Root caps provide a protective layer in front of the meristem that protects the meristem from abrasion by soil particles. The continuous production and sloughing of the root cap cells may be an adaptation to decrease the friction at the soil-root interface by acting as a low-friction lining to the channel formed by the root. Experiments were performed which provide the first direct evidence tha...

We propose to “boost” the speed of communication and computation by immersing the computing environment into a medium whose index of refraction is smaller than one, thereby trespassing the speedof-light barrier. The Church-Turing and the Cook-Karp theses, as well as other, more general limits on computation, are under permanent “scrutiny” [cf. e.g., Davis (1958, p 11) or Deutsch (1985, p. 5)] b...

A cone penetrometer is widely used in tillage and off-road mobility research as an indicator of soil strength and density characteristics. Light-weight, manually operated units are especially useful in recording cone index determination at remote field locations. An electronically hand-pushed soil penetrometer with a microcontroller-based data logging system was designed and fabricated to provi...

We demonstrate that the pattern forming partial differential equation derived from the auxin distribution model proposed by Meyerowitz, Traas, and others gives rise to all spiral phyllotaxis properties observed on plants. We show how the advancing pushed pattern front chooses spiral families enumerated by Fibonacci sequences with all attendant self-similar properties, a new amplitude invariant ...

Cryogenically cooled solid-state lasers promise a revolution in power scalability while maintaining a good beam quality because of significant improvements in efficiency and thermo-optic properties. This is particularly true for Yb lasers because of their relatively low quantum defect and relatively broadband absorption even at cryogenic temperatures. Thermo-optic properties of host materials, ...

This paper discusses the implementation of imrestaurant(), a MATLAB function for feature-based restaurant logo recognition. The algorithm works by first applying SIFT to a logo database and then creating a hierarchical vocabulary tree using K-means clustering. The input to the algorithm is a photograph of an image logo, which is first filtered to reduce noise. Then SIFT is applied to the input ...