and mortality increases with increasing body weight.” (Kushner 1993). This may be why even small amounts of weight loss can lower the risk of obesity-related illnesses. (Mitchell, 1997 p. 363, citing Goldstein 1992). “Much of the morbidity [disease] associated with obesity is due to an increase in the occurrence of hypertension... and [type 2] diabetes mellitus, all of which contribute to an in...

Regarding our article on the association of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) with increased Alzheimer’s disease risk, Bowen et al, Froehner and Wirth, Leow et al, and Brady et al highlight a number of significant considerations that will prove important in the design of future studies that investigate the association of ADT and Alzheimer’s disease. We agree with Bowen et al and Leow et al tha...

Evapotranspiration (ETc) is the mean for exploiting irrigation water and constitutes a major component of the hydrological cycle (Telis et al., 2007; Papadavid, 2011). The ETc is a basic and crucial parameter for climate studies, weather forecasts and weather modeling, hydro‐ logical surveys, ecological monitoring and water resource management (Hoedjes et al., 2008). In the past decades, the es...

An example of substrate succession: the colonization of pine needles by fungus flora Perhaps the most widely studied substrate succession was the successive development of fungal strains and other decomposer organisms at the inside of pine needles, from tree foliage to humified litter. Using litter bags and moist chamber cultures, Kendrick & Burges (1962) followed the fate of Scots pine needles...

Consider the plight of tuatara—reptiles seemingly preadapted for extinction. Today only two species survive— paltry remnants of a lineage (order Sphenodontia) that originated over 200 Myr ago (figure 1). They currently live only on some small islands off New Zealand. Their populations are small, sometimes male-biased, and genetically homogeneous (Hay et al. 2003). Moreover, tuatara take at leas...

PHOENIX (see Hauschildt & Baron, 1999, and references therein) is a generalized, stellar model atmosphere code for treating both static and moving atmospheres. The goal of PHOENIX is to be both as general as possible so that essentially all astrophysical objects can be modeled with a single code, and to make as few approximations as possible. Approximations are inevitable (particularly in atomi...