Quarantine measures to prevent insect invasions tend to focus on well-known pests but a large proportion of the recent invaders were not known to cause significant damage in their native range, or were not even known to science before their introduction. A novel method is proposed to detect new potential pests of woody plants in their region of origin before they are introduced to a new continent.

Typhoons (tropical cyclones) severely impact the half-billion population of the Asian Pacific. Intriguingly, during the recent decade, typhoon destructive potential (Power Dissipation Index, PDI) has decreased considerably (by B35%). This decrease, paradoxically, has occurred despite the increase in typhoon intensity and ocean warming. Using the method proposed by Emanuel (in 2007), we show that the stronger negative contributions from typhoon frequency and duration, decrease to cancel the positive contribution from the increasing intensity, controlling the PDI.

The present paper attempts to evaluate the economic conditions of the farm households of Yavatmal district of Vidarbha region. The district has reported an increasing number of suicides during the period of Jan. to Dec. 2011.This is in a striking contrast with other districts of Vidarbha in which suicide rates have been declining. The main thrust of the study is on ascertaining whether these farm suicides have taken place mainly due to the rural and agricultural credit problems.

There is a paucity of information on secular trends in the age-related process by which people develop overweight or obesity. Utilizing longitudinal data in the United Kingdom birth cohort studies, we investigated shifts over the past nearly 70 years in the distribution of body mass index (BMI) and development of overweight or obesity across childhood and adulthood.

Like a growing number of rapidly developing countries, India has begun to develop a system for large-scale community-based screening for diabetes. The researchers sought to identify the implications of using alternative screening instruments to detect people with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes among diverse populations across India.

Previous work on possible surface reflectance biosignatures for Earth-like planets has typically focused on analogues to spectral features produced by photosynthetic organisms on Earth, such as the vegetation red edge. Although oxygenic photosynthesis, facilitated by pigments evolved to capture photons, is the dominant metabolism on our planet, pigmentation has evolved for multiple purposes to adapt organisms to their environment.

Increasing evidence indicates that species throughout the world are responding to climate change by shifting their geographic distributions. Although shifts can be directionally heterogeneous, they often follow warming temperatures polewards and upslope. Montane species are of particular concern in this regard, as they are expected to face reduced available area of occupancy and increased risk of extinction with upslope movements. However, this expectation hinges on the assumption that surface area decreases monotonically as species move up mountainsides.

Global tropical cyclone climate has been investigated with indicators of frequency, intensity and activity. However, a full understanding of global warming’s influence on tropical cyclone climate remains elusive because of the incomplete nature of these indicators. Here we form a complete three-dimensional variability space of tropical cyclone climate where the variabilities are continuously linked and find that global ocean warmth best explains the out-of-phase relationship between intensity and frequency of global tropical cyclones.

Extreme heat events are likely to become more frequent in the coming decades owing to climate change. Exposure to extreme heat depends not only on changing climate, but also on changes in the size and spatial distribution of the human population. Here we provide a new projection of population exposure to extreme heat for the continental United States that takes into account both of these factors.

Lung adenocarcinomas from never smokers account for approximately 15 to 20% of all lung cancers and these tumors often carry genetic alterations that are responsive to targeted therapy. Here we examined mutation status in 10 oncogenes among 89 lung adenocarcinomas from never smokers. We also screened for oncogene fusion transcripts in 20 of the 89 tumors by RNA-Seq. In total, 62 tumors had mutations in at least one of the 10 oncogenes, including EGFR (49 cases, 55%), K-ras (5 cases, 6%), BRAF (4 cases, 5%), PIK3CA (3 cases, 3%), and ERBB2 (4 cases, 5%).