The alpha-1 antitrypsin (AAT) haplotype Pi*S, when inherited along with the Pi*Z haplotype to form a Pi*SZ genotype, can be associated with pulmonary emphysema in regular smokers, and less frequently with liver disease, panniculitis, and systemic vasculitis in a small percentage of people, but this connection is less well established. Since the detection of cases can allow the application of pr...

The spatial interpolation of property fields in 3D, such as the temperature, salinity, and organic content of ocean water, is an active area of research in the applied geosciences. Conventional interpolation methods have not adequately addressed anisotropy in these data. Thus, in our research we considered two interpolation methods based on a triangular prism volume element, as a triangular pri...

Diagnosis of soil salinity and characterizing its spatial variability both vertically and horizontally are needed to establish control measures in irrigated agriculture. In this regard, it is essential that salinity development in varying soil depths be known temporally and spatially. Apparent soil electrical conductivity, measured by electromagnetic induction instruments, has been widely used ...

BACKGROUND Studies of unconventional gas development (UGD) and preterm birth (PTB) have not presented risk estimates by well development phase or trimester. OBJECTIVE We examined phase and trimester-specific associations between UGD activity and PTB. METHODS We conducted a case-control study of women with singleton births in the Barnett Shale area, Texas, from 30 November 2010 to 29 Novembe...

Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) topographic data provide highly accurate digital terrain information, which is used widely in applications like creating flood insurance rate maps, forest and tree studies, coastal change mapping, soil and landscape classification, 3D urban modeling, river bank management, agricultural crop studies, etc. In this paper, we focus mainly on the use of L...

With the continuous progress of human production and life, air quality has become the focus of attention. In this paper, Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and Henan provinces were taken as the study area, where there are 58 air quality monitoring stations from which daily and monthly data are obtained. Firstly, the temporal characteristics of the air quality index (AQI) are explored. Th...

This study was carried out to evaluate the capability of a combined fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method for soil fertility evaluation of common bean in Shiraz, Iran. A set of membership functions was constructed to represent the soil fertility classes, which were derived from 50 field samples collected through a purposive sampling approach. Seven soil parameters including phosphorus (...

Near surface air temperature (NSAT) is a primary descriptor of terrestrial environmental conditions. In recent decades, many efforts have been made to develop various methods for obtaining spatially continuous NSAT from gauge or station observations. This study compared three spatial interpolation (i.e., Kriging, Spline, and Inversion Distance Weighting (IDW)) and two regression analysis (i.e.,...

A new simulation-optimization methodology is developed for cost-effective sampling network design associated with long-term monitoring of large-scale contaminant plumes. The new methodology is similar in concept to the one presented by Reed et al. (Reed, P.M., Minsker, B.S., Valocchi, A.J., 2000a. Cost-effective long-term groundwater monitoring design using a genetic algorithm and global mass i...