Over the past 50 years, the scale and intensity of livestock farming have increased significantly. At the same time, Western societies have become more urbanised and fewer people have close relatives involved in farming. As a result, most citizens have little knowledge or direct experience of what farming entails. In addition, more people are expressing concerns over issues such as farm animal ...

This paper describes how the social capital of rice farmers of the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, as manifested in the tradition of collective farming practice, has changed. Collective rice farming persisted for decades, irrespective of critical events that challenged its continuation, due to two key factors: the high need for collective farming to ensure subsistence, and the availability of a closel...

Land use change as the most important destructive factor in natural ecosystems is a globally problem that changes soil properties. Therefore, correct management and recognition of change aspects on each component of the ecosystem is necessary. This process causes land destruction, ecosystem instability, soil erosion, and more biological threats. Due to increasing land use conversion from rangel...

The use of plants for medicinal purposes dates back thousands of years but genetic engineering of plants to produce desired biopharmaceuticals is much more recent. As the demand for biopharmaceuticals is expected to increase, it would be wise to ensure that they will be available in significantly larger amounts, on a cost-effective basis. Currently, the cost of biopharmaceuticals limits their a...

The New Zealand deer industry is growing rapidly and the development of sustainable management practices for deer farming is becoming increasingly important. The main environmental issues facing the deer industry are the effects on soil and water quality, exacerba ted by the behaviour responses of deer to confinement (in particular fence pacing and wallowing). In addition, the projected increas...

Artificially produced chemical elements heavier than uranium have been known for more than seventy years and the number of superheavy elements continues to grow. Presently 26 transuranic elements are known. This paper examines the earliest scientific interest in the very heavy elements and the related question of an upper limit of the periodic system. In the period from the 1880s to the early 1...

Fresh fruits and vegetables can harbor large and diverse populations of bacteria. However, most of the work on produce-associated bacteria has focused on a relatively small number of pathogenic bacteria and, as a result, we know far less about the overall diversity and composition of those bacterial communities found on produce and how the structure of these communities varies across produce ty...

We characterised the livestock-farming management strategies of multiple-job holders and identified which variables contributed most to the differentiation of these strategies. We hypothesised that they would mainly be differentiated by the contribution of the farming income to the total household income and the availability of the household members for farming. The multiple-job holding livesto...

The growing demanding from consumers for healthier foods, produced using environmentally friendly farming practices has resulted in the rapid expansion of organic farming. There are numerous studies about the importance of organic farming but the majority of the results are sometimes contradictory, inconsistent and show no clear link between organic farming practices and enhancement of the nutr...

objective: acute inflammatory demyelinating peripheral neuropathy (guillain-barre-syndrome) is by far the most common cause of immune-medicated peripheral nervous system disease in children; with the near disappearance of poliomyelitis, gbs is responsible for the great majority of cases of acute flaccid paralysis. so far, in several controlled studies, corticosteroids, plasmapheresis and ivig h...