PURPOSE Our objective was to identify histologically and intraoperatively verified focal nerve thickening of the distal intrameatal segment on three-dimensional fast spin-echo (FSE) T2-weighted MR images as a new diagnostic criterion in patients with inflammatory peripheral facial nerve palsy. METHODS Twenty-two patients with clinically diagnosed unilateral (n = 20) or bilateral (n = 2) infla...

The lead review “Risk assessment of genetically modified crops for nutrition and health” by Magaña-Gómez and Calderon de la Barca,1 ends with a common plea: “more research is needed”. It is valid to put both this plea and the justification for other similar research into perspective. How selective are the reviews that lead to the conclusion that more of such research is needed?What comparators ...

Orthomosics and digital surface models (DSM) derived from aerial imagery, acquired by consumer-grade cameras, have the potential for crop type mapping. In this study, a novel method was proposed for extracting the crop height from DSM and for evaluating the orthomosics and crop height for the identification of crop types (mainly corn, cotton, and sorghum). The crop height was extracted by subtr...

Returning crop residue improves water conservation and storage, nutrient availability, and crop yields. We have little knowledge, however, of the residual impacts of crop residues on soil and crop production. We hypothesized that residual impacts of crop residues vary with the amount of residues used. A 10-yr study near Lincoln, NE, evaluated the residual effects of an earlier 8-yr study of var...

Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted as a cropping system that has potential to alleviate poor crop yields in smallholder farming while protecting the environment. It involves maintenance of permanent soil cover, diverse crop rotations and/or interactions; and minimum soil disturbance. CA is associated with crop residue management challenges due to low crop biomass yields and crop-livestoc...

The next advance in field crop productivity will likely need to come from improving crop use efficiency of resources (e.g., light, water, and nitrogen), aspects of which are closely linked with overall crop photosynthetic efficiency. Progress in genetic manipulation of photosynthesis is confounded by uncertainties of consequences at crop level because of difficulties connecting across scales. C...

Crop water requirement is essential for agricultural water management, which is usually available for crop growing stages. However, crop water requirement values of monthly or weekly scales are more useful for water management. A method was proposed to downscale crop coefficient and water requirement from growing stage to substage scales, which is based on the interpolation of accumulated crop ...

Factors affecting forage production, quality, marketing, and utilization include urbanization; availability of crop production resources; approaches to environmental stewardship; and other social and economic forces. Two factors of particular interest are 1) availability of pesticides for use in alfalfa and other forage crops; and 2) new laboratory procedures for predicting forage nutritional v...

Trophic polymorphisms are a prominent form of phenotypic diversification in many animal taxa. Northern temperate lakes have become model systems for the investigation of sympatric speciation due to trophic polymorphisms. Many examples of niche-based phenotypic variation occur in temperate lakes, whereas northern rivers offer few such examples. To further investigate the conditions under which t...

Antibodies to galactocerebroside (GalC) cause major changes in the organization of the membrane sheets elaborated by murine oligodendroglia in culture. Exposure of oligodendroglia to rabbit anti-GalC IgG for 15 min followed by fluoresceinated second antibodies results in patches of surface GalC staining; when second antibodies are applied after 2 hr of anti-GalC, the pattern of staining on memb...