Foraging hummingbirds and nectar bats oxidize both glucose and fructose from nectar at exceptionally high rates. Rapid sugar flux is made possible by adaptations to digestive, cardiovascular, and metabolic physiology affecting shared and distinct pathways for the processing of each sugar. Still, how these animals partition and regulate the metabolism of each sugar and whether this occurs differ...

Present agricultural land use and atmospheric deposition may lead to heavy-metal accumulation rates in soils that may violate soil quality standards in the future. To undertake suitable preventive measures against heavy-metal enrichment, flux balances in agroecosystems and their uncertainties have to be assessed. For this reason we developed an empirical stochastic model, PROTERRA-S, that consi...

We analyzed three kinds of information to evaluate the potential of forests in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to retain the nitrogen in atmospheric deposition. Long-term (13:~) measurements of nitrogen in precipitation and stream discharge for one forested watershed in the Inner Coastal Plain showed consistently high nitrogen retention. Annual wet precipitation deposited an averagk of U.4 kg N/ha...

The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP), established by the Affordable Care Act, ties a hospital's payments to its readmission rates--with penalties for hospitals that exceed a national benchmark--to encourage hospitals to reduce avoidable readmissions. This new Commonwealth Fund analysis uses publicly reported 30-day hos­pital readmission rate data to examine whether safety-net hosp...

Kinetics of alcoholic fermentation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae wine strains in a synthetic medium with high sugar content were established for different nitrogen initial content and are presented for four strains. The composition of the medium was close to grape must except that the nitrogen source consisted mainly in ammonium and was varied from 120 to 290 mg N/l assimilable nitrogen. The over...

Bulk precipitation, stemflow and throughfall were collected in a Canarian laurel forest (North Tenerife), and chemically analysed to determine the net below canopy fluxes. Annual negative fluxes were found for Hþ, NO3 , SO4 2 and Cl and annual positive fluxes for Ca2þ, Mg2þ, Kþ, Naþ, HCO3 , PO4 32 and DOC. Negative fluxes for most of these ions have been reported previously but this is the firs...

QTL mapping in autopolyploids is complicated by the possibility of segregation for three or more alleles at a locus and by a lack of preferential pairing, however the subset of polymorphic alleles that show simplex segregation ratios can be used to locate QTLs. In autopolyploid Saccharum, 36 significant associations between variation in sugar content and unlinked loci detected by 31 different p...