Disease incidences related to Escherichia coli and Salmonella enterica infections by consumption of (fresh) vegetables, sprouts, and occasionally fruits made clear that these pathogens are not only transmitted to humans via the "classical" routes of meat, eggs, and dairy products, but also can be transmitted to humans via plants or products derived from plants. Nowadays, it is of major concern ...

During extremely hot summer days, air conditioning systems are known as major electricity consumers in residential, commercial and industrial sectors. Moreover, high energy requirement of multiple-chiller plants may cause an interconnected power grid be faced with annual on-peak electrical demand, load-generation mismatch, voltage collapse and catastrophic wide area blackout. Therefore, this pa...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS It has recently found that lowland rice grown hydroponically is exceptionally efficient in absorbing NO3-, raising the possibility that rice and other wetland plants growing in flooded soil may absorb significant amounts of NO3- formed by nitrification of NH4+ in the rhizosphere. This is important because (a) this NO3- is otherwise lost through denitrification in the soil bu...

Public awareness of water- and drought-related issues is an important yet relatively unexplored component of water use behavior. To examine this relationship, we first quantified news media coverage of drought in California from 2005 to 2015, a period with two distinct droughts; the later drought received unprecedentedly high media coverage, whereas the earlier drought did not, as the United St...

BACKGROUND The social and medical problems of drug abuse are a matter of increasing global concern. To tackle drug abuse in changing scenarios, international drug agencies need fresh methods to monitor trends and patterns of illicit drug consumption. OBJECTIVE We tested a sewage epidemiology approach, using levels of excreted drug residues in wastewater, to monitor collective use of the major...

Over the past years in Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, it can be observed that there has been a considerable decrease in water consumption. This leads to high operational costs due to underutilised capacity of existing drinking water treatment plants (DWTP) or distribution systems. Under these conditions providing rational management of DWTP requires technical, economical and reli...

Hydropower plants may be required to operate in synchronous condenser mode in order to supply reactive power to the grid for compensating the fluctuations introduced by the intermittent renewable energies such wind and solar. When operating in this mode, the tail water in the Francis turbine or pump-turbine is depressed below the runner by injecting pressurized air in order to spin in air to re...