Producing Enhanced Yield and Nutritional Pigmentation in Lollo Rosso Through Manipulating the Irradiance, Duration, and Periodicity of LEDs in the Visible Region of Light

Pigmented food are an important part of the human diet, and anthocyanins have demonstrable protection against tumor production in mouse models and beneficial effects on human liver chemistry. As such, producing pigmented crops is important for a nutritionally diverse diet. Lollo rosso lettuce is a fast-growing pigmented plant, is rich in phenolic compounds, and represents a suitable system to test optimization strategies for yield and anthocyanin production. High-energy UV wavebands are often used to stimulate increased pigmentation; however, we hypothesized that optimizing visible wavebands would deliver both yield and quality improvements. Growing Lollo rosso under irradiances between 5 and 180 W m–2 using visible waveband LEDs produced 0.4 g fresh weight per W m–2 in the linear portion of the curve between 5 and 40 W m–2 and achieved an approximate asymptote of 20 g fresh weight at around 100–120 W m–2 for yield. Anthocyanin content increased linearly with irradiance. We attempted to optimize the visible wavebands by supplementing half the asymptotic energy for 15 days with supplemental red (R) or blue (B) wavebands in the peaks of photosynthetic activity (430–460 and 630–660 nm). R and B affected rosette morphology with no significant impact on yield, but B significantly increased anthocyanin content by 94% compared to R. We therefore focused on further optimizing B by shortening the daily duration of supplemental B. The minimum B treatment that lacked significant pigment induction was 1 h. We hypothesized that short durations would be more active at different times in the diurnal cycle. Supplemental B was applied for 2 h at four different times. A night-break with B produced the highest yield and anthocyanin content. Our research demonstrates new ways to efficiently use readily available LEDs within the PAR wavebands to increase both yield and crop quality in controlled environment agriculture.

Secondary dips and the asymptotics

We point out how to detect experimentally the energy region where asymptotics start to manifest themselves by relating the appearance of the secondary dips in the differential cross-section of elastic scattering [Formula: see text] with the beginning of the asymptotic energy region. The consideration relies on differential characteristics. The impact parameter picture of proton–proton interactions is used.

Energy Optimization in Cryptographic Protocols for the Cloud

In this chapter, we study the energy consumption by various modern cryptographic protocols for the cloud from the algorithmic perspective. The two categories of protocols we consider are (1) hash functions and (2) symmetric key encryption protocols. We identify various parameters that moderate energy consumption of these hashes and protocols. Our work is directed towards redesigning or modifying these algorithms to make them consume lesser energy. As a first step, we try to determine the applicability of the asymptotic energy complexity model by Roy on these hashes and protocols. Specifically, we try to observe whether parallelizing the access of blocks of data in these algorithms reduces their energy consumption based on the energy model. Our results confirm the applicability of the energy model on these hashes and protocols. Our work is motivated by the importance of cryptographic hashes and symmetric key protocols for the cloud. Hence the design of more energy efficient hashes and protocols will contribute in reducing the cloud energy consumption that is continuously increasing.

On Energy Optimization in Cryptographic Hash Functions and Symmetric Key Protocols

In this work we study the energy consumption by various modern secured hash functions (MD2, MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-2) and modern symmetric key encryption protocols (Blowfish, DES, 3DES, and AES) from the algorithmic perspective. We identify various parameters that moderate energy consumption of these hashes and protocols. Our work is directed towards redesigning or modifying these algorithms to make them consume lesser energy. As a first step, we try to determine the applicability of the asymptotic energy complexity model by Roy et. al. on these hashes and protocols. Specifically, we try to observe whether parallelizing the access of blocks of data in these algorithms reduces their energy consumption based on the energy model. Our results confirm the applicability of the energy model on these hashes and protocols. Our work is motivated by the relevance and importance of cryptographic hashes and symmetric key protocols for modern ICT (Information and Communication Technology), and ICT enabled industry to keep them protected from dynamically changing threat scenarios. Hence the design of more energy efficient hashes and protocols will definitely contribute in reducing the ICT energy consumption that is continuously increasing.

Energy spectrum of black holes: A new view

Energy of a black hole is usually quantized by invoking some area quantization scheme after expressing the energy in terms of the horizon area. However, in this approach one has to quantize the local and asymptotic energy of the black hole separately and the two results do not manifest any physical correspondence with each other. Here, as opposed to this practice, we find the unique energy spectrum of black holes by adopting a top-down approach. The physical links among the underlying quantum theory, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of the black hole horizon play the central role in determining the energy spectrum. The energy spectrum that we obtain explicitly reveals the correspondence between asymptotic and local observations through the presence of the surface gravity of the horizon as a parameter in the spectrum, rather than being expressed as a function of area and consequently getting quantized in the usual approach. Thus, our result presents a new view as far as black hole energy quantization is concerned. The calculations are performed using the quantum geometric description of black hole horizons as laid down by loop quantum gravity.

Study on Coulomb explosions of ion mixtures

The paper presents a theoretical work on the dynamics of Coulomb explosion for spherical nanoplasmas composed by two different ion species. Particular attention has been dedicated to study the energy spectra of the ions with the larger charge-to-mass ratio. The connection between the formation of shock shells and the energy spread of the ions has been the object of a detailed analysis, showing that under particular conditions the width of the asymptotic energy spectrum tends to become very narrow, which leads to a multi-valued ion phase space. The conditions to generate a quasi-monoenergetic ion spectrum have been rigorously demonstrated and verified by numerical simulations using a technique that, exploiting the spherical symmetry of the problem, allows one to obtain very accurate and precise results.