If life ever existed, or still exists, on Mars, its record is likely to be found in minerals formed by, or in association with, microorganisms. An important concept regarding interpretation of the mineralogical record for evidence of life is that, broadly defined, life perturbs disequilibria that arise due to kinetic barriers and can impart unexpected structure to an abiotic system. Many featur...

Asbestosis and silicosis are fibrotic diseases initiated by the inhalation of silica-containing dusts, asbestos and quartz. There are various approaches for explaining the causes of these diseases. At present, our knowledge on the matter indicates that silicic acid dissolved from these minerals, contact between macrophages and minerals, highly reactive and oxidative species formed on the minera...

Medical texts are filled with mentions of diseases, disorders, and other clinical conditions, with many different surface forms relating to the same condition. We describe MINERAL, a system for extraction and normalization of disease mentions in clinical text, with which we participated in the Task 14 of SemEval 2015 evaluation campaign. MINERAL relies on a conditional random fields-based model...

Applications of molecular modeling procedures to adsorption processes at clay mineral surfaces are described. Using a recently developed empirical force field for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of dioctahedral clays, the interactions of various classes of organic compounds with clay surfaces are being explored, including man-made pollutants, agrochemicals such as pesticides, naturally occu...

While the effect of soil temperature and moisture on soil CO2 efflux (Ec) has been widely investigated, the relationship between Ec and soil carbon (C), root, and stand parameters has not been comprehensively examined or quantified across extensive spatial and temporal scales. We measured Ec in loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) stands located on the South Carolina Coastal Plain across sites, seaso...

Plant chemical composition and the soil community are known to influence litter and soil organic matter decomposition. Although these two factors are likely to interact, their mechanisms and outcomes of interaction are not well understood. Studies of their interactive effects are rare and usually focus on carbon dynamics of litter, while nutrient dynamics in the underlying soil have been ignore...

Reliable quantitative mapping of minerals exposed on Vesta’s surface is crucial for understanding the crustal composition, petrologic evolution, and surface modification of the howardite, eucrite, and diogenite (HED) parent body. However, mineral abundance estimates derived from visible–near infrared (VIS–NIR) reflectance spectra are complicated by multiple scattering, particle size, and nonlin...

Surface complexation modeling (SCM) has emerged as a powerful tool for simulating heavy metal adsorption processes on the surface of soil solid components under different geochemical conditions. The component additivity (CA) approach is one of the strategies that have been widely used in multicomponent systems. In this study, potentiometric titration, isothermal adsorption, zeta potential measu...