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The Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) is one of the largest rice-growing areas in Vietnam, and exports a huge amount of rice products to destinations around the world. Multi-dike protection systems have been built to prevent flooding, and have supported agricultural intensification since the early 1990s. Semi-dike and full-dike systems have been used to grow double and triple rice, respectively. Only a small number of studies have been conducted to evaluate the water quality in the VMD. This study aimed to analyze the spatiotemporal variation of water quality inside the dike-protected area. Surface water samples were collected in the dry and wet seasons at 35 locations. We used multivariate statistical analyses to examine various water quality parameters. The mean concentrations of COD, NH4+, NO3&minus, PO43&minus, EC, and turbidity were significantly higher in water samples inside the full-dike system than in water samples from outside the full-dike systems and inside the semi-dike systems in both seasons. High concentrations of PO43&minus, were detected in most of the primary canals along which residential, tourist areas and local markets were settled. However, NO3&minus, was mainly found to be higher in secondary canals, where chemical fertilizers were used for rice intensification inside the dike system. Water control infrastructures are useful for preventing flood hazards. However, this has an adverse effect on maintaining water quality in the study area.

With the rapid advancement of radiation hard imaging technology, space-based remote sensing instruments are becoming not only more sophisticated but are also generating substantially more amounts of data for rapid processing. For applications that rely on data transmitted from a planetary probe to a relay spacecraft to Earth, alteration or discontinuity in data over a long transmission distance is likely to happen. Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) is one of the most well-known package error check techniques in sensor networks for critical applications. However, serial CRC computation could be a bottleneck of the throughput in such systems. In this work, we design, implement, and validate an efficient hybrid look-up-table and matrix transformation algorithm for high throughput parallel computational unit to speed-up the process of CRC computation using both CPU and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with comparison of both methods.

Current treatment for invasive fungal diseases is limited to three classes of antifungal drugs: azoles, polyenes, and echinocandins. The most recently introduced antifungal class, the echinocandins, was first approved nearly 30 years ago. The limited antifungal drug portfolio is rapidly losing its clinical utility due to the inexorable rise in the incidence of invasive fungal infections and the emergence of multidrug resistant (MDR) fungal pathogens. New antifungal therapeutic agents and novel approaches are desperately needed. Here, we detail attempts to exploit the antifungal and immunoregulatory properties of host defense peptides (HDPs) in the design and evaluation of new antifungal therapeutics and discuss historical limitations and recent advances in this quest.

Along with rapid population growth in Vietnam, there is an increasing dependence on groundwater for various activities. An Giang province is known to be one of the agricultural intensification areas of The Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD). This study aimed to evaluate the spatiotemporal variation of groundwater quality for a period of ten years from 2009 to 2018 in An Giang. The weighted groundwater quality index (GWQI) was developed based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy-AHP) for assigning weighted parameters. The results show that that shallow wells in the Northeast and Southeast regions of An Giang were mostly categorized under &ldquo, bad water&rdquo, quality with high arsenic (As) concentration over the years partly due to huge amounts of sediment deposition in monsoon season. Overall, the reason for the poor groundwater quality in An Giang was the combined effect of both natural and human activities. On the other hand, we detected high values of GWQI links with high As concentration in areas where people extract more groundwater for irrigation. Temporal variation of GWQI suggested that groundwater quality at eight wells has improved from 2009 to 2018 in the wet season as compared to the dry season. The reason behind the improvement of groundwater quality during wet season was the decrease in river discharge, which causes less deposition of suspended solids near the flood plains. Moreover, the filling of unused wells can reduce the movement of pollutants from unused wells to groundwater aquifers. Although there was not sufficient evidence to show the relationship between As and sediment concentration, the temporal reduction trend in river discharge and suspended solids was detected in An Giang. The understanding of groundwater quality can help policymakers protect and manage limited water resources in the long-term.

Will soil organic carbon (SOC) and yields increase for conservation management systems in tropical zones in response to the next 100 years? To answer the question, the Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model was used to study the effects of climate change, cropping systems, conservation agriculture (CA) and conservation tillage management practices on SOC and crop productivity in Kampong Cham, Cambodia. The EPIC model was successfully calibrated and validated for crop yields, biomass, SOC and nitrogen based on field data from a five-year field experiment. Historical weather (1994&ndash, 2013) was used for baseline assessment versus mid-century (2046&ndash, 2064) and late-century (2081&ndash, 2100) climate projections generated by the Geophysical Fluids Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) CM2.1 global climate model. The simulated results showed that upland rice yield would increase the most under the B1 scenario in mid-century for all treatments, followed by soybean and maize. Cassava yield only increased under CA treatment when cultivated as a continuous primary crop. Carbon sequestration was more sensitive to cropping systems and crop rotation than climate change. The results indicated that the rotated CA primary crop (maize) systems should be prioritized for SOC sequestration as well as for increasing crop productivity. In addition, rice systems may increase SOC compared to soybean and cassava.