From late colonial rent reliefs and agricultural researches to the recent land acquisition bill and the "second green revolution," Indian agriculture has seen several transitions. This paper tracks detailed quantitative and qualitative evidence on long-term shifts in agricultural practices, yields and land relations in Dhantala, a village in western Uttar Pradesh, from the 1930s to 2012. This is done with the help of family and kutcherry records, elders' recall and surveys as well as the interviews conducted personally in three revisits since 1989.

Classical tidal theory predicts that the lunar gravitational semidiurnal tide (L2) should induce perturbations in relative humidity (RH). Adiabatic expansion in divergent flow in advance of the L2 pressure minimum cools the air and reduces its saturation vapor pressure, thereby increasing the rate of condensation in saturated air parcels and causing the relative humidity (RH) of unsaturated parcels to rise.

There is increasing evidence that mobile phone health interventions (“mHealth”) can improve health behaviors and outcomes and are critically important in low-resource, low-access settings. However, the majority of mHealth programs in developing countries fail to reach scale. One reason may be the challenge of developing financially sustainable programs.

Wastewater is increasingly being used in the agricultural sector to cope with the depletion of freshwater resources as well as water stress linked to changing climate conditions. As wastewater irrigation expands, research focusing on the human health risks is critical because exposure to a range of contaminants must be weighed with the benefits to food security, nutrition and livelihoods.

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Among the tropical oceans, the western Indian Ocean hosts one of the largest concentrations of marine phytoplankton blooms in summer. Interestingly, this is also the region with the largest warming trend in sea surface temperatures in the tropics during the past century—although the contribution of such a large warming to productivity changes has remained ambiguous. Earlier studies had described the western Indian Ocean as a region with the largest increase in phytoplankton during the recent decades.

Wearable sensor technologies are essential to the realization of personalized medicine through continuously monitoring an individual’s state of health. Sampling human sweat, which is rich in physiological information, could enable non-invasive monitoring. Previously reported sweat-based and other non-invasive biosensors either can only monitor a single analyte at a time or lack on-site signal processing circuitry and sensor calibration mechanisms for accurate analysis of the physiological state.

Diarrheal disease is the world’s second leading cause of death among young children. It claims more than half a million lives of children under five years old each year, accounting for 9% of global child deaths. It is also a leading cause of morbidity in children, including chronic malnutrition. The original United Nations Millennium Development Goals included a target to reduce the mortality rate among children under five by two-thirds by 2015.

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Core isotope measurements in the equatorial Pacific Ocean reveal that although atmospheric dust deposition during the last ice age was higher than today’s, the productivity of the equatorial Pacific Ocean did not increase; this may have been because iron-enabled greater nutrient consumption, mainly in the Southern Ocean, reduced the nutrients available in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and hence also productivity there.

Global temperature targets, such as the widely accepted limit of an increase above pre-industrial temperatures of two degrees Celsius, may fail to communicate the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The translation of CO2 emissions into regional- and impact-related climate targets could be more powerful because such targets are more directly aligned with individual national interests. We illustrate this approach using regional changes in extreme temperatures and precipitation.

Songbirds are a culinary delicacy in Cyprus — but catching and eating them is illegal. Even so, the practice is on the rise and could be threatening rare species.

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