Nitrogen Fertilization and Cultivar Interactions Determine Maize Yield and Grain Mineral Composition in Calcareous Soil under Semiarid Conditions.

Identifying the contributions of climate factors and fertilization to maize yield is significant for the assessment of climate change impacts on maize production under semiarid conditions. This experiment was conducted with an overall objective to find how N fertilization and cultivar interactions along with climatic conditions determine the mineral composition and maize yield responses of four divergent maize cultivars grown under eight different fertilization levels. The results showed that element contents were significantly affected by year (Y), cultivar (C), N fertilization, and N × C interaction. The element contents of grains were mainly influenced by N rate or N × C interactions. The results showed that maize yield was significantly affected by year (Y), genotype (G), N fertilization (N), and Y × G × N interaction. These results implied that the maize yield was significantly affected by changes in genotypes and environments. Overall, our findings are a result of the interactions of genetic, environmental, and agronomic management factors. Future studies could evaluate more extreme plant densities, N fertilizer levels, and environments to further enhance our understanding of management effects on the mineral composition and maize yield in calcareous soil.

Are We Modular Lying Cues Detectors? The Answer Is "Yes, Sometimes".

We quickly form first impressions about newly encountered people guiding our subsequent behaviour (approach, avoidance). Such instant judgments might be innate and automatic, being performed unconsciously and independently to other cognitive processes. Lying detection might be subject to such a modular process. Unfortunately, numerous studies highlighted problems with lying detection paradigms such as high error rates and learning effects. Additionally, humans should be motivated doing both detecting others' lies and disguising own lies. Disguising own lies might even be more challenging than detecting other people's lies. Thus, when trying to disguise cheating behaviour, liars might display a mixture of disguising (fake) trust cues and uncontrolled lying cues making the interpretation of the expression difficult (perceivers are guessing). In two consecutive online studies, we tested whether seeing an increasing amount (range 0-4) of lying cues (LC) and non-lying cues (NLC) on a standard face results in enhanced guessing behaviour (studies 1 and 2) and that enhanced guessing is accompanied by slower responding (study 2). Results showed that pronounced guessing and slowest responding occurred for faces with an intermediate number and not with the highest number of LC and NLC. In particular, LC were more important than NLC to uncertain lying decisions. Thus, only a few LC may interfere with automatic processing of lying detection (irrespective of NLC), probably because too little lying cue information is yet available.

The vibrational and configurational entropy of α-brass.

The heat capacities of two samples of a fcc Cu-Zn alloy with the composition CuZn15 and CuZn34 were measured from T = 5 K to 573 K using relaxation and differential scanning calorimetry. Below ∼90 K, they are characterised by negative excess heat capacities deviating from ideal mixing by up to -0.20 and -0.44 J · mol-1 · K-1 for CuZn15 and CuZn34, respectively. The excess heat capacities produce excess vibrational entropies, which are less negative compared to the excess entropy available from the literature. Since the literature entropy data contain both, the configurational and the vibrational part of the entropy, the difference is attributed to the excess configurational entropy. The thermodynamics of different short-range ordered samples was also investigated. The extent of the short-range order had no influence on the heat capacity below T = 300 K. Above T = 300 K, where the ordering changed during the measurement, the heat capacity depended strongly on the thermal history of the samples. From these data, the heat and entropy of ordering was calculated. The results on the vibrational entropy of this study were also used to test a relationship for estimating the excess vibrational entropy of mixing.