10. Abstract Aquatic sediments are often the ultimate receptors of all kinds of contaminants, in particular highly toxic and persistent polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The sediments act as long term sources for the release of PCBs to aquatic environment. Developing effective technologies for cleaning up PCBs-contaminated sites has been one of the highest priorities of USGS, EPA, and DOD. Stat...

This study examined the effect of psychosocial factors and environmental perceptions on self-rated health in the environmentally devastated Aral Sea area of Karakalpakstan. Self-rated health was assessed using a questionnaire on 881 randomly selected individuals from three communities. Communities were chosen based on relative differences with regards to economic and ethnic characteristics, and...

How people maintain and repair their self-esteem has been a topic of widespread interest. In this article, the authors ask, What determines whether people will use direct, remedial actions, or defensive actions? In three studies, they tested the hypothesis that a belief in fixed intelligence (entity theory) would produce defensiveness, whereas a belief in improvable intelligence (incremental th...

abstract petroleum pollution is one of the most common and dangerous pollutions that is due to petroleum industries such as refineries, and consequently of oil pipes and tanks leak causing environmental pollutions. one of the newest born technologies in this area is phytoremediation, in which plants are used for decreasing of petroleum pollution. this technology is used for remediation of soil,...

The disposal of untreated urban sewage in to open water bodies is common in most developing countries. This poses potential negative consequences to public health and agricultural sustainability. Hyderabad, one of India’s largest cities, disposes large amounts of its wastewater untreated into the Musi River, from where it is used, with the aid of irrigation weirs, for agricultural production. T...

This article describes the psychometric validation of a scale designed to measure intrinsic motivation (IM) in schizophrenia. Recent studies have highlighted the relationship between motivation and functional outcome in schizophrenia and identified IM as an important mediating factor between neurocognition and psychosocial outcome. It therefore becomes imperative to have validated measures of I...

The effectiveness of cognitive remediation therapy (CRT) for the neuropsychological deficits seen in schizophrenia is supported by meta-analysis. However, a recent methodologically rigorous trial had negative findings. In this study, 130 chronic schizophrenic patients were randomly assigned to computerized CRT, an active computerized control condition (CC) or treatment as usual (TAU). Primary o...

Cognitive remediation involves task practice and may improve deficits in people suffering from schizophrenia, but little is known about underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. In people with schizophrenia and controls, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine accuracy and practice-related changes in parameters indexing neural network structure and activity, to determine whether these m...