The USGS-NPS partnership meeting at Effigy Mounds National Monument on October 24-30, 2024, united scientists, tribal representatives, and NPS staff for collaborative sampling and discussions. This event emphasized integrating traditional ecological knowledge with scientific practices while honoring tribal protocols in environmental research and strengthening partnerships.

A local man shares his testimony, endures persecution and encourages others in the Near East to stand firm.

Local OM worker plants a church in a conservative Muslim village and sees fruit after ten years of prayer.

OM Ecuador experiences God’s awesome hand as they witness the transformation in people’s lives on Santay Island.

(EMAILWIRE.COM, October 30, 2024 ) Due to growing water scarcity and environmental worries, the rainwater harvesting market offers a substantial potential for expansion. The increasing importance of alternative water sources is expected to lead to a rise in the use of rainwater harvesting systems...

Inexpensive and very healthy zucchini as a food alternative for dinner - sliced and cubed zucchini as a rice substitute.

Farmscape for October 30, 2024

Two research projects approved through the Swine Health Information Center's Wean-to-Harvest Biosecurity Research Program will focus on reducing the risk of swine transport vehicle contamination at hog processing plants and at deadstock disposal sites.
The Swine Health Information Center’s Wean-to-Harvest Biosecurity Research Program, funded in collaboration with the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research and Pork Checkoff, has approved funding for research intended to help improve transport vehicle biosecurity where the transport trailer interfaces with the harvest facility and at the deadstock disposal site.
SHIC Associate Director Dr. Lisa Becton says two projects will be conducted by the University of Minnesota.

Quote-Dr. Lisa Becton-Swine Health Information Center:
The first project is quantifying trailer contamination rates at the harvest plant interface.
The goal of this project is to gather and analyze data on viral contamination rates in trailers and this will be looking at a 12-month period over time at the plant interface.
It's going to assess the rates of PED, PRRS and Senaca Valey Virus and the goal is to understand what are the epidemiology factors related to trailers and unloading for the ability to either increase or decrease contamination rates, to understand what happens at that interface and then determine what are things that we can do to mitigate those risks.
The second project is going to be assessing viral contamination of mortality disposal structures at wean to harvest farms.
It's going to describe what the current procedures are for disposal and assess viral contamination in the environment around those containers but also to assess what is happening at these disposal structures such as compost and dead box and to detect and test what could be a decontamination strategy.
Again, the goal is to help identify risks and to develop a strategy to mitigate those risks.

Dr. Becton says the two projects will be conducted over a 12 month span to take into account seasonal changes and how those changes can drive the risk of disease introduction.
Information on this work can be found at swinehealth.org.
For more visit Farmscape.Ca.
Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is produced on behalf of North America’s pork producers

Craig Neilson and Ray Matthews recently returned from North Carolina to learn about using DSpace, ePrints, and LOCKSS-Docs for providing permanent public access to state publications. OCLC has announced it is teaming with Google and MIT to harvest DSpace OAI-PMH metadata to turn it into a format which can be indexed and searched by Google. This will enable information about publications stored by governments and universities using this open source institutional archiving system to be readily retrievable.

Fruit harvesting is one of the trickiest parts of the agricultural spectrum. The fruit not only has to be selected when it’s at the ideal ripeness, but also has to be picked very carefully so it doesn’t bruise or suffer damage. Now Israeli made Tevel fruit harvesting bots promise to revolutionize the process of fruit harvesting in a big way. The technology, which integrates A.I. based computer vision with clever vacuum based drone technology, offers fruit farmers a perfect way...

The post Tevel Autonomous Fruit Harvesting Bots – produce pickers face a fruitless future appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

There is a wind farm on I-65 that evokes a sense of longing– for peace, for stillness, for quiet. What does it mean for us, in a busy and loud world, to stay engaged, to seek out that stillness, to harvest this like the wind turbines harvest air?

How can I be more of a part of the work of Christ and His Church here on earth?

Should a human life be ended just so we can harvest their organs for another person's use? It might be closer than you think!

Farmers say the National Trust has damaged heathland on the Long Mynd.

Aim/Purpose: Vis-à-vis management of crisis and disaster situations, this paper focuses on important use cases of social media functions, such as information collection & dissemination, disaster event identification & monitoring, collaborative problem-solving mechanism, and decision-making process. With the prolific utilization of disaster-based ontological framework, a strong disambiguation system is realized, which further enhances the searching capabilities of the user request and provides a solution of unambiguous in nature. Background: Even though social media is information-rich, it has created a challenge for deriving a decision in critical crisis-related cases. In order to make the whole process effective and avail quality decision making, sufficiently clear semantics of such information is necessary, which can be supplemented through employing semantic web technologies. Methodology: This paper evolves a disaster ontology-based system availing a framework model for monitoring uses of social media during risk and crisis-related events. The proposed system monitors a discussion thread discovering whether it has reached its peak or decline after its root in the social forum like Twitter. The content in social media can be accessed through two typical ways: Search Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and Streaming APIs. These two kinds of API processes can be used interchangeably. News content may be filtered by time, geographical region, keyword occurrence and availability ratio. With the support of disaster ontology, domain knowledge extraction and comparison against all possible concepts are availed. Besides, the proposed method makes use of SPARQL to disambiguate the query and yield the results which produce high precision. Contribution: The model provides for the collection of crisis-related temporal data and decision making through semantic mapping of entities over concepts in a disaster ontology we developed, thereby disambiguating potential named entities. Results of empirical testing and analysis indicate that the proposed model outperforms similar other models. Findings: Crucial findings of this research lie in three aspects: (1) Twitter streams and conventional news media tend to offer almost similar types of news coverage for a specified event, but the rate of distribution among topics/categories differs. (2) On specific events such as disaster, crisis or any emergency situations, the volume of information that has been accumulated between the two news media stands divergent and filtering the most potential information poses a challenging task. (3) Relational mapping/co-occurrence of terms has been well designed for conventional news media, but due to shortness and sparseness of tweets, there remains a bottleneck for researchers. Recommendations for Practitioners: Though metadata avails collaborative details of news content and it has been conventionally used in many areas like information retrieval, natural language processing, and pattern recognition, there is still a lack of fulfillment in semantic aspects of data. Hence, the pervasive use of ontology is highly suggested that build semantic-oriented metadata for concept-based modeling, information flow searching and knowledge exchange. Recommendation for Researchers: The strong recommendation for researchers is that instead of heavily relying on conventional Information Retrieval (IR) systems, one can focus more on ontology for improving the accuracy rate and thereby reducing ambiguous terms persisting in the result sets. In order to harness the potential information to derive the hidden facts, this research recommends clustering the information from diverse sources rather than pruning a single news source. It is advisable to use a domain ontology to segregate the entities which pose ambiguity over other candidate sets thus strengthening the outcome. Impact on Society: The objective of this research is to provide informative summarization of happenings such as crisis, disaster, emergency and havoc-based situations in the real world. A system is proposed which provides the summarized views of such happenings and corroborates the news by interrelating with one another. Its major task is to monitor the events which are very booming and deemed important from a crowd’s perspective. Future Research: In the future, one shall strive to help to summarize and to visualize the potential information which is ranked high by the model.

Our audio tour through Charleston’s West Side continues with a community gardener, an antique collector, a symphony clarinetist, a deli owner, and a retired pro basketball player. Plus, a visit to a local auto shop, a barbershop, a Girl Scout meeting, and Mary C Snow West Side Elementary.

Special thanks this episode to West Virginia State Folklorist Emily Hilliard, The West Virginia Folklife Program at the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

With 40-45 calories per slice (serving size two slices, 80-90 calories), Healthy Habits includes the brand's first keto-friendly variety – Healthy Habits White made with Whole Grain – a soft and fluffy white bread with six net carbs per slice (serving size two slices, 12 net carbs).

Riviana Foods Inc. announced the signing of a definitive agreement to purchase the assets of InHarvest, Inc. which specializes in the production, marketing and sale of premium specialty rice, quinoa and grains.

Founded in 1983, Ancient Harvest pioneered the sale of quinoa in the US and continues to be a leading brand of value-added, plant-based products including gluten-free pasta, polenta and a brand of quinoa. 

The newly acquired Cooper Street Bakery will operate independently from the Cooper Street Snacks brand but will play a crucial role in supporting the company’s expanding product lines.

PHT Growth Fund LP is a new investment vehicle established to make strategic acquisitions and investments in temperature-controlled food supply chains, with a mission to support the movement of fresh produce from field to table.

The company transformed a portion of its office space into a laboratory and pilot plant in six months.

New plant-based snack features smooth, creamy taste and green peas as first ingredient.

The Kroger Co. has announced the launch of Harvest Apple, a new limited edition Private Selection line of products spicing up fall with a fresh new twist.

The introduction of HarvestEdge Oro comes as the pizza market continues to expand, with the line helping operators tap into new areas.

The bite-sized snacks are filled with hemp hearts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, chai, flax, and quinoa, and are Manitoba’s debut into the snacking category.

The brand is undergoing a packaging redesign for its three Harvest Snaps flavors: Honey Dijon, Loaded Taco, and White Cheddar Jalapeno.

The snacks consist of a baked base of green peas and are flavored with a touch of sweetness and heat.

New collection, available only at Williams Sonoma, will focus on mindfulness of ingredients and sustainable sourcing to address growing consumer demand for food products that accommodate various dietary and lifestyle preferences.

Krispy Kreme's Golden Harvest Collection is available beginning today for a limited time at participating shops.

Harpoon Brewery, the maker of New England's Original IPA, and L.L.Bean, the iconic American outdoor retailer, announced the release of the Harpoon x L.L.Bean Harvest Lager. 

The Austin, Texas-based CBD manufacturer has officially dropped prices on a significant portion of their product line-up. Premium Full Spectrum, Broad Spectrum, and CBD Isolate products at very competitive prices.

25% OFF Site Wide with Code STPAT25

Asheville Agrihood's 1st Annual HarvestFest Aims to Nourish Community for Producers and Consumers of Farmers Market Produce

The farming season in the United States is in full swing, with crops being planted in the spring, tended throughout the summer, and harvested in early fall. When it's harvesting time, consumers usually focus on fresh produce, but what about canned food that provides produce year-round?

The brand is undergoing a packaging redesign for its three Harvest Snaps flavors: Honey Dijon, Loaded Taco, and White Cheddar Jalapeno.

A preview of the 2024 Black Harvest Film Festival.

Get Solitaire Grand Harvest free coins now, new links added daily. Only tested and working links, complete with a guide on how to redeem the links.

September's partial lunar eclipse will be the first and only time the Moon ducks into Earth's umbral shadow in 2024. The Moon also occults Saturn and hides members of the Pleiades this month.

The post Harvest Moon Takes a Quick Dip in Earth's Shadow for a Partial Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

This past Monday, we discussed embroidering the larger round elements on Harvest Hues, and today, we’re going to follow that …

Welcome back to Harvest Hues, our current stitch-along here on Needle ‘n Thread, where we are exploring the embroidering of …

Today, we’re going to finish up the embroidery on the sample leaf for Harvest Hues. If you’re just joining in, …

Good morning! Today, we’re going to start the finishing process for Harvest Hues – yippee!! Due to the length of …

Yesterday, we began the finishing process on Harvest Hues, and today, we are going to tie up the project! In …

Nonphotochemical quenching (NPQ) is a mechanism of regulating light harvesting that protects the photosynthetic apparatus from photodamage by dissipating excess absorbed excitation energy as heat. In higher plants, the major light-harvesting antenna complex (LHCII) of photosystem (PS) II is directly involved in NPQ. The aggregation of LHCII is proposed to be involved in quenching. However, the lack of success in isolating native LHCII aggregates has limited the direct interrogation of this process. The isolation of LHCII in its native state from thylakoid membranes has been problematic because of the use of detergent, which tends to dissociate loosely bound proteins, and the abundance of pigment–protein complexes (e.g. PSI and PSII) embedded in the photosynthetic membrane, which hinders the preparation of aggregated LHCII. Here, we used a novel purification method employing detergent and amphipols to entrap LHCII in its natural states. To enrich the photosynthetic membrane with the major LHCII, we used Arabidopsis thaliana plants lacking the PSII minor antenna complexes (NoM), treated with lincomycin to inhibit the synthesis of PSI and PSII core proteins. Using sucrose density gradients, we succeeded in isolating the trimeric and aggregated forms of LHCII antenna. Violaxanthin- and zeaxanthin-enriched complexes were investigated in dark-adapted, NPQ, and dark recovery states. Zeaxanthin-enriched antenna complexes showed the greatest amount of aggregated LHCII. Notably, the amount of aggregated LHCII decreased upon relaxation of NPQ. Employing this novel preparative method, we obtained a direct evidence for the role of in vivo LHCII aggregation in NPQ.