High summer temperatures in extratropical areas have an impact on the public's health, mainly through heat stress, high air pollution concentrations, and the transmission of tropical diseases. The purpose of this study is to examine the current characteristics of heat events and future projections of summer apparent temperature (AT)-and associated health concerns-throughout the southeastern Uni...

Drought tolerance is a key trait for increasing and stabilizing barley productivity in dry areas worldwide. Identification of the genes responsible for drought tolerance in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) will facilitate understanding of the molecular mechanisms of drought tolerance, and also facilitate the genetic improvement of barley through marker-assisted selection or gene transformation. To m...

The second Summer Youth Olympic Games will take place August 16-28, 2014 in Nanjing, People's Republic of China during the peak of the summer. Nanjing has been reported as one of the hottest cities in the People's Republic of China, with temperatures reaching as high as 40°C. There is limited clinical evidence of the real risks that youth athletes face when training and competing in the heat, b...

Plants undergoing heat and low-CO2 stresses emit large amounts of volatile isoprenoids compared with those in stress-free conditions. One hypothesis posits that the balance between reducing power availability and its use in carbon assimilation determines constitutive isoprenoid emission rates in plants and potentially even their maximum emission capacity under brief periods of stress. To test t...

A large body of evidence shows that sugars function both as nutrients and signals to regulate fruit and seed set under normal and stress conditions including heat and drought. Inadequate sucrose import to, and its degradation within, reproductive organs cause fruit and seed abortion under heat and drought. As nutrients, sucrose-derived hexoses provide carbon skeletons and energy for growth and ...

In the Mediterranean evergreen oak woodlands of southern Portugal, the main tree species are Quercus ilex ssp. rotundifolia Lam. (holm oak) and Quercus suber L. (cork oak). We studied a savannah-type woodland where these species coexist, with the aim of better understanding the mechanisms of tree adaptation to seasonal drought. In both species, seasonal variations in transpiration and predawn l...

The tree-ring-based North American Drought Atlas (NADA), Monsoon Asia Drought Atlas (MADA), and Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) collectively yield a near-hemispheric gridded reconstruction of hydroclimate variability over the last millennium. To test the robustness of the large-scale representation of hydroclimate variability across the drought atlases, the joint expression of seasonal climate v...

to evaluate the effect of different levels of drought stress on some physiological parameters in strawberry, potted experiment involing strawberry cultivars  ‘marak٫ , ‘camarosa٫ and ‘gaviota٫ was conducted during summer 2009. the experiment consisted of three drought stress levels in three replications. the experimental arrangement was a factorial one, based upon a randomized complete block de...

Transgenic tobacco plants (M51-1) constitutively over-expressing a modified gene for the proline biosynthetic enzyme ∆-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthetase (P5CSF129A) and the corresponding wild-type plants (WT) were compared during drought or heat stress and under combination of both stresses. The proline content in M51-1 was several times higher than in WT plants. Under optimal conditions, the ...