The Aral Sea was once the fourth largest inland body of water on earth with a surface area of 66,000 km. In 1960, the mean water level was 53.4 m and it contained 1090 km of water (Glantz 1999). The destruction of the sea and its ecosystems constitutes one of the greatest man-made environmental disasters in history. The ecological catastrophe has been associated with a sharp decline in the heal...

The asymmetric unit of the title triangulo-triruthenium compound, [Ru(3)(C(25)H(22)As(2))(C(18)H(10)F(5)P)(CO)(9)]·CHCl(3), contains one mol-ecule of the triangulo-triruthenium complex and one mol-ecule of the disordered chloro-form solvent. The bis-(diphenyl-arsino)methane ligand bridges an Ru-Ru bond and the monodentate phosphine ligand bonds to the third Ru atom. Both the arsine and phosphin...

The autopsy has traditionally been used as a tool in undergraduate medical education, but recent decades have seen a sharp decline in their use for teaching. This study reviewed the current status of the autopsy as a teaching tool by means of systematic review of the medical literature, and a questionnaire study involving UK medical schools. Teachers and students are in agreement that autopsy-b...

Virus infection frequently modifies plant phenotypes, leading to changes in behaviour and performance of their insect vectors in a way that transmission is enhanced, although this may not always be the case. Here, we investigated Bemisia tabaci response to tomato plants infected by Tomato chlorosis virus (ToCV), a non-circulative-transmitted crinivirus, and Tomato severe rugose virus (ToSRV), a...

4.2 Acid Deposition Acid rain was first identified in the 19th century, when English pharmacist Robert Angus Smith measured high acidity levels in rain falling over industrial regions of England and much lower levels in less-polluted areas near the coast. However, this pattern did not receive sustained attention until biologists began to notice sharp declines in fish populations in lakes in Nor...

Two powerful and related trends in the organization of U.S. farming are: production is shifting to larger family farms and agricultural contracts are increasingly being used to guide the production and marketing of farm commodities. These combined structural changes affect productivity and costs in agriculture and in the broader food sector, and also affect the financial returns to farmers, ben...

The high-arctic Ivory Gull (Pagophila eburnea) has recently undergone a sharp decline in numbers, and in Canada it is listed as "Endangered" under the Species-At-Risk Act. To test for circumpolar genetic distinctiveness, we examined 264 bp of the mtDNA Control Region Domain I from 127 museum specimens collected during the breeding season from northern Canada, Greenland, and Norway, and during t...