Aquatic macrophytes play an important role in the structure and functioning of lagoon ecosystems. We assessed the importance of biotic and abiotic environmental factors in controlling spatial ...patterns of charophyte occurrence and coverage in the Curonian Lagoon. The relationships among five charophyte species, abiotic and biotic environmental factors were assessed using canonical correspondence analysis and multivariate regression trees. Salinity and wave exposure were the most important environmental factors explaining the occurrence and coverage of charophytes species in the estuarine part of the lagoon. The salinity gradient restricted the occurrence of brackish water species (especially Chara baltica and Tolypella nidifica) and freshwater species (especially Nitellopsis obtusa). The occurrence and coverage of C. contraria and T. nidifica were positively associated with the wave exposure and related factors (the bottom slope and grain size of sediments). The cover of N. obtusa could be suppressed by shading and/or space limitation by dense stands of Potamogeton perfoliatus. Relatively low explained variation in the occurrence and coverage (respectively, 28 and 19%) of charophytes by environmental factors highlights the need for analysis of other important factors (e. g. chemical content of sediments, dynamics of propagule bank and herbivory), and better resolution in linking macrophyte community composition with environmental data.
•Biotic and abiotic factors influence the distribution of charophytes in the lagoon.•Salinity and wave exposure were the most important explanatory factors.•Occurrence of brackish and freshwater species were restricted by salinity of 0.4.•Chara contraria and Tolypella nidifica were positively related to wave exposure.•Competitive interactions due to stands of pondweeds limited Nitellopsis obtusa cover.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Abstract Post independent India has witnessed several horrific incidents of communal violence. The largest communal riot happened in the year 1984, in the capital city New Delhi. The Anti- Sikh ...Riots of 1984, happened after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India. But for a long time, there was silence surrounding the incident in which thousands lost their lives. The silence was primarily caused from the trauma inflicted from the incident. There are reasons to believe that the silence was politically motivated too. But the role fictional writings have played in communicating the traumatic memory of the incident was significant. This paper studies the novel Amu written by Shonali Bose to understand representation of traumatic memory of the community. The paper attempts to problematize the decades long silence surrounding the incident and the novel’s role along with other similar fictional accounts’ in unraveling the truth of the incident. The concept of unspeakability in trauma is examined alongside the forced silencing of the incident. Keywords: History, Unspeakability, trauma, 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots, Fiction, Silencing
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In 2014, 30 years after the anti-Sikh pogrom (Chauraasi) instigated by the Hindu Right destroyed Sikh lives in New Delhi, I listened to the survivors and witnesses of the 1984 pogrom chat casually ...about their memories of the violence. Several visited their former homes at the original site of the violence and undertook 'walks' to remember what they had experienced. As they did so, they talked, creating a record of where their autobiographical re-tellings of those events created communal memory. While sociological scholarship attends to the trauma of 1984 (Saluja 2015; Das 2006), there is yet to emerge a reckoning with the performance iterations of such event-narratives as the memory walks. Using frameworks of witnessing, describing, and walking, thinking with how a walk can 'hear-tell' memory, I ask in this article: how does one re-tell testimonies of trauma and rumour that the survivors of Chauraasi remembered to and with a non-survivor? In what ways does rumour operate officially and informally? How does the telling, description, and undertaking of the memory walk reproduce a crisis of witnessing, and how does the aural and embodied performance of the walk respond to this crisis? How does the aporia between the descriptions emerging on memory walks and the ineffability of traumatic memory conjure the epistemic limits of narration?
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The gut microbiota has emerged as an environmental factor that modulates the host's energy balance. It increases the host's ability to harvest energy from the digested food, and produces metabolites ...and microbial products such as short-chain fatty acids, secondary bile acids, and lipopolysaccharides. These metabolites and microbial products act as signaling molecules that modulate appetite, gut motility, energy uptake and storage, and energy expenditure. Several findings suggest that the gut microbiota can affect the development of obesity. Germ-free mice are leaner than conventionally raised mice and they are protected against diet-induced obesity. Furthermore, obese humans and rodents have an altered gut microbiota composition with less phylogeneic diversity compared to lean controls, and transplantation of the gut microbiota from obese subjects to germ-free mice can transfer the obese phenotype. Taken together, these findings indicate a role for the gut microbiota in obesity and suggest that the gut microbiota could be targeted to improve metabolic diseases like obesity. This review focuses on the role of the gut microbiota in energy balance regulation and its potential role in obesity.
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The 1984 explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India was undisputedly one of the world's worst industrial disasters. Some have argued that the resulting litigation provided an ..."innovative model" for dealing with the global distribution of technological risk; others consider the disaster a turning point in environmental legislation; still others argue that Bhopal is what globalization looks like on the ground. Kim Fortun explores these claims by focusing on the dynamics and paradoxes of advocacy in competing power domains. She moves from hospitals in India to meetings with lawyers, corporate executives, and environmental justice activists in the United States to show how the disaster and its effects remain with us. Spiraling outward from the victims' stories, the innovative narrative sheds light on the way advocacy works within a complex global system, calling into question conventional notions of responsibility and ethical conduct. Revealing the hopes and frustrations of advocacy, this moving work also counters the tendency to think of Bhopal as an isolated incident that "can't happen here."
Induced Seismicity Keranen, Katie M; Weingarten, Matthew
Annual review of earth and planetary sciences,
05/2018, Volume:
46, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The ability of fluid-generated subsurface stress changes to trigger earthquakes has long been recognized. However, the dramatic rise in the rate of human-induced earthquakes in the past decade has ...created abundant opportunities to study induced earthquakes and triggering processes. This review briefly summarizes early studies but focuses on results from induced earthquakes during the past 10 years related to fluid injection in petroleum fields. Study of these earthquakes has resulted in insights into physical processes and has identified knowledge gaps and future research directions. Induced earthquakes are challenging to identify using seismological methods, and faults and reefs strongly modulate spatial and temporal patterns of induced seismicity. However, the similarity of induced and natural seismicity provides an effective tool for studying earthquake processes. With continuing development of energy resources, increased interest in carbon sequestration, and construction of large dams, induced seismicity will continue to pose a hazard in coming years.
A look behind the scenes of some of India's most critical foreign policy decisions by the country's former foreign secretary and national security adviser.Every country must make choices about ...foreign policy and national security. Sometimes those choices turn out to have been correct, other times not. In this insider's account, Shivshankar Menon describes some of the most crucial decisions India has faced during his long career in government-and how key personalities often had to make choices based on incomplete information under the pressure of fast-moving events.Menon either participated directly in or was associated with all the major Indian foreign policy decisions he describes in Choices. These include the 2005-08 U.S.-India nuclear agreement; the first-ever boundary-related agreement between India and China; India's decision not to use overt force against Pakistan in response to the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai; the 2009 defeat of the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka; and India's disavowal of the first-use of nuclear weapons. Menon examines what these choices reveal about India's strategic culture and decisionmaking, its policies toward the use of force, its long-term goals and priorities, and its future behavior.Choiceswill be of interest to anyone searching for answers to questions about how one of the world's great, rising powers makes its decisions on the world stage, and the difficult choices that sometimes had to be made.
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Vascular cognitive impairment van der Flier, Wiesje M; Skoog, Ingmar; Schneider, Julie A ...
Nature reviews. Disease primers,
02/2018, Volume:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The term vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) was introduced around the start of the new millennium and refers to the contribution of vascular pathology to any severity of cognitive impairment, ...ranging from subjective cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment to dementia. Although vascular pathology is common in elderly individuals with cognitive decline, pure vascular dementia (that is, dementia caused solely by vascular pathology) is uncommon. Indeed, most patients with vascular dementia also have other types of pathology, the most common of which is Alzheimer disease (specifically, the diffuse accumulation of amyloid-β plaques and neurofibrillary tangles composed of tau). At present, the main treatment for VCI is prevention by treating vascular diseases and other risk factors for VCI, such as hypertension and diabetes mellitus. Despite the current paucity of disease-modifying pharmacological treatments, we foresee that eventually, we might be able to target specific brain diseases to prevent cognitive decline and dementia.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
This unique book, now fully updated, provides a comprehensive overview of all aspects of life in North Korea today. Drawing on decades of experience, noted experts Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh explore ...a secretive, oppressed, and hungry world few outsiders can imagine.
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