BACKGROUND Some studies have indicated an inverse relationship between cancer risk and sunlight exposure. Others have reported that the prognosis of some cancers such as prostate, colon, ovarian and non melanoma skin cancer, were affected by the season in which the cancer was diagnosed. In our study, we evaluated whether season is prognostic in Turkish patients with breast cancer. MATERIALS A...

In schizophrenia there is a consistent epidemiological finding of a birth excess in winter and spring. Season of birth is thought to act as a proxy indicator for harmful environmental factors during foetal maturation. There is evidence that prenatal exposure to harmful environmental factors may trigger pathologic processes in the neurodevelopment, which subsequently increase the risk of schizop...

Trees need to store reserves to allow their survival during winter and for bud flush and leaf growth in the following spring. In many tree species, these reserve functions are mainly covered by starch, which is degraded to soluble carbohydrates during the dormant season for maintenance respiration and in spring during bud flush. We conducted girdling experiments on poplar (Populus deltoides x n...

The ability of seed to germinate under favorable environmental conditions is critical for seedling emergence, plant establishment, subsequent development and growth of adult plants, and it is controlled by internal genetic factors and external environmental factors. Winter wheat in the southern Great Plains is often planted six weeks before the optimal planting date to produce more biomass for ...

Abstract Scomberoides commersonnianus is one of the commercially important fishes of the family Carangidae. In this study, 563 specimens (292 males, 247 females, and 24 sexually unknown ones) were collected from the north-west of the Persian Gulf. Length-weight relationships and condition factors were determined for each sex in four length classes within different seasons. In general, the growt...

Soil respiration of terrestrial ecosystems, a major component in the global carbon cycle is affected by elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations. However, seasonal differences of feedback effects of elevated CO2 have rarely been studied. At the Gießen Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (GiFACE) site, the effects of +20 % above ambient CO2 concentration have been investigated since 1998 in a temperate grass...

PREMISE OF THE STUDY Trait differences can promote distinct survival and fecundity responses to environmental fluctuations. In a Sonoran Desert winter annual plant community, we have identified a tradeoff between relative growth rate (RGR) and water-use efficiency (WUE) that predicts interannual variation in reproductive success. Here we test the hypothesis that traits underlying RGR and WUE di...

Previous studies in East Asia have revealed that the short-term associations between tropospheric ozone and daily mortality rate were strongest in winter, which is opposite to the findings in North America and Western Europe. Therefore, we investigated the season-varying association between ozone and daily mortality rate in 21 cities of East Asia from 1979 to 2010. Time-series Poisson regressio...