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Remote sensing has been widely used to estimate crop area and production. Forecasting the crop area year-by-year is the key step to realizing crop production forecasting. In this letter, a methodology to calculate rice area using NOAA AVHRR and Landsat TM data is introduced. The rice area in 1992 was estimated using Landsat TM data.`Rice' pixels in 1992 and 1994 were calculated and the rice area change trend determined using NOAA AVHRR data for the two years. With a linear statistical model, the rice area of 1994 was forecast. Its accuracy was 84´5 per cent compared to the data released by the Agricultural Investigation Team(AIT) of Hubei province. The same method was applied to estimate the rice area of 1995. The accuracy was 91´6 per cent compared with AIT data.

The negative-geotaxis climbing assay is used to efficiently study aging and neurodegeneration in Drosophila. To make it suitable for large-scale study, a method called the rapid iterative negative geotaxis (RING) assay has been established by simultaneously photographing the climbing of multiple groups of fl ies when they are manually tapped down in test tubes. Here, we automated the assay by using a well-controlled electric motor to drive the tapping, and a homemade program to analyze the climbing height of flies. Using the automated RING (aRING) assay, we found that the climbing ability of a strain of wild-type fl ies, males in particular, declined rapidly before day 21 after eclosion, but slowly from day 21 to 35. We also found that the expression of arctic mutant Aβ 42 accelerated the age-dependent decline in the climbing ability of fl ies. Moreover, using aRING, we examined the effect of third chromosome defi ciencies on the accelerated locomotor decline in Aβ 42 -expressing fl ies, and isolated 7 suppressors and 15 enhancers.