the sassanid rulers’ endeavor to establish an empire led to a substantial change in the previous ruling system and to the foundation of a new order. the founders of the empire enjoyed the legacy of parthian and other preceding rules. they were fully acquainted with the concept of sh?hansh?hi (‘king of kings’) which aroused in parthian and other preceding rules on the one hand, and with zoroastr...

The concept of four elements: air, water, earth, and fire, thought to have its origin with the Greek philosopher Empedocles about 440 B.C., held sway for many centuries. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) added to this concept that the properties of substances are the result of the simultaneous presence of certain fundamental properties. The Aristotelian doctrine was therefore concerned not with what mod...

ain has fallen on the explosive wildfire that ripped through the Fort McMurray region of Canada last month, but the inferno is likely to burn until the snow falls later in the year. The raging fire was a true force of nature. It sent out embers that skipped natural barriers such as the Athabasca River, hundreds of metres wide, and created its own weather system: pyrocumulus clouds that generate...

nanoclay/triphenyl phosphate hybrid system was employed to examine the fire retardancy and mechanical properties of pc/abs blends. each of the polymers and their blends are widely used in the automotive, electrical andelectronic industries. because most thermoplastics are easily combustible they need to be flame retarded to reduce the burning rate especially in the initial phase of a fire incid...

The aim of this paper was to provide an overview of the current state of the art on research into the emission of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) from vegetation fires. Significant amounts of VOCs are emitted from vegetation fires, including several reactive compounds, the majority belonging to the isoprenoid family, which rapidly disappear in the plume to yield pollutants such as s...

‘Veda’ means knowledge. Since we call our earliest period Vedic, this is suggestive of the importance of knowledge and science, as a means of acquiring that knowledge, to that period of Indian history. For quite some time scholars believed that this knowledge amounted to no more than speculations regarding the self; this is what we are still told in some schoolbook accounts. New insights in arc...

Each year landscape fires across the globe emit black and organic carbon smoke particles that can last in the atmosphere for days to weeks. We characterized the climate response to these aerosols using an Earth system model. We used remote sensing observations of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and simulations from the Community Atmosphere Model, version 5 (CAM5) to optimize satellitederived smoke ...