BACKGROUND Childhood cancer has been linked to a variety of environmental factors, including agricultural activities, industrial pollutants and population mixing, but etiologic studies have often been inconclusive or inconsistent when considering specific cancer types. More specific exposure assessments are needed. It would be helpful to optimize future studies to incorporate knowledge of high-...

Objective: Water scarcity is a growing global problem and increasing population pressures, living standards and the growing demand for environmental quality have evoked all the governments to represent better solutions about water resources management. In addition, there are growing political ties for reducing water use in agriculture that follow enough environmental benefits and increase the w...

In this paper, an image authentication technique by embedding digital “watermarks” into images is proposed. Watermarking is a technique for labeling digital pictures by hiding secret information into the images. Sophisticated watermark embedding is a potential method to discourage unauthorized copying or attest the origin of the images. In our approach, we embed the watermarks with visually rec...

Most studies of the influence of weather and climate on food production have examined the influence on crop yields. However, climate influences all components of crop production, includes cropping area (area planted or harvested) and cropping intensity (number of crops grown within a year). Although yield increases have predominantly contributed to increased crop production over the recent deca...

Agricultural sustainability has become a major concern in arid regions of China. In order to better understand the influence of continuous cropping on soil quality, six experimental fields were established in the Alar Oasis of Xinjiang, including uncultivated land (as a zero year treatment duration) and five different continuous cropping years on cotton fields, with different cropping durations...

Cropping is a cutting process whereby opposing aligned blades create a shearing failure by exerting opposing forces normal to the surfaces of a metal sheet or plate. Building on recent efforts to quantify cropping, this paper formulates a plane strain elastic–plastic model of a plate subject to shearing action by opposing rigid platens. Shear failure at the local level is modeled by a cohesive ...