One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Climate change has resulted in increased vulnerability of smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Zimbabwe where there is limited capacity to adapt to changing climate. One approach that has been used to adapt to changing climate is in-field water harvesting for improved crop yields in the semi- arid regions of Zimbabwe. This review analyses the history of soil and water conservation in Zimbab...

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...

The quantum cloner machine maps an unknown arbitrary input qubit into two optimal clones and one optimal flipped qubit. By combining linear and non-linear optical methods we experimentally implement a scheme that, after the cloning transformation, restores the original input qubit in one of the output channels, by using local measurements, classical communication and feedforward. This significa...

Leptospirosis caused by infection with pathogenic leptospires, which is the most prevalent zoonotic disease in the world. The outer membrane proteins (OMPs) of pathogenic leptospires such as LipL41 play a crucial role in pathogenesis of this disease. Therefore a major challenge to develop an effective vaccine against leptospirosis is application of basic research on the OMPs of leptospires to i...

We describe a novel expression cloning strategy in the fission yeast for the isolation of mammalian transcription factors using a mammalian promoter as target. This strategy is possible because of the conservation between mammalian cells and Schizosaccharomyces pombe of the mechanism that leads to the selection of the transcription start site. It also opens new perspectives to investigate the t...

leptospirosis caused by infection with pathogenic leptospires, which is the most prevalent zoonotic disease in the world. the outer membrane proteins (omps) of pathogenic leptospires such as lipl41 play a crucial role in pathogenesis of this disease. therefore a major challenge to develop an effective vaccine against leptospirosis is application of basic research on the omps of leptospires to i...

The perception by humans of what is doable is itself a great determiner of future events. Thus, the successful sheep cloning experiment leading to “Dolly” by Ian Wilmut and associates at Roslin Institute, Midlothian, UK, compels us to look in the mirror and consider the issue of human cloning. Should it occur, and if not, how should that opposing mandate be managed? If human cloning should have...

Ectonucleotidase proteins occupy a central role in purine signalling regulation by sequentially hydrolysing ATP to ADP and to adenosine. The ENPP ( or PDNP) gene family, which encodes ectophosphodiesterase/nucleotide phosphohydrolases, is a subfamily of these enzymes, which consists of 7 members in mammals. These proteins catalyse the generation of bioactive lipids, placing the ENPP enzymes as ...