Background: During the course of disease, particularly of chronic diseases, changes in internal standards cause certain changes in the estimation of quality of life (QOL). These changes indicate the phenomenon of ‘response shift’. The present study aimed at assessing response shift in different scales of QOL in Iranian cancer patients.    Methods: To assess response shift...

Obtaining local soil-to-crop transfer factor (TF) is important because climates, soil types and vegetations influence on the factor. In this study, analyses of stable isotopes and natural radioisotopes in rice and wheat grains and the associated soils collected throughout Japan were carried out in order to obtain TF under equilibrium conditions. The studied samples had been collected for the me...

precipitation plays an important role in the global energy and water cycle. special interest in long-term precipitation analyses arises from the need to assess climate change and its impacts on all spatial scales. based on this demand national and international organization initiated and support many research and monitoring programs. there are a lot of centers developing gridded precipitation d...

Despite constraining legislation and increasing efficiency of pesticides (with a decrease in the applied amounts), their use still cause a contamination of environment (air, soil and water). To conciliate agricultural and environmental interests, a better understanding of the fate of pesticides is needed, in particular because it will determine the exposure and consequently the impact of pestic...

For the past 200 years, the field of aerobiology has explored the abundance, diversity, survival and transport of micro-organisms in the atmosphere. Micro-organisms have been explored as passive and severely stressed riders of atmospheric transport systems. Recently, an interest in the active roles of these micro-organisms has emerged along with proposals that the atmosphere is a global biome f...

Fly ash (FA) is produced as a waste byproduct during the burning process of coal in thermal power plants whose cost is primarily associated to cleaning and transportation. It possesses mechanical properties on account of its constituents like silica and alumina. The use of FA as filler in styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) was of researchers’ interest to reinforce and/or to reduce product cost. In ...

Stem CO2 efflux (ES) plays an important role in the carbon balance of forest ecosystems. However, its primary controls at the global scale are poorly understood and observation-based global estimates are lacking. We synthesized data from 121 published studies across global forest ecosystems and examined the relationships between annual ES and biotic and abiotic factors at individual, biome, and...