As you read this, 35 million humans in various parts of the world are fleeing from war. Their daily lives are severely affected by the psychological consequences of traumatic stress. Today’s military actions no longer resemble those of wars long ago, in which one country’s army fought the governmental forces of another. In today’s wars, more than 80% of casualties are civilians. A civilian’s ho...

Regular monitoring of global burnt surface areas has been identified as an essential climate variable by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS, 2003) because vegetation fires are important drivers of climate, indicators of possible climate change and have a role to play in climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. The GCOS’s requirements include the need to identify areas around ...

ackground: DNA profiling plays a vital role in the identification of dead bodies during mass disasters. Severe fragmentation, decomposition, burning and intermixing of the remains can occur in the mass disasters. DNA analysis faces many challenges especially when the dead bodies are completely decomposed or burnt. This report presents the identification of 32 completely burnt individuals includ...

The “pancake problem” is a well-known open combinatorial problem that recently has been shown to have applications to parallel processing. Given a stack of n pancakes in arbitrary order, all of different sizes, the goal is to sort them into the size-ordered configuration having the largest pancake on the bottom and the smallest on top. The allowed sorting operation is a “spatula flip”, in which...

Short wavelength ion sound waves (2–4 kHz) are detected in association with the Langmuir waves (∼15– 30 kHz) in the source regions of several local type III radio bursts. They are most probably not due to any resonant wavewave interactions such as the electrostatic decay instability because their wavelengths are much shorter than those of Langmuir waves. The Langmuir waves occur as coherent fie...

This study deals with the fire-adapted behaviour of three Australian fly species on freshly burnt areas in Western Australia. The smoke fly, Microsania australis Collart (Platypezidae), swarms in smoke plumes. Our field studies present new notes about the ecology of Microsania, especially with respect to its ecological niche. Additionally, Hypocerides nearcticus Borgmeier (Phoridae) aggregated ...