Feature Article

A reconstruction of changes in ocean oxygenation throughout the last glacial cycle shows that respired carbon was removed from the deep Southern Ocean during deglaciation and Antarctic warm events, consistent with a prominent role of reduced iron fertilization and enhanced ocean ventilation, modifying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 80,000 years.

The viability and environmental risks of removing carbon dioxide from the air must be assessed if we are to achieve the Paris goals, writes Phil Williamson.

The viability and environmental risks of removing carbon dioxide from the air must be assessed if we are to achieve the Paris goals, writes Phil Williamson.

Since the origins of agriculture, the scale of human cooperation and societal complexity has dramatically expanded. This fact challenges standard evolutionary explanations of prosociality because well-studied mechanisms of cooperation based on genetic relatedness, reciprocity and partner choice falter as people increasingly engage in fleeting transactions with genetically unrelated strangers in large anonymous groups. To explain this rapid expansion of prosociality, researchers have proposed several mechanisms.

Dengue is the most common arbovirus infection globally, but its burden is poorly quantified. We estimated dengue mortality, incidence, and burden for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013. The researchers modelled mortality from vital registration, verbal autopsy, and surveillance data using the Cause of Death Ensemble Modelling tool. We modelled incidence from officially reported cases, and adjusted our raw estimates for under-reporting based on published estimates of expansion factors.

Modelling of growth trend and improvement in forecasting techniques for vehicular population has always been and will continue to be of paramount importance for any major infrastructure development initiatives in the transportation engineering sector. Although many traditional as well as some advanced methods are in vogue for this process of estimation, there has been a continuous quest for improving on the accuracy of different methods.

Global climate change is affecting biodiversity and ecological processes. We coupled a general circulation model that uses global datasets with terrain-based analyses to identify potential climate refugia in two conservation landscapes in Nepal for climate changeintegrated conservation planning. The results indicate that lower and mid-montane forests are vulnerable to climate change, but the temperate upper montane and subalpine forests are more resilient and represent macrorefugia.

The CERES (Crop Estimation through Resource and Environment Synthesis)-rice model incorporated in DSSAT version 4.5 was calibrated for genetic coefficients of rice cultivars by conducting field experiments during the kharif season at Jorhat, Kalyani, Ranchi and Bhagalpur, the results of which were used to estimate the gap in rice yield.

Original Source

Discharge of untreated textile effluents containing heavy metals is a serious environmental issue. Biosorption is a promising method for the removal of heavy metals. The present study analyses the biosorption of Cr(VI) from synthetic textile effluent onto tamarind bark biomass as a function of initial metal ion concentration, contact time, pH, sorbent dosage, shaking speed and temperature.

Original Source

Cr, Pb, Zn, Cd, Ni, Cu, Co and Fe content in the surface sediments was studied at three sites along a 20 km stretch on the Bidyadhari River (situated at the gateway to Indian Sundarban mangrove ecosystem) starting from the sewage outfall zone of the Kolkata metropolis (northern limit of Sundarban) during the dry (March) and wet (August) seasons in the year 2011.