Pleistocene collapse of the west antarctic ice sheet

Some glacial sediment samples recovered from beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet at ice stream B contain Quaternary diatoms and up to 10(8) atoms of beryllium-10 per gram. Other samples contain no Quaternary diatoms and only background levels of beryllium-10 (less than 10(6) atoms per gram). The occurrence of young diatoms and high concentrations of beryllium-10 beneath grounded ice indicates that the Ross Embayment was an open marine environment after a late Pleistocene collapse of the marine ice sheet.     

Simplification of the standard method for determination of non-exchangeable NH4−N in soil

The widely-used Silva-Bremner method for determining non- exchangeable NH₄?N in the soil was modified so as to reduce reagent requirement and the time taken to carry out the analyses. In the modification, boiling the mixture of soil and KOBr on a hot plate was replaced with heating the soil/KOBr mixture, directly placed in centrifuge tubes, in a boiling water bath or a microwave oven. The best procedure is to keep the soil/KOBr mixture for 10 minutes in the water bath or for 10 minutes at 50% of full power in a microwave oven. The modified method gave similar values to the standard method on 4 quite different soils and also slightly increased reproducibility.     

Sulfur in soils

Sulfur (S) deficiency of crops, which has been reported with increasing frequency over the past two decades on a worldwide scale, is a factor that reduces yield and affects the quality of harvested products. Especially in Western European countries, incidence of S deficiency has increasingly been reported in Brassicaceae. For this reason, more attention should be paid to the optimization of S‐fertilizer application, in order to cover plant S requirements whilst minimizing environmental impacts. In soils, S exists in inorganic and organic forms. While sulfate (SO ), which is a direct S source for plants, contributes up to 5% of total soil S, generally more than 95% of soil S are organically bound. Organic S is divided into sulfate ester and carbon‐bonded S. Although not directly plant‐available, organically bound S may potentially contribute to the S supply of plants, especially in deficiency situations. Sulfur turnover involves both biochemical and biological mineralization. Biochemical mineralization, which is the release of SO from the ester sulfate pool through enzymatic hydrolysis, is controlled by S supply, while the biological mineralization is driven by the microbial need for organic C to provide energy.     

Effects of organic manure and chemical fertilizer on soil fertility and productivity of plant and ratoon crops of sugarcane

A long-term field experiment was initiated in November, 1967 at Research Area of Department of Soil Science to study the response of nitrogen to pearl millet-wheat cropping system at various doses and modes of farmyard manure application. The soil organic carbon increased with farmyard manure application and ranged from 0.68% in control to 1.82% in the plot receiving the highest annual dose (90 Mg ha^?1) of farmyard manure. To study the contribution of farmyard manure on the productivity of pearl millet and wheat crops, the constants (intercept and slope) were determined between the grain yield of pearl millet and wheat crops with increasing dose of fertilizer nitrogen. Another linear regression was fitted between the intercept of the linear model and the soil organic carbon content. It has been observed that with each unit increase in the soil organic carbon, the productivity of pearl millet increased by 273 kg ha^?1 and that of wheat by 1591 kg ha^?1. The regression between the slope and soil organic carbon was linear in case of pearl millet (R² 0.49) but in case of wheat there was no relationship.     

Cobiogasification of Wastepaper Products with Separately Collected Municipal Solid Waste

? The treatment of soiled hygiene papers (HYP), such as diapers and sanitary napkins, added at a concentration of 10 percent (w/w) to separately collected municipal biowaste was tested at Biotechnishce Abfallverwertung (BTA)'s three stage mesophilic biogas plant in Munich. The study aimed to establish the feasibility of cobiogasification of hygiene papers and biowaste. Parameters measured were: Efficiency of plastics and inerts separation; Mass balances; Organic and inorganic dry residues; COD; C:N ratio; Heavy metal content; Bacterial counts; Fiber analysis of suspension; Residues; Effluent for hemicellulose, cellulose and lignin; Biogas yield; and Quality. In the conditioning stage, the hygiene papers (HYP) (10 percent) were completely suspended with municipal solid waste. The dry materials balance of the conditioning unit resulted in an increase of 1.5 percent of the screenings, corresponding exactly to the amount of the added plastics. Heavy metal contents in the residues were well below limits established by German compost quality guidelines. Plate counts of the sums of Enterobacteriae and Salmonellae revealed that addition of soiled HYPs does not increase risk of contamination. Fermentation process and yield did not differ from control; biogas contained about 70-75 percent methane and most organic pollutants measured were undetectable.     

The genome sequence of Drosophila melanogaster

The fly Drosophila melanogaster is one of the most intensively studied organisms in biology and serves as a model system for the investigation of many developmental and cellular processes common to higher eukaryotes, including humans. We have determined the nucleotide sequence of nearly all of the approximately 120-megabase euchromatic portion of the Drosophila genome using a whole-genome shotgun sequencing strategy supported by extensive clone-based sequence and a high-quality bacterial artificial chromosome physical map. Efforts are under way to close the remaining gaps; however, the sequence is of sufficient accuracy and contiguity to be declared substantially complete and to support an initial analysis of genome structure and preliminary gene annotation and interpretation. The genome encodes approximately 13,600 genes, somewhat fewer than the smaller Caenorhabditis elegans genome, but with comparable functional diversity.     

The persistence of foot-and-mouth disease virus on wool

SUMMARY Five Suffolk sheep, held in a high-security isolation room, were exposed for 2 hours to the aerosol of 3 mature pigs that had been infected with foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV), strain O₁-BFS. The fleeces of 3 of the sheep were contaminated with FMDV at 2 days post exposure (dpe), while at 5 dpe the fleeces of all 5 sheep were more extensively, and more heavily, contaminated. The persistence of FMDV on contaminated wool was examined in vitro using multiple 0.5 g samples of Merino wool that were each contaminated with one of 3 strains of FMDV in tissue-culture medium: O₁-BFS, O-Morocco (O-MOR 9/91) or an Asia 1 strain (TAI 1/90). Wool samples were held at either 4°C, 18°C or 37°C, and decay curves were established for each virus at each temperature. These curves predicted that O₁-BFS, O-MOR 9/91 and TAI 1/90 would fall below detect-able levels at 72, 70 and 48 days post contamination (pc), respectively, for wool stored at 4°C; at 11, 12 and 12 days pc, respectively, for wool stored at 18°C; and at 57, 68 and 33 hours pc, respectively, for wool stored at 37°C. For wool contaminated with O₁-BFS-infected sheep faeces, urine or blood, or with O₁-BFS-infected cattle saliva, decay curves predicted virus to persist for 5 to 11 days pc at 18°C. We demonstrated that the simulated scouring of FMDV-contaminated wool at 60° to 70°C would usually reduce virus to below detectable levels. The detergent component of the scouring process had little, if any, antiviral activity, and scouring at 20°C or 50°C had limited impact on FMDV titres . We recommend that either (1) simple storage of FMDV-contaminated wool for 4 weeks at temperatures of 18°C or higher, or (2) scouring of contaminated wool at 60° to 70°C would be sufficient to remove the threat of FMDV-contaminated wool being infectious to other animals .