today, saving and storing water are among the most critical and important issues which have attracted the world's attention. history of storing water in the form of ghanat and water reservoir by iranians goes back to ancient times. studies on this field show that benefiting from underground dams was one of the methods employed for exploiting water in past times. in countries like iran, due...

A central unresolved issue in evolutionary biology is how metabolic innovations emerge. Low-level enzymatic side activities are frequent and can potentially be recruited for new biochemical functions. However, the role of such underground reactions in adaptation toward novel environments has remained largely unknown and out of reach of computational predictions, not least because these issues d...

A Bluetooth beacon-based underground navigation system (BBUNS) was developed to identify the optimal haul road in an underground mine, track the locations of dump trucks, and display this information on mobile devices. A three-dimensional (3-D) geographic information system (GIS) database of the haul roads in an underground mine was constructed, and the travel time for each section was calculat...

Researchers have long noted that child support policy for low-income parents may discourage formal child support payments and increase fathers’ participation in the underground economy. Among other factors, low-income fathers may have an incentive to avoid the formal child support system through underground work, since child support order amounts for low-income fathers can be quite high relativ...

Wireless Underground Communication Networks (WUCNs) consist of wireless devices that operate below the ground surface. These devices are either (i) buried completely under dense soil, or (ii) placed within a bounded open underground space, such as underground mines and road/subway tunnels. The main difference between WUCNs and the terrestrial wireless communication networks is the communication...

The seismic behaviour of underground structures is generally satisfactory compared to the above-ground ones. However, despite of the buried structure confinement, in recent strong seismic events some underground structure as tunnels, pipelines and tanks suffered high damage; for this reason, a strong effort is focused to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of these structure and to give codes in...

The global energy shortage has revived the interest in hydroelectric power, but extreme geological condition always pose challenges to the construction of hydroelectric power stations with large underground caverns. To solve the problem of safe design of large underground caverns, a Chinese-style intelligent stability design, representing recent developments in Chinese techniques for the constr...

Underground pipelines constitute one of the most important ways to transport large amounts of fluid (e.g. oil and water) through long distances. However, existing leakage detection techniques do not work well in monitoring the underground pipelines due to the harsh underground environmental conditions. In this paper, a new solution, the magnetic induction (MI)-based wireless sensor network for ...

The wide adoption of underground mining has contributed immensely to the rapid growth of the countries’ economy, job creation, gross domestic product, fixed capital formation, gross investment and merchandise exports on an enormous global scale. At the same time, the tedious and dangerous nature of underground mining makes it vulnerable to mine accidents and disasters, such as the fall of loose...

The implementation of underground distribution lines has grown significantly over the last decades due to the rapid increase of electric energy demand. But, the life of underground lines is determined by strong single or multiple stresses, developed during manufacturing and operation. Establishing and predicting the end of life of a distribution underground line is a task for researchers, desig...