2005 will see the launch of three new open access journals from the Public Library of Science - PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, a notable increase (0.60.8°C) in the Earth’s mean surface temperature has been documented and is continuing at an accelerated rate [1,2]. The European (Anguilla anguilla L.) an eel species of the moderate temperature zoneshas been dwindling since the eighties of the previous centuries [3] and is an endangered species [4]. Possible causes for its decline were in...

One of the mysteries of the animal kingdom is the long-distance migration (5000-6000 km) of the European eel Anguilla anguilla L. from the coasts of Europe to its spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea. The only evidence for the location of the spawning site of the European eel in the Sargasso Sea is the discovery by Johannes Schmidt at the beginning of the previous century of the smallest eel la...

Nitrifying activity measurements, carried out on freshly collected samples from an estuarine environment, show that the composition of the nitrifier population undergoes a progressive modification during the mixing of freshwater masses in seawater, with increasing tolerance to salt. As a result, the overall effect of increasing salinity on nitrification is much less severe than the direct effec...

Membrane distillation is an emerging technology which has been used to produce freshwater and purify different types of aqueous mixtures. Qatar is an arid country where almost 100% of its freshwater demand is supplied through the energy-intensive thermal desalination process. The country’s need for water has reached an all-time high which stipulates finding an alternative way to augment freshwa...

Meridional ocean freshwater transports and convergences are calculated from absolute geostrophic velocities and Ekman transports. The freshwater transports are analyzed in terms of mass-balanced contributions from the shallow, ventilated circulation of the subtropical gyres, intermediate and deep water overturns, and Indonesian Throughflow and Bering Strait components. The following are the maj...

The author performed a retrospective study on 5 complete reports with geographical data and the prevalence of metacercariae in Thailand. The relation between rainfall (derived from the geographical data) and the prevalence of metacercariae in freshwater fish (derived from the overall infection rate of metacercaria) was investigated. The least- square equation plot rainfall (y) versus prevalence...

To assess the potential impacts of agricultural pesticides on tropical freshwater ecosystems, the present study developed temperature-specific, freshwater species protection concentrations (i.e., ecotoxicity threshold values) for 8 pesticides commonly detected in Australia's tropical freshwaters. Because relevant toxicity data for native tropical freshwater species to assess the ecological risk...

We have examined the genetic diversity using mitochondrial COI and ND2 sequence data from 306 specimens of the amphi-Atlantic-distributed amphipod Gammarus duebeni. Marine populations from the Atlantic Ocean, the Baltic and North Sea, as well as freshwater populations from Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany were analysed. G. duebeni is a complex of five allopatric lineages. Freshwater populations r...