available online at http://meteoritics.org 1249 © The Meteoritical Society, 2006. Printed in USA. Microbial diversity on the Tatahouine meteorite Karim BENZERARA1*, Virginie CHAPON2, David MOREIRA3, Purificación LÓPEZ-GARCÍA3, François GUYOT1, and Thierry HEULIN2 1Laboratoire de Minéralogie-Cristallographie, UMR 7590 and Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex...

The Ordos Basin of China encompasses the Mu Us Desert in the northwest and the Chinese Loess Plateau to the south and east. The boundary between the mostly internally drained Mu Us Desert and fluvially incised Loess Plateau is an erosional escarpment, up to 400 m in relief, composed of Quaternary loess. Linear ridges, with lengths of ~102–103 m, are formed in Cretaceous–Quaternary strata throug...

Data from the Earth Radiation Budget wide-field-of-view sensors on board the Nimbus-7 satellite during the period 1979–87 indicate a statistically significant downward trend in daytime outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) of up to 14 W m22 decade21 over the Sahara desert region of Africa. Reflected solar radiation shows a positive trend of the same magnitude. No significant trends in temperature o...

Previous research showed that the concrete’s strength is obviously decreased when river sand was substituted by desert in abundance. In this paper, a new type of fibre-reinforced ultra high-strength mortar studied. mix design mortar, low W/B used to save water. Also, fly ash and silica fume were adopted partly replace cement, completely take place sand. At same time, steel fibre improve toughne...

Original scientific paper Aerosol particle thickness measurements were performed at the "Politehnika" University in Timisoara (Romania) during March 2011 using a CIMEL SUN solar photometer, as part of the global AERONET network. The aerosol optical thickness (AOT) represents a parameter of optical visibility in an atmospheric air column from the instrument towards the sun, affected by the prese...

Climate change plays an important role in the transition of ecosystems. Stratigraphic investigations have suggested that the Asian interior experienced frequent transitions between grassland and desert ecosystems as a consequence of global climate change. Using maternally and bi-parentally inherited markers, we investigated the population dynamics of Agriophyllum squarrosum (Chenopodiaceae), an...

W hy does California, a large and topographically complex state that spans fogdrenched redwood groves to desert sand dunes, have 30 species of snakes, whereas roughly twice that number occur in five square miles of lowland Costa Rican rainforest? Almost 400 species of birds, a bit more than half as many as breed in the entire continental United States, occupy that same small Central American si...

Robotics can ·leam a lot by investigating simple and effective techniques evolved in biology. The sand scorpion that ·lives· in the Mojave Desert uses ground vibrations when locating. its prey. In this paper it is shown that a robot can be made to navigate using similar techniques. A six-legged robot was constructed and fitted with vibration sensors to try the concept. Such a robot could be use...

The complex clinical symptomatology of chronic illnesses, commonly described as Gulf War Syndrome, remains a poorly understood disease entity with diversified theories of its etiology and pathogenesis. Several causative factors have been postulated, with a particular emphasis on low level chemical warfare agents, oil fires, multiple vaccines, desert sand (Al-Eskan disease), botulism, Aspergillu...