Feature Article

The provisioning of potable water was a microcosm of the Ottoman state's incomplete projects of technopolitical modernization on the Arab frontier. Water questions sat at the intersection between international pressures surrounding cholera, drought, Wahhabi and Bedouin disorder, and the inability of the state to impose its will on the semi-autonomous Amirate of Mecca. To be sure, Ottoman public health reforms and increased attention to water infrastructure were partly a product of the intense international attention generated by the hajj's role in the globalization of cholera.

Upper-air radiosonde observations, taken during “Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement EXperiment” (CAIPEEX) at Mahabubnagar (16.73°N, 77.98°E) under Integrated Ground Observation Campaign (IGOC) during the second half of southwest monsoon of 2011 have been analysed. Various weather data taken from India Meteorological Department as well as NCEP/NCAR reanalyzed upper-air wind data for the months August and September of 2011 have also been used in the study. Intra-seasonal variation of monsoon, during the period of experiment, has been studied.

Nontransparent contact fingers on the sun-facing side of solar cells represent optically dead regions which reduce the energy conversion per area. We consider two approaches for guiding the incident light around the contacts onto the active area. The first approach uses graded-index metamaterials designed by two-dimensional Schwarz–Christoffel conformal maps, and the second uses freeform surfaces designed by one-dimensional coordinate transformations of a point to an interval.

Earlier spring leaf unfolding is a frequently observed response of plants to climate warming. Many deciduous tree species require chilling for dormancy release, and warming-related reductions in chilling may counteract the advance of leaf unfolding in response to warming. Empirical evidence for this, however, is limited to saplings or twigs in climate-controlled chambers.

Glacial erosion is fundamental to our understanding of the role of Cenozoic-era climate change in the development of topography worldwide, yet the factors that control the rate of erosion by ice remain poorly understood. In many tectonically active mountain ranges, glaciers have been inferred to be highly erosive, and conditions of glaciation are used to explain both the marked relief typical of alpine settings and the limit on mountain heights above the snowline, that is, the glacial buzzsaw.

Structural variants are implicated in numerous diseases and make up the majority of varying nucleotides among human genomes. Here we describe an integrated set of eight structural variant classes comprising both balanced and unbalanced variants, which we constructed using short-read DNA sequencing data and statistically phased onto haplotype blocks in 26 human populations.

The contribution of rare and low-frequency variants to human traits is largely unexplored. Here we describe insights from sequencing whole genomes (low read depth, 7×) or exomes (high read depth, 80×) of nearly 10,000 individuals from population-based and disease collections.

Groundwater in the carbonate aquifers of the southern Andhra Pradesh, India has approached to stress level as water table has declined due to increasing groundwater draft, low to moderate rainfall, less availability or absence of surface water sources and semi-arid climate. In Kallugotla watershed of Kurnool district, groundwater is overexploited for irrigation and static water level exhibit declining trend. In order to manage the aquifers for sustainable water supply, understanding and accurate assessment of groundwater recharge is necessary.

Deep and large opencast coal mines of 400m to 450m depth are considered important to increase the coal production of India. Planning and managing such large open pits depends upon a thorough understanding of geological and geotechnical aspects of the rock strata comprising the overburden column. The experiences of Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) located in Telangana, India document borehole geophysical logging as an effective means to generate a continuous description of geological and geotechnical strata features from the surface to total drilled depth.

Plasmodium falciparum resistance to artemisinin derivatives in Southeast Asia threatens global malaria control strategies. Whether delayed parasite clearance, which exposes larger parasite numbers to artemisinins for longer times, selects higher-grade resistance remains unexplored. We investigated whether long-lasting artemisinin pressure selects a novel multidrug-tolerance profile.