Fungus-growing (attine) ants and their fungal symbionts passed through several evolutionary transitions during their 50 million year old evolutionary history. The basal attine lineages often shifted between two main cultivar clades, whereas the derived higher-attine lineages maintained an association with a monophyletic clade of specialized symbionts. In conjunction with the transition to speci...

Suzhou city was the cultural centre of ancient south China. It continues urban pattern more than 800 years ago. gardens are essence Chinese gardening art, as well valuable world heritage site. This paper compared evolution in distribution and scale among five historical periods, discussed influence urbanization on gardening. revealed that: (1) The affected by layout changes political commercial...

BACKGROUND Relatively little has been researched or published on the importance of peri-urban domestic gardens as part of a household livelihood strategy in South Africa. Due to lack of comprehensive data on peri-urban domestic gardens, their potential value as luxury green space, provision of food, income and ecosystem services to the fast growing urban population in South Africa is not clearl...

BACKGROUND Home gardens (HGs) provide perspectives for conservation of plant genetic resources while contributing to improving livelihoods. However, knowledge of local factors shaping their ownership, plant diversity (PD) and structure is still limited especially in West-Africa, where food insecurity is acute. This is critical to ensure effective mainstreaming of HGs into future biodiversity co...

Some highlights of the history of modern cosmology and the lessons to be learned from the successes and blind alleys of the past are described. This heritage forms the background to the lectures and discussions at this Second Carnegie Centennial Symposium, which celebrates the remarkable contributions of the Carnegie Institution in the support of astronomical and cosmological research.

Grid is one of the most e ective new paradigms in large scale distributed computing. Only recently Petri nets have been adopted as a formal modeling framework for describing the speci c aspects of the Grid. In this paper we describe a Grid tool for High Energy Physics data analysis, and we show how modeling its architecture with nets-withinnets has led us to identify and solve a number of defec...

landscape architect mohammad shaheer (1948-2015) was the principal consultant in the restoration of several historic gardens in india and afghanistan. this article presents his particular approaches and methods in three landscape restoration projects: humayun’s tomb gardens and sunder nursery central axis in delhi, and babur garden in kabul.shaheer had a deep understanding of persian garden and...

BACKGROUND Food access is a global issue, and for this reason, a wealth of studies are dedicated to understanding the location of food deserts and the benefits of urban gardens. However, few studies have linked these two strands of research together to analyze whether urban gardening activity may be a step forward in addressing issues of access for food desert residents. METHODS The Phoenix, ...

It seems impossible to think of the Persian art without mentioning the significant presence of gardens. They are present in miniature painting, architecture, and literature. One of the modern works of Persian fiction in which gardens play a significant role is Malakut (1961), a novella by the modern Iranian fiction writer Bahram Sadeqi (1936-1984). The story of this novella begins in a “green g...