or monthly at numerous monitoring sites during the period from 1980-2010 to track wet deposition of nitrate and sulfate near several U s. and East Asian cities.
At select sites Bertness and Coverdale enclosed the two crabs together within a wire cage at a burrow.
I'm trying to assess sustainable subsistence strategies within the time period of the site Berkebile says.
The MU 125 archaeological site in northern Arizona features a multi-room masonry structure occupied by the ancient Puebloans from 1070-1090.
Berkebile looks for ancient plant remains inside soil samples excavated from the site. She uses a flotation technique to reveal the secrets hidden within the ancient earth.
Berkebile thinks it's likely the Puebloans lived at the MU 125 site year-round and to do so they would have needed to develop sustainable agricultural methods that complemented their maize crops.
She uses the plant samples she's found at the site to assess the Puebloans'agricultural strategy.
#Sensitive sites: Research examines preservation of Southwest archaeology in time of tight budgetswhen surveying in the Upper Basin of the Grand canyon national park in April 2011 University of Cincinnati faculty
and data GPS data Google earth data and his own months-long work in the region Washam found that his study area in the Grand canyon is being safeguarded and protected.
However differing policies and fewer available protective resources mean that archaeological sites and finds in Kaibab National park have greater likelihood for destruction.
The forest's environmental and archaeological sites are vulnerable for a number of reasons. These includefor instance Washam's research points to one woodcutting area of the forest that encompassed 30 acres of felled trees in 2006.
Participants were asked to evaluate 3 pairs of products--2 yogurts 2 cookies and 2 potato chip portions.
The cookies and yogurt were estimated to have significantly fewer calories when labeled organic and people were willing to pay up to 23.4%more for them.
The organic cookies and yogurt were said to taste'lower in fat'than the regular variety
and the organic cookies and chips were thought to be more nutritious! The label even tricked people's taste buds:
Regular cookies were reported to taste better--possibly because people often believe healthy foods are not tasty.
when shopping for organic foods--they are after all still cookies and chips! Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Cornell Food
The study involved a reexamination of 46 research papers published between 1957 and 2010 as well as an analysis of 409 soil profiles from the National Soil Carbon Network database.
Corn and cotton have been modified genetically to produce pest-killing proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt for short.
Compared with typical insecticide sprays the Bt toxins produced by genetically engineered crops are much safer for people
Although Bt crops have helped to reduce insecticide sprays boost crop yields and increase farmer profits their benefits will be short-lived
Bt crops were grown first widely in 1996 and several pests have already become resistant to plants that produce a single Bt toxin.
To thwart further evolution of pest resistance to Bt crops farmers have shifted recently to the pyramid strategy:
As reported in the study the pyramid strategy has been adopted extensively with two-toxin Bt cotton completely replacing one-toxin Bt cotton
Using lab experiments computer simulations and analysis of published experimental data the new results help explain why one major pest has started to become resistant faster than anticipated.
His home institution the Center for Agricultural Research for Development or CIRAD is interested keenly in factors that could affect pest resistance to Bt crops in Africa.
For their experiments the group collected cotton bollworm--also known as corn earworm or Helicoverpa zea-a species of moth that is a major agricultural pest and selected it for resistance against one of the Bt toxins Cry1ac.
when Carriã re's team put them on pyramided Bt cotton containing Cry2ab in addition to Cry1ac.
and some other pests that are not highly susceptible to Bt toxins to begin with. The team found violations of other assumptions required for optimal success of the pyramid strategy.
In particular inheritance of resistance to plants producing only Bt toxin Cry1ac was dominant which is expected to reduce the ability of refuges to delay resistance.
Refuges consist of standard plants that do not make Bt toxins and thus allow survival of susceptible pests Under ideal conditions inheritance of resistance is not dominant
According to Tabashnik overly optimistic assumptions have led the EPA to greatly reduce requirements for planting refuges to slow evolution of pest resistance to two-toxin Bt crops.
Knowing the actual gene that reduces plant height has allowed us to develop markers that can be used by breeders to screen for the presence of the gene long before the effects of the gene can be observed visually said Devos a professor in the College of Agricultural
and to develop plant-breeder-friendly markers that would allow breeders to screen for the dwarfing gene before their plants matured.
To test this idea Warudkar used a software package that's commonly used to model industrial chemical processes.
#Even graphene has weak spotsgraphene the single-atom-thick form of carbon has become famous for its extraordinary strength.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted.
At these points under tension polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab often via chemical vapor deposition are almost neverperfect arrays of hexagons Yakobson said.
Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are lined not necessarily up with each other
Most common of the defects in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five-and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
But in the real world he said these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces.
I thought we should test the junctions. They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and good old mathematical analysis that in a graphene quilt the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends.
The details are complicated but basically the longer the lever the greater the amplification on the weakest point Yakobson said.
And graphene is a brittle material so a crack might go a really long way.
For graphene we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch because the effect is very similar
because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic because polycrystals are considered often
If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance you'd better go for perfect monocrystals
or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration. Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser Zhiping Xu an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua.
Moreover they said that exposure to different combinations of pesticides that act at this site may increase this risk.
The big developers who are responsible players in the industry would be in favor of this regulation
and I heard on the Internet somewhere that it's invasive 'and it gets added to the state's noxious weed list.
Endres said that developers also do not want to spend a lot of money to commercialize a biofuels plant that's going to cause trouble later on--they want to do that analysis beforehand
Quinn said We want to encourage developers to commercialize only those species that will carry a low risk of invasion.
but also protects developers from potential losses due to findings of negligence down the road. Our plan gives them an opportunity to develop something safe early in the process she said.
We want to shift developers'incentives to make sure that they're doing an assessment of the invasiveness before they go too far down the development stage
(1. 5 terabytes) are available in the Gigascience database Gigadb in a citable format (see:
http://dx. doi. org/10.5524/100050 and http://dx. doi. org/10.5524/100054) and are available as raw reads in the NCBI SRA database (Accession#SRP005973 and SRP005974.
With a network of more than 80 experimental forests located across the country and decades of monitoring data from this network the Forest Service is contributing invaluable information about forest conditions along a complex rural to urban land gradient as well as discovering other trends through a wide-range
of ongoing critical research topics. Co-authors include NRS researchers Amey Bailey Scott Bailey John Campbell
Hybrid ribbons a gift for powerful batterieshybrid ribbons of vanadium oxide (VO2) and graphene may accelerate the development of high-power lithium-ion batteries suitable for electric cars and other demanding applications.
The high-conductivity graphene lattice that is literally baked in solves that problem nicely he said by serving as a speedy conduit for electrons and channels for ions.
The atom-thin graphene sheets bound to the crystals take up very little bulk. In the best samples made at Rice fully 84 percent of the cathode's weight was the lithium-slurping VO2
One challenge to production was controlling the conditions for the co-synthesis of VO2 ribbons with graphene Yang said.
The process involved suspending graphene oxide nanosheets with powdered vanadium pentoxide (layered vanadium oxide with two atoms of vanadium and five of oxygen) in water and heating it in an autoclave for hours.
while the graphene oxide was reduced to graphene Yang said. The ribbons with a weblike coating of graphene were only about 10 nanometers thick up to 600 nanometers wide and tens of micrometers in length.
These ribbons were the building blocks of the three-dimensional architecture Yang said. This unique structure was favorable for the ultrafast diffusion of both lithium ions
The publication comes three years after the International Peach Genome Consortium publicly released the draft assembly of the annotated peach genome on the DOE JGI Plant portal Phytozome. net and on other websites.
A separate study led by the Feder lab details how the apple maggot fly was introduced recently into the Pacific Northwest region of the U s. likely via larval-infested apples from the East.
and low-income housing sites for the 34 week study. Sixty-three completed the diet protocol and the six-month follow-up requirement.
and Range network a system of 80 locations across the country that provide settings for long-term science and management studies.
Many of the sites have long-term monitoring programs and data sets spanning decades and so provide unique opportunities to evaluate long-term trends.
Some sites have over 40 years of weekly data. The researchers analyzed 559 years of stream nitrate and 523 years of stream ammonium data from 22 streams in 7 experimental forests across the country.
They also observed that within a forest trends were not always in sync--at some sites two streams within an experimental forest had opposing trends for the same type of nitrogen for the same period of time suggesting that the controls on stream nitrogen concentrations may vary among and within sites.
#Record simulations conducted on Lawrence Livermore supercomputerresearchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have performed record simulations using all 1572864 cores of Sequoia the largest supercomputer in the world.
Sequoia based on IBM Bluegene/Q architecture is the first machine to exceed one million computational cores.
It also is No. 2 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers operating at 16.3 petaflops (16.3 quadrillion floating point operations per second.
The simulations are the largest particle-in-cell (PIC) code simulations by number of cores ever performed.
Fast ignition uses the same hardware as the hot spot approach but adds a high-intensity ultrashort-pulse laser as the spark that achieves ignition.
Using this code Fiuza demonstrated excellent scaling in parallel performance of OSIRIS to the full 1. 6 million cores of Sequoia.
By increasing the number of cores for a relatively small problem of fixed size what computer scientists call strong scaling OSIRIS obtained 75 percent efficiency on the full machine.
But when the total problem size was increased what is called weak scaling a 97 percent efficiency was achieved.
This means that a simulation that would take an entire year to perform on a medium-size cluster of 4000 cores can be performed in a single day.
OSIRIS is used routinely for fundamental science during the test phase of Sequoia in simulations with up to 256000 cores.
and fielded as part of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program. Sequoia is preparing to move to classified computing in support of stockpile stewardship.
This historic calculation is an impressive demonstration of the power of high-performance computing to advance our scientific understanding of complex systems said Bill Goldstein LLNL's deputy director for Science and Technology.
and HL-34343 and by the Laubisch Castera and M. K. Grey funds at UCLA. Studies on the determination of 6f in intestinal contents and plasma were funded partially by a Network Grant from the Leducq Foundation.
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt; battery electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf;
http://www. nap. edu/catalog. php? record id=18264story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by National Academy of Sciences.
and birds we've come up with a technique to predict sites where these viruses could mix
These findings predicting potential outbreak sites can help decision-makers prioritize the most important areas where people poultry
Matt Conrad a student in Johnson's lab used three-dimensional visualization software on over 200 images to manually segment each region on three planes.
The software put the information together into a three-dimensional image of the pig brain. This is used to determine the volume of the different structures.
because the software takes information from an individual and deforms it until it fits the template
and fingernails#Werth also describes how the protein forms large continually growing plates each with an internal fibrous core sandwiched between smooth outer plates.
and collected samples from ram-feeding bowheads in Alaska Werth began to compare how well the baleen trapped minute latex beads carried in flowing water.
Cows will pant eat less and produce less milk when their core body temperature increases. Allen said cows prefer standing to lying on hot days.
if standing behavior could be used to predict core body temperature. The researchers used two tools to study the relationship between behavior and temperature.
They fitted each cow with an intravaginal sensor to measure core body temperature. They also fitted each cow with a special leg sensor to measure the angle of the leg
and core body temperature are correlated strongly. Allen said cows stood for longer bouts of time as their core body temperatures rose from 101 degrees Fahrenheit to above 102 degrees.
We can predict the animal's behavior to stand according to their core temperature Allen said.
According to Allen dairy producers could use standing behavior to improve well being and efficiency in their herds.
and misters to target a specific core body temperature. By encouraging cows to lie down producers will also help their cows conserve energy.
Allen's abstract was titled Effect of core body temperature or time of day on lying behavior of lactating dairy cows.
Associate professor of Mechanical engineering Ronald Bucinell and his students also offer critical support to Ecovative's research and development pipeline.
The findings are based on a study of seedling development under three levels of logging debris--0 40 and 80 percent cover--at two sites in Washington
Indeed as part of a second study the authors have detected recently nicotine in ancient pipes from an 800-year-old site in the modern city of Pleasanton Calif
and pipes that researchers found at sites indicate smoking was an important part of ritual activities in the past.
and various fragments found at village sites in Tolowa ancestral territory researchers found the biomarker nicotine indicating that tobacco had been smoked.
The study sites are located in the traditional homeland of the Tolowa people in the Smith River basin and vicinity of northwestern California.
We would recommend that future television programming remove gratuitous depictions of tobacco particularly actual smoking
In all the researchers used samples from 50 to 100 trees at each of 53 different sites throughout southwestern North america.
To do this they looked at all known protein structures as defined in the Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) database
Dr Huntingford and colleagues used computer simulations with 22 climate models to explore the response of tropical forests in The americas Africa and Asia to greenhouse-gas-induced climate change.
The NASA-funded study based on newly improved ground and satellite data sets examines critically the relationship between changes in temperature and vegetation productivity in northern latitudes.
For the study Packer and 57 colleagues compared population densities and management practices across 42 sites in 11 countries.
and lemonsa computer recognition system that is 99%accurate can identify different fruits and vegetables even the particular strain of apples or plums for instance.
Shiv Ram Dubey and Anand Singh Jalal of GLA University in Mathura India have developed an automated image processing system that not only quickly distinguishes between oranges
and vegetables so that the image analysis software can assign common features to a database. The process involves photographing an image of the different fruits removing the background
Tests showed that 99 times out of 100 the software could correctly identify the product in question regardless of
Suggestions for Improved Regulation the authors also advocate liability for industry developers who fail to show due diligence in evaluating the potential invasiveness of a new cultivar.
This will help take the expense of noxious weed control away from taxpayers while protecting conscientious biofuels developers some of
Through large database searches his team eventually was able to find a similar chromosome in the Mbo a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon in Sub-saharan africa.
So NREL used money from its internal general purpose equipment account to buy an auto-sampler the final piece in the goal of combining automation pyrolysis spectrometry and speed.
because so much is present at the study site. For example some layers of volcanic ash are as thick as 20 feet (six meters.
In the new study the researchers used new web-based software to compile 30000 museum specimen records representing 438 bee species. A novel aspect of this study was the use of collaborative
Ongoing data capture will continue to expand the bee database so that statistical analyses can be applied across a broader geographic area
#Short algorithm, long-range consequencesin the last decade theoretical computer science has seen remarkable progress on the problem of solving graph Laplacians--the esoteric name for a calculation with hordes of familiar applications
and scientific computing to name just a few. Only in 2004 did researchers first propose an algorithm that solved graph Laplacians in nearly linear time meaning that the algorithm's running time didn't increase exponentially with the size of the problem.
At this year's ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing MIT researchers will present a new algorithm for solving graph Laplacians that is not only faster than its predecessors but also drastically simpler.
The 2004 paper required fundamental innovations in multiple branches of mathematics and computer science but it ended up being split into three papers that
I think were 130 pages in aggregate says Jonathan Kelner an associate professor of applied mathematics at MIT who led the new research.
and Kelner's students Aaron Sidford and Zeyuan Zhu--believe that the simplicity of their algorithm should make it both faster and easier to implement in software than its predecessors.
Overcoming resistancea graph Laplacian is a matrix--a big grid of numbers--that describes a graph a mathematical abstraction common in computer science.
Efficient algorithms for constructing spanning trees are established well. The spanning tree in hand the MIT algorithm then adds back just one of the missing edges creating a loop.
A loop means that two nodes are connected by two different paths; on the circuit analogy the voltage would have to be the same across both paths.
So the algorithm sticks in values for current flow that balance the loop. Then it adds back another missing edge and rebalances.
Paradigm shiftdaniel Spielman a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at Yale university was Kelner's thesis advisor
According to Spielman his algorithm solved Laplacians in nearly linear time on problems of astronomical size that you will never ever encounter
Jon and colleagues'algorithm is actually a practical one. Spielman points out that in 2010 researchers at Carnegie mellon University also presented a practical algorithm for solving Laplacians.
Theoretical analysis shows that the MIT algorithm should be somewhat faster but the strange reality of all these things is you do a lot of analysis to make sure that everything works
but you sometimes get unusually lucky or unusually unlucky when you implement them. So we'll have to wait to see which really is the case.
and really solving this problem using ideas from data structures and algorithm design. It's substituting one whole set of ideas for another set of ideas and
Suppose also that every time you polished off a jug of two percent you would be stocking up on raw material to make anything from a cell phone case and golf tees to a toy castle and a garlic press.
Using free software downloaded from sites like Thingiverse which now holds over 54000 open-source designs 3d printers make all manner of objects by laying down thin layers of plastic in a specific pattern.
While high-end printers can cost many thousands of dollars simpler open-source units run between $250
One impediment to even more widespread use has been the cost of filament says Pearce an associate professor of materials science and engineering and electrical and computer engineering.
With more experimentation the results would be even better he says. 3d printing is where computers were in the 1970s.
Recyclebots and 3d printers have all kinds of applications but they would be especially useful in areas where shopping malls are few and far between Pearce believes.
and habitat loss on plant-pollinator networksare plant-pollinator networks holding together as the insects and plants in the network are jostled by climate change and habitat loss?
and her then postdoctoral research associate Laura Burkle were delighted to discover meticulous data on a plant-pollinator network recorded by Illinois naturalist Charles Robertson between 1887 and 1916.
Recollecting 26 spring-blooming flowers from Robertson's network Knight Phd professor of biology at Washington University
and Burkle Phd now assistant professor of ecology at Montana State university discovered that the network had weakened.
The network is still there and still functioning despite major perturbations Knight said. The bees still have food plants are still getting pollinator service.
But the service has declined the network's structure is weaker and its response to future perturbations much less certain she said.
The study the first to look at human disruption of plant-pollinator networks through the lens of historical data appears in the Feb 28th online edition of Science.
Robertson's meticulous database is probably the oldest of its type for flower-visiting insects.
Before Robertson said co-author John Marlin Phd a research affiliate at the University of Illinois's Prairie Research Institute who had recollected part of Robertson's network in the 1970s almost all insect collecting was done independently of the plant.
How Robertson's network is studied doingrobertson it all Knight said. He studied forests he studied prairies he studied roadside plants he studied old fields;
To keep our project manageable Knight said we recollected a subset of the network Robertson collected focusing on one plant community:
Of the 532 pairings between the plants and bees that linked the subset of Robertson's network Knight
A 40-year-old re-collection of Robertson's networkbut Burkle and Knight were aware that counting network links was a crude measure of pollination services.
All the network diagrams say is the bee is present the plant is present and we saw them interacting at least once Knight points out.
whether anybody had published on the Carlinville network since Robertson and one person had. That person turned out to be Marlin.
because it is the plant in the network currently visited by the greatest diversity of bees Knight said.
There have been major changes in Robertson's network over the past 120 years Knight said.
The good news is that the network proved flexible and many of the broken connections were replaced with new ones.
But the bad news is that network has been restructured in ways that will make it less resilient to disturbances in the future.
We can't just kick these plant-pollinator networks forever and expect them to keep functioning Knight said.
The study found that the proportion of flowers producing fruits was considerably lower in sites with fewer wild insects visiting crop flowers.
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