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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

UF is teeming with brilliant people working on cutting-edge technology that saves lives, reveals mysteries and solves problems. We’re here to share the latest in UF’s advancements, research and studies.

Feeling Sour

UF researchers have developed a simple, efficient and inexpensive sensor that can detect whether a tree has been infected with citrus greening. 

Citrus greening, also known as “yellow dragon disease,” begins when a tiny insect deposits bacteria on the leaf of a fruit tree. The bacteria invade the tree and starve it of nutrients, creating a thick, pale peel with a green bottom, killing most affected trees within a few years. 

The sensor’s early warning could give growers enough lead time to destroy diseased trees and save the rest, said Daniel Lee, the UF professor of agriculture and biological engineering who developed the sensor.

In 95 to 98 percent of laboratory and field tests, the sensor accurately detected the signs of citrus greening: leaves with veins and splotches that appear a pale shade of gray on the sensor’s images, an obvious contrast to the dark-gray image of healthy leaves.

“The current ground inspection is very time-consuming, subjective and labor intensive, and also requires a lab analysis of leaf samples,” Lee said. “Our real-time, in-field detection system can provide objective, fast and accurate results of the disease detection.”

Smart Sex 

New UF research shows that female students with dads who were more involved in their lives as teenagers were more likely to use protection when having sex in college.

For her master’s thesis in the UF/IFAS Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences, Caroline Payne-Purvis analyzed responses from 748 college students on aspects of their adolescent years, like their parents’ level of involvement when they still lived at home, how often they now engage in sexual behaviors and their contraceptive use.

Payne-Purvis found female students who said their father was “involved” in their lives as teens used condoms more frequently during intercourse. She said one possible explanation is that the presence of a father figure reduces the desire for male attention outside the home.

“The main lesson to take from this study is that in an era of single families, high divorce rates and dual working families, fathers continue to have an impact on their daughters’ lives,” she said. “Additionally, it indicates that situations and relationships from one’s adolescence carry over into early adulthood.”

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[A version of this story ran on page 4 on 1/30/2015 under the headline “UF research roundup: Greening citrus and fatherly roles"]

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