Feature Article

The deep sea encompasses the largest ecosystems on Earth. Although poorly known, deep seafloor ecosystems provide services that are vitally important to the entire ocean and biosphere. Rising atmospheric greenhouse gases are bringing about significant changes in the environmental properties of the ocean realm in terms of water column oxygenation, temperature, pH and food supply, with concomitant impacts on deep-sea ecosystems.

The trace element selenium is essential for human health and is required in a narrow dietary concentration range. Insufficient selenium intake has been estimated to affect up to 1 billion people worldwide. Dietary selenium availability is controlled by soil–plant interactions, but the mechanisms governing its broad-scale soil distributions are largely unknown. Using data-mining techniques, we modeled recent (1980–1999) distributions and identified climate–soil interactions as main controlling factors.

Seven small planets whose surfaces could harbour liquid water have been spotted around a nearby dwarf star. If such a configuration is common in planetary systems, our Galaxy could be teeming with Earth-like planets.

The English and Romanian Adoptees study is a longitudinal, natural experiment investigation into the long-term outcomes of individuals who spent from soon after birth to up to 43 months in severe deprivation in Romanian institutions before being adopted into the UK.

Temporal variations in aerosol optical properties were investigated at a coastal station in Hong Kong based on the field observation from February 2012 to February 2015. At 550 nm, the average light-scattering (151 ± 100 Mm−1) and absorption coefficients (8.3 ± 6.1 Mm−1) were lower than most of other rural sites in eastern China, while the single-scattering albedo (SSA  =  0.93 ± 0.05) was relatively higher compared with other rural sites in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region.

Our world is prone to more frequent, deadly and costly earthquake disasters, which are increasingly uncertain and complex due to the rapid environmental and socio-economic changes occurring at multiple scales. There is an urgent need to recover rapidly and effectively for community after earthquake disasters. To enhance community recovery, it is necessary to have a good initial understanding of what it is, its determinants and how it can be measured, maintained and improved.

South Africa has a large burden of rifampicin-resistant tuberculosis (RR-TB), with 18,734 patients diagnosed in 2014. The number of diagnosed patients has increased substantially with the introduction of the Xpert MTB/RIF test, used for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis for all patients with presumptive TB. Routine aggregate data suggest a large treatment gap (pre-treatment loss to follow-up) between the numbers of patients with laboratory-confirmed RR-TB and those reported to have started second-line treatment.

Improvements to housing may contribute to malaria control and elimination by reducing house entry by malaria vectors and thus exposure to biting. We tested the hypothesis that the odds of malaria infection are lower in modern, improved housing compared to traditional housing in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Original Source

Prediction of earthquake in advance is really a challenging task for the scientific community till now. But research results from various scientists regarding lineament extraction using satellite imageries help us to way forward for earthquake monitoring study. For the present study, Landsat 8 OLI Time series data analyzed by integrating four different remote sensing and GIS software’s for automatic lineament extraction, its change, including lineament lengths and directions study by creating rose diagrams and finally vertical surface transect profile curve drawing.

A thorough understanding of movement patterns of a species is critical for designing effective conservation and management initiatives. However, generating such information for large marine vertebrates is challenging, as they typically move over long distances, live in concealing environments, are logistically difficult to capture and, as upper-trophic predators, are naturally low in abundance. Large-bodied, broadly distributed tropical shark typically restricted to coastal and shelf habitats, the great hammerhead shark Sphyrna mokarran epitomizes such challenges.