Coccidiodomycosis (valley fever) is a systemic infection caused by inhalation of airborne spores from Coccidioides immitis, a soil-dwelling fungus found in the southwestern United States, parts of Mexico, and Central and South America. Dust storms help disperse C. immitis so risk factors for valley fever include conditions favorable for fungal growth (moist, warm soil) and for aeolian soil eros...

Spatial and temporal patterns of transported organic matter (seston) and macroinvertebrates (drift) and benthic macroinvertebrate densities were examined before, during, and shortly after each of a series of scheduled, experimental floods in a flow-regulated river in the Swiss National Park. Temporal patterns in the lateral transfer of seston, drift, and benthic macroinvertebrates were evaluate...

a r t i c l e i n f o Mars accumulated and differentiated into crust, mantle and core within a few tens of millions of years of Solar System formation. Formation of Hellas, which has been adopted as the base of the Noachian period, is estimated to have occurred around 4.1 to 3.8 Gyr ago, depending on whether or not the planet experienced a late cataclysm. Little is known of the pre-Noachian per...

The permanently ice-covered lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica are distinctive ecosystems that consist strictly of microbial communities. In this study, water samples were collected from Lake Vanda, a stratified Dry Valley lake whose upper waters (from just below the ice cover to nearly 60 m) are highly oligotrophic, and used to establish enrichment cultures. Six strains of psychrotol...

Several potential dust sources, including generic sources of sparsely vegetated alluvium, playa deposits, and anthropogenic emissions, as well as the area around Owens Lake, California, affect the composition of modern dust in the southwestern United States. A comparison of geochemical analyses of modern and old (a few thousand years) dust with samples of potential local sources suggests that d...

[1] To explain the much higher denudation rates and valley network development on early Mars (> 3.6 Gyr ago), most investigators have invoked either steady state warm/wet (Earthlike) or cold/dry (modern Mars) end-member paleoclimates. Here we discuss evidence that highland gradation was prolonged, but generally slow and possibly ephemeral during the Noachian Period, and that the immature valley...

In the spring of 1927 and in other years since that time considerable numbers of farm animals, chiefly mules, have been killed in the lower Mississippi Valley by outbreaks of the Southern Buffalo Gnat. In Former times this insect caused enormous losses for livestock in this region, but for some forty years prior to the present series of outbreaks, little was recorded concerning its depredations...

This research evaluated the effect of flooding on the microphytobenthos community structure in a microbial mat from a tropical salt flat. Field samples were collected during four consecutive days: on the first three days the salt flat was dry, on the fourth day it was flooded by rain. In order to evaluate the community maintained in flood conditions, samples from this area were collected and ke...