At 7:51 p.m. on 17 April 2013, an explosion rocked the town of West, Texas, when fertilizer-grade ammonium nitrate stored at the West Fertilizer Company blew up with the explosive force of 12.5 tons of TNT. Fifteen people died, and 260 were injured. More than 150 offsite buildings were destroyed by the blast and subsequent fire, among them a middle school, a high school, a nursing home, and an ...

Much as Christianity has informed the development of the arts in the West thematically as well as compositionally, Taoism, one of the key philosophical systems to emerge out of China in the sixth or fifth century BCE, has left its stamp on Chinese art, literature and music. Leading translator of Asian spiritual literature, Thomas Cleary, pays tribute to the enormous impact of Taoist thought on ...

The evolutionary and biogeographic history of West Indian boid snakes (Epicrates), a group of nine species and 14 subspecies, was once thought to be well understood; however, new research has indicated that we are missing a clear understanding of the evolutionary relationships of this group. Here, we present the first multilocus, species-tree based analyses of the evolutionary relationships, di...

natural resources have been attracted a great deal of attentions and have been frequently exploited for many years. dust is one of natural disasters mainly in recent years; here, in south west of iran, it had destroyed the rangelands. the dust has detrimental effects on the rangelands, livestock and livestock production. high concentrations of dust may lead to the coughing, nasal discharge, whe...