Natural soil Cs concentration is low and non-toxic to plants. The stable isotope Cs is present at concentrations close to 25 μg per g of dry soil [23] and only specially Cs-rich pollucite might cause environmental toxicity of Cs, as in areas of Manitoba [20]. Additionally, two radioisotopes of Cs, Cs and Cs, originating from industry, testing of thermonuclear weapons and from radiation accident...

INTRODUCTION Keratinophilic fungi are an important group of fungi that live in soil. The aim of this study was to isolate and identify keratinophilic fungi from the soil of different parks in Shiraz. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 196 soil samples from 43 parks were collected. Isolation of the fungi was performed by hair bait technique. The isolated colonies were identified by morphologic f...

Laves-phase precipitation and coarsening of tungsten strengthened 9% Cr steel under thermal aging at 923K up to 8000 h was reported in this paper, where the information of the evolution of mean particle size, the number density, the volume fraction of Laves-phase precipitates and the partition coefficients of W and Mo in the matrix over the aging time were determined. The change of hardness ove...

A case day, 11 October 1987, was chosen for simulation using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS). The day was unique from other ‘‘golden’’ days of the First International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project (ISLSCP) Field Experiment (FIFE) in that the surface wind speeds were light in terms of magnitude. Numerous datasets were used to initialize the meteorology, vegetation, c...

Bulliform phytoliths play an important role in researching rice origins as they can be used to distinguish between wild and domesticated rice. Rice bulliform phytoliths are characterized by numerous small shallow fish-scale decorations on the lateral side. Previous studies have shown that domesticated rice has a larger number of these decorations than wild rice and that the number of decoration...

In this paper a rate dependent model for unsaturated geomaterials is presented. The formulation and numerical predictions are compared with available experimental results and discussed. The constitutive laws for the description of the time-dependent mechanical behaviour of saturated and unsaturated geomaterials generalize the isotach approach to the elastoplastic strain hardening based constitu...

Microbial life in soil is perceived as one of the most interesting ecological systems, with microbial communities exhibiting remarkable adaptability to vast dynamic environmental conditions. At the same time, it is a notoriously challenging system to understand due to its complexity including physical, chemical, and biological factors in synchrony. This study presents a spatially-resolved model...

The determination of water application parameters for creating an optimal soil moisture profile represents a complex nonlinear optimization problem which renders traditional optimization into a cumbersome procedure. For this reason, an alternative methodology is proposed which combines a numerical subsurface flow model and artificial neural networks ~ANN! for solving the problem in two, fully s...

Many alluvial soils along navigable waterways are affected by disposal of dredged sediments or overbank sedimentation and contain metal concentrations that are elevated compared to baseline levels. Uptake patterns for metals and other elements by several volunteer Salix species growing on these sites were determined during a growing season in field plots and compared with the same species growi...

A common feature of microbial colonization in deserts is biological soil crusts (BSCs), and these comprise a complex community dominated by Cyanobacteria. Rock substrates, particularly sandstone, are also colonized by microbial communities. These are separated by bare sandy soil that also supports microbial colonization. Here we report a high-throughput sequencing study of BSC and cryptoendolit...