For life to survive outside the biosphere, it must be protected from UV light and other radiation by exterior shielding or through sufficient inherent resistance to survive without protection. We tested the plausibility of inherent resistance in plant seeds, reporting in a previous paper that Arabidopsis thaliana and tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) seeds exposed for 558 days outside the Internation...

In this era of computerization, education has also revamped itself and is not limited to old lecture method. The regular quest is on to find out new ways to make it more effective and efficient for students. Nowadays, lots of data is collected in educational databases, but it remains unutilized. In order to get required benefits from such a big data, powerful tools are required. Data mining is ...

Observations of QSOs at z ∼ 5.7 − 6.4 show the appearance of Gunn-Peterson troughs around z ∼ 6, and a change in the slope of the IGM optical depth τ(z) near z ∼ 5.5. These results are interpreted as a signature of the end of the reionization era, which probably started at considerably higher redshifts. However, there also appears to be a substantial cosmic variance in the transmission of the I...

Beyond Pesticides’ comment (Docket # EPA-HQ-OPP-2010-0889-0384): Once again EPA is proposing to repeat missteps of the past by registering a pesticide known to be toxic to non-target organisms without all required data to ensure its safety. As already seen with the neonicotinoid, clothianidin, and the herbicide aminocyclopyrachlor (Imprelis®), conditional registration without relevant ecologica...