The Gonghe Basin on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has a cold, arid climate and suffered severe land degradation. Climate change as well anthropogenic activities including overgrazing have resulted in widespread blowout development formation of some Earth’s largest blowouts. blowouts are part an aeolian dominated landscape that passes from deflation zone to grass covered plain, then through increasi...

A clean house is a sign of a boring life. When more interesting or urgent matters arise, the housework has to wait. Similarly, when the body needs to fight infection, the liver's clean-up work is impaired. Chow et al. (page 2589) now show why: switching on virus-fighting factor interferon also switches off the liver's detoxification pathway. Viral infection can cause metabolic disorders, includ...

The m-bonacci word is a generalization of the Fibonacci word to the m-letter alphabet A = {0, . . . ,m − 1}. It is the unique fixed point of the Pisot–type substitution φm : 0 → 01, 1 → 02, . . . , (m − 2) → 0(m − 1), and (m − 1) → 0. A result of Adamczewski implies the existence of constants c such that the m-bonacci word is c-balanced, i.e., numbers of letter a occurring in two factors of the...

For a cropping system to be sustainable, should not only the soil nitrogen (N) content be preserved but also the N runoff be minimised. Finding a simple but robust way to estimate N runoff would thus be a great advantage when evaluating cropping systems. In this study all major N flows in six different cropping systems, each covering 0.18 ha of a separately pipe drained field lysimeter, located...