This paper emerges from a book I am writing entitled ‘Europe’s Green Revolution: the Rise and Fall of Peasant-Friendly Plant-Breeding, 1890-1945’. For the most part it concentrates upon the emergence in Central Europe during the 1890s of a movement which aimed to bring the advantages of modern plant-breeding to smallholders, the work of the state plant-breeding stations which were founded as a ...

BACKGROUND Beryllium is known to be toxic to the lungs, causing beryllium lung disease and associated with increased lung cancer risk. Airborne beryllium exposures have been monitored since the 1940s. This study describes methods used to measure airborne beryllium concentrations and how historical measurements from a beryllium manufacturing plant were used to estimate workers' exposures in a lu...

BACKGROUND Helicobacter pylori infection is now widely recognized as a cause of stomach cancer. We assessed trends in H. pylori infection in Japan, a population with high rates of gastric malignancy. METHODS Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), we tested sera collected between 1980 and 1993 from Tokyo University Hospital patients for anti-H. pylori IgG. Patients ranged in age f...

Abstract El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) have a worldwide impact on seasonal to yearly climate. However, there are decadal variations in prediction skill of ENSO dynamical statistical models; particular, has declined since 2000. The shortcomings models mean that it is very important study predictability its variation using observational/reanalysis data. Here we quantitatively estima...

Many centers of crop domestication and diversity are experiencing rapid changes in agriculture practices resulting in the loss of crop varieties and the knowledge and customs that have sustained them (Brush 2004; Harlan 1975). Germplasm diversity is threatened by several factors including: replacement by high-yielding varieties, a shift to cash crop cultivation, change in land use, economic inc...

Tan spot (TS), caused by the fungus Pyrenophora tritici-repentis (Died) Drechs, is an important foliar disease of wheat and has become a threat to world wheat production since the 1970s. In this study a globally diverse pre-1940s collection of 247 wheat genotypes was evaluated against Ptr ToxA, P. tritici-repentis race 1, and stem rust to determine if; (i) acquisition of Ptr ToxA by the P. trit...

I n many respects, the 1980s appear to be the worst decade in banking since the Great Depression, while the 1990s could be rated as the best. Over 1,100 commercial banks failed or needed FDIC assistance during the 1980s, and significant parts of the thrift industry became insolvent and had to be resolved, costing taxpayers $125 billion. In contrast, the banking industry began a dramatic recover...

Resistance to antituberculosis drugs has been documented since the 1940s, when the first medicines for tuberculosis were introduced. Since the initiation in 1994 of a global project to monitor the development of drug-resistant tuberculosis, nearly 60% of all countries in the world have implemented surveillance activities. In the past 15 years, special surveys have been the most common approach ...

The use of cellular models for simulating spatial change phenomena has been a subject of intensive theoretical and applied research for the last two decades. This type of models was developed during the 1940s to devise mathematical rules for the evolution of biological systems. They were introduced in urban geography by Waldo Tobler in the 1970s because of their spatial structure and their abil...

Since chemotherapy started in 1940s, chemosensitivity testing has been both a very attractive field and one fraught with potential pitfalls. Many methods were developed and brought initial promises, yet later ending in disappointment and were eliminated. For example, in the 1970s clonogenic assay was generally believed to be the best testing method for predicting clinical outcome. However, tech...