A case study was carried out to see the impacts of shrimp culture on the surface (pond) and ground water (tube-well) quality in three coastal sub-districts of Bagherhat Sadar, Rampal and Morrelganj of Bangladesh. The people of Rampal (100%), Morrelgonj (87.5%) and Bagherhat (75.5%) expressed that salinity of both surface and ground water increased after shrimp culture, and water becomes more tu...

Arsenic is a contaminant in the groundwater of Holocene aquifers in Bangladesh, where approximately 57 million people drink water with arsenic levels exceeding the limits set by the World Health Organization. Although arsenic is native to the sediments, the means by which it is released to groundwater remains unresolved. Contrary to the current paradigm, ferric (hydr)oxides appear to dominate t...

Aerosolized microorganisms may play an important role in climate change, disease transmission, water and soil contaminants, and geographic migration of microbes. While it is known that bioaerosols are generated when bubbles break on the surface of water containing microbes, it is largely unclear how viable soil-based microbes are transferred to the atmosphere. Here we report a previously unknow...

Water autoionization reaction 2H2O --> H3O- + OH- is a textbook process of basic importance, resulting in pH = 7 for pure water. However, pH of pure water surface is shown to be significantly lower, the reduction being caused by proton stabilization at the surface. The evidence presented here includes ab initio and classical molecular dynamics simulations of water slabs with solvated H3O+ and O...

Article history: Received 19 October 2007 Received in revised form 19 February 2008 Accepted 20 February 2008 Available online 18 April 2008 This paper concerns the behaviour of nonlinear regular waves interacting with rectangular submerged breakwaters. A new series of experimental results is presented and compared with numerical calculations based upon a Boundary Element Method (BEM) that util...

Functional properties of cowpea flour from seeds micronised at two different surface temperatures (130 and 170 °C) were studied. Micronisation (130 and 170 °C) significantly (P 0.05) increased the water absorption capacity and least gelation concentration of the flour. The treatment significantly (P 0.05) reduced the water solubility and swelling indices, gel strength and foaming capacity of th...

Freezing, melting, evaporation and condensation of water are essential ingredients for climate and eventually life on Earth. In the present work, we show how surface freezing of supercooled water in an open container is conditioned and triggered-exclusively-by humidity in air. Additionally, a change of phase is demonstrated to be triggered on the water surface forming surface ice crystals prior...

Two types of vibrissal surface structures, undulated and smooth, exist among pinnipeds. Most Phocidae have vibrissae with undulated surfaces, while Otariidae, Odobenidae, and a few phocid species possess vibrissae with smooth surfaces. Variations in cross-sectional profile and orientation of the vibrissae also exist between pinniped species. These factors may influence the way that the vibrissa...

The high-frequency performance of the reflector antennas is mainly limited by the surface. It has been shown that distortions on different regions of the reflector surface can have different effects on the radiation performance. In other words, degradation of the radiation pattern due to the presence of surface distortions is sensitive to the location and behavior of the surface distortion prof...

Conventional modeling techniques to model macromolecular solvation and its effect on binding in the framework of Poisson-Boltzmann based implicit solvent models make use of a geometrically defined surface to depict the separation of macromolecular interior (low dielectric constant) from the solvent phase (high dielectric constant). Though this simplification saves time and computational resourc...