversion centre and no reflection planes. The particle-hole symmetry characteristic to the BDI symmetry class stems from the distinct behavi...

This study aimed to discriminate red wines obtained from organic and biodynamic management by means of proton nuclear magnetic resonance (H-NMR) and metabonomic investigation. Red wines were produced from Sangiovese grapes over the three harvests 2010-2012 from two parcels of a vineyard, managed according to organic (ORG) or biodynamic (BIO) protocol, respectively. Every year the vinifications ...

The research community has focused on technical analyses for a range of distributed network problems, placing less emphasis on the challenge at which Nature excels — design synthesis. Whereas biomimetics copies Nature’s evolutionary “products,” we can also learn from Nature’s “processes” about how evolution produces exquisitely adapted novelty that traditional engineering design would fail to p...

This work presents a multiagent architecture for web educational resources retrieval that may help users to find courses according to their personal and cultural aspects. This multiagent platform includes several kinds of agents with different functionalities. We particularly model the Educational Resources Finder Agent as a Graded BDI Agent, which is in charge of a flexible retrieval of the be...

New helmet-mounted devices (such as night-vision goggles, laser eye protection, etc.) have created new safety hazards for pilots during ejection or high G maneuvering. In order to prevent the resulting head/neck injuries, this study extends the air-bag protection system developed for ground vehicles to a neck mounted system for aircrew personnel. Results, carried out by computer biodynamic simu...