Until it was banned, leaded gasoline dominated the manmade lead emissions in South America Leaded gasoline was a larger emission source of the toxic heavy metal lead than mining in South America – even though the extraction of metals from the region’s mines historically released huge quantities of lead into the environment. Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and the University of ...

A total of 187 different species of arboviruses and other viruses in vertebrates were identified at the Evandro Chagas Institute (IEC) from 1954 to 1998, among more than 10,000 arbovirus strains isolated from humans, hematophagous insects, and wild and sentinel vertebrates. Despite intensive studies in the Brazilian Amazon region, especially in Pará State, very little is known about most of the...

Most physiological and biotechnological processes rely on molecular recognition between chiral (handed) molecules. Manmade homogeneous catalysts and enzymes offer complementary means for producing enantiopure (single-handed) compounds. As the subtle details that govern chiral discrimination are difficult to predict, improving the performance of such catalysts often relies on trial-and-error pro...

Several noise barriers made of phononic crystals (i.e. manmade composite materials with a periodic structure) have been designed over the last decade. The periodic structure of phononic crystal avoids sound propagation in a defined frequency range called Bragg band gap (i.e. waves are evanescent). This study aims at quantifying the perceptual impact of a noise barrier based on a phononic crysta...

Deformed wing virus (DWV) and its vector, the mite Varroa destructor, are a major threat to the world's honeybees. Although the impact of Varroa on colony-level DWV epidemiology is evident, we have little understanding of wider DWV epidemiology and the role that Varroa has played in its global spread. A phylogeographic analysis shows that DWV is globally distributed in honeybees, having recentl...

This enzyme, called the photosynthetic water oxidation complex (WOC), liberates protons and electrons needed for energy production and reduction of NADP’ and quinones that are essential for plant growth. The 0, formed in Equation 1 is not essential for plant survival, but is essential for other organisms on Earth, since it is by far the major source of global OL production for the atmosphere. T...

The subject of large-scale disasters is broadly introduced in this article. Both the art and science of predicting, preventing and mitigating natural and manmade disasters are discussed. A universal, quantitative metric that puts all natural and manmade disasters on a common scale is proposed. Issues of prediction, control and mitigation of catastrophes are presented. The laws of nature govern ...

By combining a perceptual discrimination task and a visuospatial working memory task, the present study examined the effects of visuospatial working memory load on the hierarchical processing of scene gist. In the perceptual discrimination task, two scene images from the same (manmade-manmade pairing or natural-natural pairing) or different superordinate level categories (manmade-natural pairin...