The southeastern Australian climate and climate variability is driven primarily by large-scale climate dynamics. How these dynamics translate into local effects is influenced by the nature of the landscape, the vegetation, soil moisture, fire, snow, irrigation and orography. This local land-atmosphere coupling can enhance or moderate the large-scale dynamics and have significant influences loca...

We report on model experiments that support the hypothesis that the second mode of variability of the East Asian Summer Monsoon is influenced by the variability of the Indian Summer Monsoon. The results suggest that the recent trend towards drier conditions in northern China in summer is, at least partly, a consequence of the synchronous drying trend over India in summer noted by some authors. ...

Precipitation trend analysis, on different spatial and temporal scales, has been of great concern during the past century because of the attention given to global climate change by the scientific community. According to some recent studies, the Italian territory has been suffering a precipitation decrease, especially in the last 50 years, and the southern areas seem to be more affected. The aim...

This paper presents a methodology for detecting summer rainfall enhancement within a metropolitan area. The chosen study domain is the Atlanta, Georgia USA metropolitan area, and the time period covers summer (i.e. June–August) seasons from 1949 to 2005. In order to determine if observed heavy-rainfall frequencies at nine candidate stations in the metropolitan area are enhanced, predicted frequ...

Recently, the University of Missouri (UM) moved its SuomiNet station from the roof of a building near downtown Columbia, Missouri, USA, to the University’s rural South Farm. Comparisons of Columbia Regional Airport (KCOU) data and SuomiNet data are presented both prior to and after the latter’s relocation. Analysis reveals an elevation of mean temperature by ∼1.5 ◦C at the downtown location, bu...

Objective: To investigate the anti-bacterial properties of royal jelly against six different bacteria (Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptomyces griseus, and three unclassified strains of

Spatial-resolution errors are inherent in gridded precipitation (P ) fields – such as those produced by climate models and from satellite observations – and they can be sizeable when P is averaged spatially onto a coarse grid. They can also vary dramatically over space and time. In this paper, we illustrate the importance of evaluating resolution errors associated with gridded P fields by inves...

The major environmental determinants of honeybee caste development come from larval nutrients: royal jelly stimulates the differentiation of larvae into queens, whereas beebread leads to worker bee fate. However, these determinants are not fully characterized. Here we report that plant RNAs, particularly miRNAs, which are more enriched in beebread than in royal jelly, delay development and decr...

In this paper, we describe our participation in the INEX 2012 Social Book Search track. We investigate the contribution of different types of document metadata, both social and controlled, and examine the effectiveness of re-ranking retrieval results using different social features, such as user ratings, tags, and authorship information. We find that the best results are obtained using all avai...

Involvement of children in gardening has the potential to increase liking of fruit and vegetables (FV) and consequently, intake, but research results are mixed. School gardening led by external specialists such as the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) could have more impact than teacher-led gardening on children's knowledge of, and attitudes towards, FV. Data from a cluster randomised controlle...