Background: Pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] is a staple food and fodder crop of marginal agricultural lands of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. It is also a summer forage crop in the southern USA, Australia and Latin America, and is the preferred mulch in Brazilian no-till soybean production systems. Use of molecular marker technology for pearl millet genetic improvement has been limited. Progress is hampered by insufficient numbers of PCRcompatible co-dominant markers that can be used readily in applied breeding programmes. Therefore, we sought to develop additional SSR markers for the pearl millet research community.

We report interesting anomalies in the temperature dependent Raman spectra of FeSe 0.82 measured from 3K to 300K in the spectral range from 60 to 1800 cm -1 and determine their origin using complementary first-principles density functional calculations. A phonon mode near 100 cm -1 exhibits a sharp increase by ~ 5% in frequency below a temperature T s (~ 100K) attributed to strong spin-phonon coupling and onset of shortrange antiferromagnetic order. In addition, two high frequency modes are observed at 1350 cm -1 and 1600 cm -1 , attributed to electronic Raman scattering from (x 2 -y 2 )to xz / yz d-orbitals of Fe.

We report the low-temperature susceptibility and specific heat for single crystals of Pr 1−x La x Os 4 Sb 12 ͑0 ഛ x ഛ 1͒. The ionic properties of the material, characterized by the energy spectrum of crystalline electric field ͑CEF͒ levels of Pr, are unchanged by La doping. The average T c is only weakly affected by La substitution and varies approximately linearly between the end compounds. The discontinuity in the specific heat divided by temperature C / T at T c is drastically reduced from about 800 mJ/ K 2 mol for x = 0 to the value of LaOs 4 Sb 12 near x = 0.3. This behavior of a superconducting transition implies a collective origin of the heavy-fermion state in PrOs 4 Sb 12 . We suggest that fluctuations of the anti-ferro-quadrupolar order parameter are responsible for this heavy-fermion state.

We suggest that the transition to superconductivity in a single crystal of Ba 0.6 K 0.4 BiO 3 with T c 32 K, and having critical fields with anomalous temperature dependencies and vanishing discontinuities in specific heat and magnetic susceptibility, may well be an example of a fourth order (in Ehrenfest's sense) phase transition. We have derived a free energy functional for a fourth order transition and calculated (for the temperature range T c ͞2 , T Ӎ T c ) the temperature dependence of the critical fields. We find H c1 ͑T ͒~͑1 2 T͞T c ͒ 3 , H 0 ͑T͒~͑1 2 T ͞T c ͒ 2 , and H c2 ͑T ͒~͑1 2 T ͞T c ͒ 1 in general agreement with experiments. [S0031-9007 (99)09255-8] PACS numbers: 74.20.De

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