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This paper presents the way durability has been introduced to steel fiber reinforced concrete in Taiwan. It is generally acknowledged that steel fibers are added to improve the toughness, abrasion resistance, and impact strength of concrete. However, a locally developed mixture design method, the densified mixture design algorithm (DMDA), was applied to solve not only the entanglement or balling problem of steel fibers in concrete or to produce steel fiber reinforced self-consolidating concrete (SFRSCC) with excellent flow-ability, but also to increase the durability by reduction in the cement paste content. By dense packing of the aggregates and with the aid of pozzolanic material and superplasticizer (SP), concrete can flow honey-like with less entanglement of steel fibers. Such SFRSCC has already been successfully applied in several projects, such as construction of a low radiation waste container, bus station pavement, road deck panel, and two art statues. So it is recommended that the SFRSCC can be used for improving the performance of ordinary steel fiber reinforced concrete in many ways and should be considered for increasing the lifecycle of a concrete structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  With the completion of the rice genome sequencing project, the next major challenge is the large-scale determination of gene function. As an important crop and a model organism, rice provides major insights into gene functions important for crop growth or production. Phenomics with detailed information about tagged populations provides a good tool for functional genomics analysis. By a T-DNA insertional mutagenesis approach, we have generated a rice mutant population containing 55,000 promoter trap and gene activation or knockout lines. Approximately 20,000 of these lines have known integration sites. The T0 and T1 plants were grown in net “houses” for two cropping seasons each year since 2003, with the mutant phenotypes recorded. Detailed data describing growth and development of these plants, in 11 categories and 65 subcategories, over the entire four-month growing season are available in a searchable database, along with the genetic segregation information and flanking sequence data. With the detailed data from more than 20,000 T1 lines and 12 plants per line, we estimated the mutation rates of the T1 population, as well the frequency of the dominant T0 mutants. The correlations among different mutation phenotypes are also calculated. Together, the information about mutant lines, their integration sites, and the phenotypes make this collection, the Taiwan Rice Insertion Mutants (TRIM), a good resource for rice phenomics study. Ten T2 seeds per line can be distributed to researchers upon request. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]