Since 1976, in the northeastern hill region of Mizoram intensive collections of maize landraces were made by ICAR-NBPGR, New Delhi and diversity of landraces maize from this region comprised 36% of the total collection from whole India, which was the highest number of accession among other regions . The maize landraces in this region were reported to show extensive variability for plant, tassel, ear and kernel characteristics, and are interesting from the viewpoints of breeding, diffusion and evolution of maize. (Correspondence)

It is generally believed that an efficacious vaccine will be a major asset and the most cost-effective intervention in combating malaria. The fact that individuals living in malaria endemic areas develop immunity against the disease and that injection of irradiated sporozoites can protect humans from infection, suggest that it may be possible to develop vaccines against malaria. (Editorial)

Original Source

In the past several years, as worldwide morbidity and mortality due to malaria have continued to decrease, the global malaria community has grown increasingly supportive of the idea of malaria eradication.

Estimating the exposure of agriculture to climate variability and change can help us understand key vulnerabilities and improve adaptive capacity, which is vital to secure and increase world food production to feed its growing population. A number of indices to estimate exposure are available in literature. However, testing or validating them is difficult and reveals a considerable variability, and no systematic methodology has been developed to guide users in selecting indices for particular applications.

Large rivers create major gaps in reef distribution along tropical shelves. The Amazon River represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean, generating up to a 1.3 × 106–km2 plume, and extensive muddy bottoms in the equatorial margin of South America. As a result, a wide area of the tropical North Atlantic is heavily affected in terms of salinity, pH, light penetration, and sedimentation. Such unfavorable conditions were thought to imprint a major gap in Western Atlantic reefs. We present an extensive carbonate system off the Amazon mouth, underneath the river plume.

As one of the most prolific and widespread reef builders, the staghorn coral Acropora holds a disproportionately large role in how coral reefs will respond to accelerating anthropogenic change. We show that although Acropora has a diverse history extended over the past 50 million years, it was not a dominant reef builder until the onset of high-amplitude glacioeustatic sea-level fluctuations 1.8 million years ago. High growth rates and propagation by fragmentation have favored staghorn corals since this time.

The diversity of life on Earth—which provides vital services to humanity —stems from the difference between rates of evolutionary diversification and extinction. Human activities have shifted the balance : Species extinction rates are an estimated 1000 times the “background” rate and could increase to 10,000 times the background rate should species threatened with extinction succumb to pressures they face.

Robust appraisals of climate impacts at different levels of global-mean temperature increase are vital to guide assessments of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. The 2015 Paris Agreement includes a two-headed temperature goal: "holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C". Despite the prominence of these two temperature limits, a comprehensive overview of the differences in climate impacts at these levels is still missing.

The 170 National Forests and Grasslands (NFs) in the conterminous United States are public lands that provide important ecosystem services such as clean water and timber supply to the American people. This study investigates the potential impacts of climate change on two key ecosystem functions (i.e., water yield and ecosystem productivity) using the most recent climate projections derived from 20 Global Climate Models (GCMs) of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5).

Many recent studies point to increasing inequality in mortality in the U.S. over the past twenty years. These studies often use mortality rates in middle and old age. Here we study inequality in mortality for all age groups in 1990, 2000, and 2010. Our analysis is based on groups of counties ranked by their poverty levels. Consistent with previous studies, we find increasing inequality in mortality at older ages.