In India, spices have been traditionally used since ancient times, for the preservation of food products as they have been reported to have antiseptic and disinfectant properties. In this respect, a preliminary screening for antimicrobial activities of 35 different Indian spices has been carried out. Of the spices surveyed, the results indicate that clove, cinnamon, bishop's weed, chilli, horse raddish, cumin, tamarind, black cumin, pomegranate seeds, nutmeg, garlic, onion, tejpat, cellary, cambodge, have potent antimicrobial activities against the test organisms Bacillus subtilis (ATCC 6633), Escherichia coli (ATCC 10536) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ATCC 9763). The results also establish the traditional use of spices as food preservatives, disinfectants and antiseptics. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Star anise (Illicium verum Hook f) has been shown to possess potent antimicrobial properties. Chemical studies indicate that a major portion of this antimicrobial property is due to anethole present in the dried fruit. Studies with isolated anethole (compared with standard anethole) indicated that it is effective against bacteria, yeast and fungal strains.

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Currently, studies on leaf anatomy have provided an important source of characters helping taxonomic, systematic, and phylogenetic studies. These studies strongly rely on measurements of characters (such as tissue thickness) and qualitative information (structures description, presence–absence of structures). In this work, we provide a new computational approach that semiautomates the collection of some quantitative data (cuticle, adaxial epidermis, and total leaf thickness) and accesses a new source of information in leaf cross-section images: the texture and the color of leaf tissues. Our aim was to evaluate this information for plant identification purposes. We successfully tested our system identifying eight species from different phylogenetic positions in the angiosperm phylogeny from the neotropical savanna of central Brazil. The proposed system checks the potential of identifying the species for each extracted measure using the Jeffrey–Matusita distance and composes a feature vector with the most important metrics. A linear discriminant analysis with leave-one-out to classify the samples was used. The experiments achieved a 100% success rate in terms of identifying the studied species accessing the above-described parameters, demonstrating that our computational approach can be a helpful tool for anatomical studies, especially ones devoted to plant identification and systematic studies.

Holographic interferometry is certainly one of the most useful practical applications of holography. This subject was initiated principally by Stetson and Powell with a double exposure technique. In this paper a new technique is exposed which needs only one exposure of the photographic emulsion. This uses two reference beams instead of one as is customary in holography. Depending on the location of the phase object, two configurations are possible, each having some distinct properties. When the object is placed in the central beam, we get, upon reconstruction, an interferogram having twice the sensitivity of one coming from a single-pass interferometer. On the other hand if the object is located in one of the outer beams, the reconstruction step would simultaneously yield an interferogram of the phase object in a first order of diffraction, and the original object wave in a second order. Experimental confirmations are given.