introduction: the accumulation of heavy metals (hms) in the soil is of increasing concern due to food safety issues, potential health risks, and the detrimental effects on soil ecosystems. hms may be considered as the most important soil pollutants, because they are not biodegradable and their physical movement through the soil profile is relatively limited. therefore, root uptake process may p...

Inspired by the “generalized t-designs” defined by Cameron [P. J. Cameron, A generalisation of t-designs, Discrete Math. 309 (2009), 4835–4842], we define a new class of combinatorial designs which simultaneously provide a generalization of both covering designs and covering arrays. We then obtain a number of bounds on the minimum sizes of these designs, and describe some methods of constructin...

in this paper, we ask “can proximity to towns reduces poverty in rural areas?” for this study we have mapped all the villages in orissa. the study is based on small area poverty estimation methodology as well as the secondary data covering 47,395 villages and 109 towns. our main findings are (i) there is a relationship between the distance to nearest town and rural poverty and (ii) poverty leve...

In 1954 the Council for Scientific and Industrial Re­ search (CSIR) entered into an agreement with the Uni­ versity of the Witwatersrand. As a result, the Joint CSIR/University Dental Research Unit was formed with Professor James Irving appointed as Director. Professor Irving was a medical graduate of the University of Cape Town with an interest in mineral metabolism and calcifi­ cation. This i...

The increasing importance of sustainability in town planning and architectural design is strongly questioning the actual logic of built environment dispersion. The peripheral extension of cities is indeed leading to irrational uses of ground, growing environmental impacts and important infrastructural costs. Looked at from that point of view, the goal of the Ecoparc project is the regeneration ...

Benis Egoh⁎, Mathieu Rouget, Belinda Reyers, Andrew T. Knight, Richard M. Cowling, Albert S. van Jaarsveld, Adam Welz Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany & Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, Matieland 7602, South Africa b South African National Biodiversity Institute Private Bag x101, Pretoria 0001 Natural Resources and the Environment, Council for Scientific and In...

Saturday, August 27, 1859 was a day that profoundly changed the world, for on that afternoon in the small town of Titusville, Pennsylvania, the first well drilled specifically to produce liquid oil came in. Petroleum offered a simpler and cheaper way to produce kerosene than the method of that time, which involved the destructive distillation of certain types of coal (1 ). Kerosene, introduced ...