The species richness of flower-visiting insects has declined in past decades, raising concerns that the ecosystem service they provide by pollinating crops and wild plants is threatened. The relative commonness of different species with shared ecological traits can play a pervasive role in determining ecosystem functioning, but information on changes in abundances of pollinators over time is la...

DRASTIC--Database Resource for the Analysis of Signal Transduction In Cells (http://www.drastic.org.uk/) has been created as a first step towards a data-based approach for constructing signal transduction pathways. DRASTIC is a relational database of plant expressed sequence tags and genes up- or down-regulated in response to various pathogens, chemical exposure or other treatments such as drou...

Dear Editor, A 56-year-old Indian woman with obesity underwent bariatric surgery (laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy). She had gained 10 kg over the 3 years preceding the surgery after changing to a sedentary job. For 2 years, she had been having localised itch over the paraspinal region of her left upper back. Examination revealed a localised hyperpigmented patch over her left upper back (Fig. 1)...

Water shortage crisis is an issue that has led to drastic changes in different agricultural policies, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. Uncertainty in the amount of resources, e.g. water, used for agricultural production entails risk for farmers' income and cropping pattern changes. In the present study, the robust optimization model was used for optimal allocation of arable lands of Khor...

The arc-factored model is the simplest graph-based model for dependency parsing, a model that factorizes the scoring function in terms of subgraphs of the dependency tree. The arc-factored model is often referred to as a first-order model, because it decomposes the score of a tree into the scores of one arc at a time. From a linguistic point of view, this is a rather drastic assumption, similar...

Groundwater plays an important role in the environment as it contributes to irrigation, streams and rivers, and wetland habitats affecting many species of plants and animals. Groundwater provides over half the drinking water for the nation; it is important to protect such an important resource. Groundwater contamination, though almost impossible to stop in some areas, can be minimized by deline...