climate was rare heavy rainfall in western Queensland. And a result has been enormous flocks of the popular pet bird, budgerigars. The birds have had a breeding boom as a result of the grasses that have seeded after the rains. “I have been here since 1983 and never seen anything like it, Ann Britton, a resident of Boulia, told Queensland’s Courier and Mail. “My father, who has travelled extensi...

Perfluorinated substances are listed among emerging contaminants because they are globally distributed, environmentally persistent, bioaccumulative and potentially harmful. In a three-year monitoring campaign (2010-2013) we investigated the occurrence, sources and fate of nine perfluoroalkylcarboxylic acids and three perfluoroalkylsulfonic acids, in the most industrialized region of Italy. Comp...

BACKGROUND Intracardiac thrombus formation is a rare but serious complication of Behçet's disease. We aimed to review the clinical and pathologic correlates of cardiac thrombus formation in the context of Behçet's disease. METHODS AND RESULTS A comprehensive search of the medical literature was conducted using MEDLINE including bibliographies of all selected articles. Although the disease has...

Biodiversity is the diversity of life at all scales, from genes to ecosystems. Predicting its patterns of variation across the globe is a fundamental issue in ecology and evolution. Diversity within species, that is, genetic diversity, is of prime importance for understanding past and present evolutionary patterns, and highlighting areas where conservation might be a priority. Using published d...

Capsule The wintering area of the nominate subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull Larus fuscus fuscus is from Ethiopia across Uganda and the Congo basin to the Atlantic, while L. f. intermedius and L. f. graellsii winters in westernmost Africa. Aims To clarify the wintering distributions of the subspecies of Lesser Black-backed Gull. Methods We compiled, mapped, and analyzed available data on r...

Difficulty in monitoring the flat-tailed horned lizard (Phrynosoma mcallii) has led to controversy over its conservation status. The difficulty in detecting this species has discouraged large-scale estimates of abundance and led to uncertainty over whether the species exists in population sizes of sufficient size for long-term persistence. We incorporated detection probability into monitoring o...

Many tropical reef fishes are divided into Atlantic and East Pacific taxa, placing similar species in two very different biogeographic regimes. The tropical Atlantic is a closed ocean basin with relatively stable currents, whereas the East Pacific is an open basin with unstable oceanic circulation. To assess how evolutionary processes are influenced by these differences in oceanography and geog...

Inversion of NASA Operation IceBridge airborne gravity over the Abbot Ice Shelf in West Antarctica for subice bathymetry defines an extensional terrain made up of east-west trending rift basins formed during the early stages of Antarctica/Zealandia rifting. Extension is minor, as rifting jumped north of Thurston Island early in the rifting process. The Amundsen Sea Embayment continental shelf w...

While energy infrastructure can contribute to economic development goals, they differ in potential to contribute to local livelihoods. In discussion of distributed energy scenarios and trade-offs it is important to consider the importance of rural energy access especially in a state where the total rural population is so significant. Scale and localized needs are important considerations in ene...

We used a multitemporal and multisensor satellite dataset to investigate the geological evolution of a tectonic basin of the East African Rift. The study area is the Lake Abhe-Goba'ad basin which is located at the border between Djibouti and Ethiopia. This area is the southern portion of a wide triangle-shaped depression, the Afar Depression. The Afar is one of the Earth's most geologically act...