Soil carboxydovore bacteria are the biological sink of atmospheric carbon monoxide (CO). The initial oxidation of CO is catalyzed by a CO-dehydrogenase (CODH), and the gene coxL encodes the large subunit of the enzyme. Only a few carboxydovore isolates were shown to oxidize atmospheric CO and little is known about the potential impact of global change on the ecophysiology of this functional gro...

Forest structure and dynamics vary across the Amazon Basin in an east-west gradient coincident with variations in soil fertility and geology. This has resulted in the hypothesis that soil fertility may play an important role in explaining Basin-wide variations in forest biomass, growth and stem turnover rates. Soil samples were collected in a total of 59 different forest plots across the Amazon...

The regional determining factors underlying inter- and intra-site variation of (15)N natural abundance in foliage, O horizon and mineral soil were investigated in eastern China.(15)N natural abundance values for these forest ecosystems were in the middle of the range of values previously found for global forest ecosystems. In contrast to commonly reported global patterns, temperate forest ecosy...

Assessing potential long-term forest productivity requires identification of the processes regulating chemical changes in forest soils. We resampled the litter layer and upper two mineral soil horizons, A and AB/BA, in two aggrading southern Appalachian watersheds 20 yr after an earlier sampling. Soils from a mixed-hardwood watershed exhibited a small but significant decrease in soil pH. Extrac...

It is shown that the weak phase γ ≡ arg(−VudV ∗ ubVcbV ∗ cd) can be determined using only untagged decays B0/B̄0 → DKS. In order to reduce the uncertainty in γ, we suggest combining information from B → DK and from untagged B0 decays, where the D meson is observed in common decay modes. Theoretical assumptions, which may further reduce the statistical error, are also discussed. Work supported in...

In this work we study the thermodynamic properties of the pion gas starting from the realistic elastic scattering phase-shifts obtained from Chiral Perturbation Theory and using the virial expansion. In particular we study the state equation and the behavior of the quark condensate as a function of the temperature and the density. Research supported by the Department of Energy under contract DE...

A method is presented for calculating the real part of the longitudinal impedance for both a small hole and a long slot in a beam vacuum chamber with a circular cross section. The length of the slot can be arbitrarily large, the only requirement on the dimensions of the slots is that its width be much smaller than c/w. Regular . arrays of N slots periodically distributed along the pipe are also...

Conversion of native rainforest ecosystems in Limón Province of Costa Rica to banana and pineapple monoculture has led to reductions in biodiversity and soil quality. Agroforestry management of cacao (Theobroma cacao) is an alternative system that may maintain the agricultural livelihood of the region while more closely mimicking native ecosystems. This study compared physical, biological and c...

A model is proposed that will allow forest and land use policy options to be explored in a repeatable, objective and quantitative way. Construction and use of the model should lead to a better understanding of spatial and temporal land use patterns. It will provide detailed spatially-explicit data on a range of parameters to enable rigorous testing and offer insights for further development. Th...

It is shown that a recent proof that # 0 in QCD with massless quarks is in error. Submitted to Physical Review Letters * Work supported by the Department of Energy, contract DE-AC03-76SF00515.