Plants and animals may serve as excellent hosts for many fungi. Spores from fungi (molds) are primarily spread by water and air and come into contact with plants in the field or with grain in storage facilities. Factors that influence the degree of fungal infestation in grain are moisture, temperature and availability of oxygen. Other factors such as insect population, physical condition of gra...

The authors documented gross and microscopic morphology of lesions in corals on 7 islands spanning western, southern, and eastern Micronesia, sampling 76 colonies comprising 30 species of corals among 18 genera, with Acropora, Porites, and Montipora dominating. Tissue loss comprised the majority of gross lesions sampled (41%), followed by discoloration (30%) and growth anomaly (29%). Of 31 case...

The development of seismic vulnerability evaluation standards for reinforced concrete buildings in Japan is briefly reviewed. Damage statistics are shown to indicate that severe damage was observed in a relatively small percentage of existing buildings even after damaging earthquakes in the world. Therefore, a simple screening procedure is necessary to identify such vulnerable buildings out of ...

There has been an increase in the occurrence of sudden local flooding of great volume and short duration caused by heavy or excessive rainfall intensity over a small area, which presents the greatest potential danger threat to the natural environment, human life, public health and property, etc. Such flash floods have rapid runoff and debris flow that rises quickly with little or no advance war...

Drought stress is one of the most important environmental stresses affecting plant growth, yield and crop production around the world. It is believed that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are used for protecting plants against drought damage.Vesicular-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi have been used in recent years to cope with water stress in many plants. In this study, the relationship between water d...

Changing climatic conditions have led to a significant increase in the magnitude and frequency of extreme rainfall events in the Central Andes of South America. These events are spatially extensive and often result in substantial natural hazards for population, economy and ecology. Here we develop a general framework to predict extreme events by introducing the concept of network divergence on ...

ABSTRACT The method described in Part 1 of this paper was applied to about 30 earthquakes in various parts of the world. The modified single couple hypothesis proposed in Part 1 appears to explain the observations generally better than the double couple hypothesis. Surprisingly consistent pictures of tectonics were obtained in the Mediterranean region and in Japan on the basis of the modified s...