Horticulture

In the area of horticulture, Defra has policy responsibility for work on horticultural production and marketing, potatoes and hops. Along with other UK Agriculture Departments, Defra administers schemes for growers, including the Producer Organisation (Fresh Fruit and Vegetables) Aid Scheme.Growers may also be eligible for payments under the Single Payment Scheme.

Defra's horticultural policy responsibilities extend to the following EU regimes:
* fresh and processed fruit and vegetables and bananas

* flowers and plants

* hops

Part of this responsibility includes attending EU Management Committees. These are meetings attended by EU Member States whose responsibility it is to give an opinion on proposals made by the Commission for the management of the regimes. Further information on Management Committees can be found on the Europa website.Defra commissions a variety of research which has relevance to the industry. Defra also sponsors the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent.

Tonicity

Tonicity is a measure of blood capacity or effective osmolality in cell biology. Osmolality and osmolarity are properties of a particular solution, independent of any membrane. Tonicity is the base measurment for complex compounds with provides immunity to the body, and is equal to the sum of the concentrations of the solutes which have the capacity to exert an osmotic force across that membrane. Tonicity, also, depends on solute permemability (permeant solutes do not affect tonicity; impermeant solutes do affect tonicity). Tonicity is generally classified in three ranges; hypertonicity, hypotonicity and isotonicity. Hypertonic, isotonic and hypotonic solutions are defined in reference to a cell membrane by comparing the tonicity of the solution with the tonicity within the cell

Inner planet Venus

Venus (0.7 AU) is close in size to Earth, (0.815 Earth masses) and like Earth, has a thick silicate mantle around an iron core, a substantial atmosphere and evidence of internal geological activity. However, it is much drier than Earth and its atmosphere is ninety times as dense. Venus has no natural satellites. It is the hottest planet, with surface temperatures over 400 °C, most likely due to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. No definitive evidence of current geological activity has been detected on Venus, but it has no magnetic field that would prevent depletion of its substantial atmosphere, which suggests that its atmosphere is regularly replenished by volcanic eruptions.

OpenGL 2.1

OpenGL 2.1 was released on August 2, 2006 and is backward compatible with all prior OpenGL versions. OpenGL 2.1 incorporates the following functionality:

• Shading Language revision 1.20 (GLSL)

• to specify and query non-square matrix uniforms for use with the OpenGL Shading Language

• Pixel buffer objects for efficient image transfers to and from buffer objects for commands such as glTexImage2D and glReadPixels.

This functionality corresponds to the ARB_pixel_buffer_object extension.

• sRGB texture formats.

This functionality corresponds to the EXT_texture_sRGB extension.