Natural substances extracted from plants have recently been considered as potential sunscreen resources because of their ultraviolet ray absorption in the UVA region and their antioxidant activity. In the present study, the UV protective effects of ethyl acetate extracts of some common medicinal plants, which have flavonoids and other phenolics as the most important components, were evaluated u...

The urgent demand of integrated water resources management has drawn attention to the issue of transnational water bodies that comprise exploitable resources for two or more countries. It is estimated that 50% of the global surface is lying on transboundary catchments and this percentage is continually increasing due to the creation of new nations, while around 40% of the earth’s population res...

Ecosystem restoration efforts have become a booming business in China. Billions of dollars are being spent annually to restore polluted waterways and ecosystems that have been degraded, fragmented, or paved over (Fu et al. 2007; Wang et al. 2007). However, China’s environmental sustainability index remains among the lowest in the world (World Bank 2009; Liu 2010). For all the money spent, there...

Environmental quality monitoring of water resources is challenged with providing the basis for safeguarding the environment against adverse biological effects of anthropogenic chemical contamination from diffuse and point sources. While current regulatory efforts focus on monitoring and assessing a few legacy chemicals, many more anthropogenic chemicals can be detected simultaneously in our aqu...

As one of the primary factors of production, labor is an essential element in every nation’s economy. Investing in human capital is widely viewed as a key to sustaining increases in labor productivity and economic growth. While health is increasingly seen as an important part of human capital, environmental protection, which typically promotes health, has not been viewed through this lens. Inde...