Strip Of Land Research Articles

Versican-A Critical Extracellular Matrix Regulator of Immunity and Inflammation.

The extracellular matrix (ECM) proteoglycan, versican increases along with other ECM versican binding molecules such as hyaluronan, tumor necrosis factor stimulated gene-6 (TSG-6), and inter alpha trypsin inhibitor (IαI) during inflammation in a number of different diseases such as cardiovascular and lung disease, autoimmune diseases, and several different cancers. These interactions form stable scaffolds which can act as “landing strips” for inflammatory cells as they invade tissue from the circulation. The increase in versican is often coincident with the invasion of leukocytes early in the inflammatory process. Versican interacts with inflammatory cells either indirectly via hyaluronan or directly via receptors such as CD44, P-selectin glycoprotein ligand-1 (PSGL-1), and toll-like receptors (TLRs) present on the surface of immune and non-immune cells. These interactions activate signaling pathways that promote the synthesis and secretion of inflammatory cytokines such as TNFα, IL-6, and NFκB. Versican also influences inflammation by interacting with a variety of growth factors and cytokines involved in regulating inflammation thereby influencing their bioavailability and bioactivity. Versican is produced by multiple cell types involved in the inflammatory process. Conditional total knockout of versican in a mouse model of lung inflammation demonstrated significant reduction in leukocyte invasion into the lung and reduced inflammatory cytokine expression. While versican produced by stromal cells tends to be pro-inflammatory, versican expressed by myeloid cells can create anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive microenvironments. Inflammation in the tumor microenvironment often contains elevated levels of versican. Perturbing the accumulation of versican in tumors can inhibit inflammation and tumor progression in some cancers. Thus versican, as a component of the ECM impacts immunity and inflammation through regulating immune cell trafficking and activation. Versican is emerging as a potential target in the control of inflammation in a number of different diseases.

Late Pleistocene Landscape and Settlement Dynamics of Portuguese Estremadura

ABSTRACTHere we report the results of an integrated geoarchaeological survey to study Palaeolithic human settlement dynamics in the coastal region of Portuguese Estremadura. The region has been an important focus of human occupation across multiple glacial-interglacial cycles, including periods of well-documented abrupt climate instability during MIS 3 and 2. The pedestrian survey covered a roughly 10 km wide strip of land between São Pedro de Muel and Peniche. The survey intensively targeted three landscape settings with Pleistocene-age surfaces and sediments: the coastal bluffs with exposed aeolian, fluvial, and colluvial sands; the Caldas da Rainha diapiric valley and associated fluvial/estuarine fills; and, Cretaceous chert-rich limestone uplands that bound the inland margin of the study area. We discovered dozens of new Palaeolithic sites, analyzed numerous Pleistocene sedimentary sections, and applied widespread OSL-dating to establish age control that allowed us to build a regional geomorphic history to contextualize Late Pleistocene human settlement across the region.

Site Extension. Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Ohrid region (Albania)

The part of Lake Ohrid located in Northern Macedonia and its hinterland, including the town of Ohrid, has been inscribed on the World Heritage List since 1979. With this extension, the site now encompasses the north-western, Albanian, part of Lake Ohrid, the small Lin Peninsula and the strip of land along the shoreline that connects the peninsula to the Macedonian border. The peninsula is the site of the remains of an Early Christian church founded in the middle of the 6th century. In the shallow waters near the shores of the lake, three sites testify to the presence of prehistoric pile dwellings. A superlative natural phenomenon, the lake provides a refuge for numerous endemic species of freshwater fauna and flora dating from the Tertiary period.

Kela – A Middle Paleolithic flint extraction and reduction site in the northern Golan Heights

Flint-bearing Eocene outcrops are well known from west of the northern Jordan Rift Valley, appearing as a strip of land along the Eastern Galilee and extensively used by prehistoric knappers as a rich source of quality raw material. In this paper we report for the first time on the flint extraction and reduction site of Kela, located within an isolated Eocene limestone outcrop in the basalt terrain of the northwestern margins of the Golan Heights.Based on the analysis of flint items collected at the Kela extraction and reduction locality, we attribute the entire assemblage to the Middle Paleolithic period. Our conclusions are for the most part founded on the presence of numerous Levallois cores and on the absence of other cores and waste types. Our preliminary geochemical analysis tested possible links between the Kela extraction and reduction locality and prehistoric habitation sites in the region. Our finds show that Kela was a source of flint for the Middle Paleolithic knappers of the northern Golan Heights. These results contribute to our understanding of raw material exploitation strategies by prehistoric knappers in the northern Jordan Rift Valley and the Golan Heights.

Postantique Soils as a Source of Land Use Information: A Case Study of an Ancient Greek Agricultural Area on the Northern Black Sea Coast

As an effect of intensive agricultural development of the steppes of the northern Black Sea coast, the finds of postantique agricultural landscapes that preserve relic elements of ancient land-use infrastructure are extremely rare. To these belongs the uniquely preserved ancient Greek land division system on the Tarkhankut Peninsula (north-western Crimea), which was studied using the methods of soil science and biomorphic analysis. This paper explores ancient land-use practices in order to reconstruct the original parameters of the land division system, as well as agricultural techniques employed. For postantique agricultural landscapes, an integrated geoarchaeological approach that includes GIS and remote sensing methodologies, in-field study of microrelief and soil registrograms, pedochronological dating technique, and physicochemical, geochemical, and biomorphic soil analyses has been developed and tested. The soil-geomorphological reconstruction shows that the Hellenistic land division system included a 4.5–4.9 m wide strip of land bordered by a 4.1–4.7 m wide (at the base) and c. 0.2 m high wall and a c. 2 m wide and over 15 cm deep trench, which controlled surface runoff and erosion. Ancient agricultural practices of slope farming resembled the modern ones. Surface runoff and soil erosion were controlled by dividing the catchment area into narrow plots, the borders of which on arable land were marked by simple earthen structures (low walls with shallow trenches). The biomorphic analysis of soil sampled atop these structures indicates that in ancient times, these earthen walls were not cultivated. The study of conservative properties preserved in pedomemory of postagrogenic soils provided valuable evidence of agricultural techniques used in the palaeogeographic conditions of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

The communist party’s viewpoints of marine economic development in innovation period

Marine economy include economic activities taking place on the sea and is directly related to the exploitation of the sea in the coastal strip of land. Vietnam is a maritime country with strategic position advantages for both the region and the world. Therefore, the marine economy has become a part of the national economy and significantly contributed to the national economic development strategy. During the revolutionary leadership process, the Communist Party of Vietnam has been aware of the important role of the marine economy in the overall economy, sovereignty protection, especially during the comprehensive reform period of the country. In order to provide an systematic review of the developing process of the thinking and reasoning of the Party on the marine economic development during the reform period, this article analyzes the Party's view on marine economic development through the congresses from 1986 up to now. On that basis, the article also mentions the Party's viewpoint on some solutions for a sustainable development of the Vietnam’s marine economy during the period of accelerating industrialization, modernization and international integration such as communicating, raising social awareness, constantly improving institutions and policies, planning, and promoting the development of science, technology and marine human resources so as to create a breakthrough for sustainable development of the marine economy.

THE IMPACT OF FOREST BELTS ON THE ECOLOGICAL CONDITIONS OF AUTOMOBILE TRANSPORT LAND

Environmental pollution by road emissions, including nitrogen oxide, dioxide, lead, was investigated. It was established that roadside green spaces, which are a natural barrier and delay the spread of pollution to the roadside, play an important protective role in the roadside. It was determined that the most common plantating along autotomobile roads are protective forest plantating. These plantings include natural forests and forest plantatings of linear type, which are located in the standardized strips of land along the roads or which are intended for their creation. These forest areas make protective functions and minimize the occurrence of negative impacts to the surrounding areas. Lately intensive construction works are being carried out, the fleet of trucks and cars, public automobile transport is increasing, the requirements for the construction of atomobile roads in accordance with the current environmental norms were substantiated, the necessity for inventory of forest plantations along the roads was substantiated. That is why the situation requires continuous updating of forest belts along the automobile roads. It is found that the most informative methods for the inventory of forest belts are space pictures with ultra-high spatial resolution of about one meter (type ICONOS). The stages and the works` list during the inventory of roadside forest belts were determined. The proposals for forecasting the required number of protective forest belts area in the future were substantiated. The basic State building codes and environmental standards, which are guided during the design and construction of automobile roads, were analyzed.

Odpowiedzialność administracyjna na obszarach specjalnych o charakterze przyrodniczym. Zagadnienia wybrane

Administrative responsibility in special areas of natural character must take into account a special legal regime in the form of prohibitions in force ontheir territory. This applies to every entity using the natural environment inthese special areas. In addition, the above prohibitions are introduced inorder to protect, in particular, exceptional natural values and landscape values by means of an appropriate form of nature protection, for example landscapepark or protected landscape area. Therefore, an entity using the natural environment will bear administrative responsibility both if it breaches common prohibitions as well as prohibitions or restrictions related to the creation of an area form of nature protection. This also applies to restrictions in running an economic activity or even prohibiting it when it would threaten the proper functioning of a special area of natural character. In addition,it may also be banned to construct new building facilities in a 100-meter wide strip of land from the banks of rivers or lakes. This means that construction of a building facility in this area is treated as an unauthorized construction, which is subject to a demolition order, i.e. it can not be legalized in any case.

Long-term coastline monitoring on a coral reef island (Moorea, French Polynesia)

While many monitoring programs on coral reefs (for lagoons and outer slopes) exist in the South Pacific, there are no observatories dedicated to monitoring the coastline, a small strip of land and sea upon which many environmental and economic issues coincide. The present study compares the extent of coastline modification at Moorea Island (French Polynesia) between 1977 and 2018. Our coastal monitoring highlighted a strong increase in artificial embankments, and a decrease in beach-dominated coast from 1977 to 2009. From 2009 to 2018, the percentage of embankments have been relatively stable. However, we observed 20% of beach-dominated coast without high vegetation in 2009 and only 10% in 2018. Furthermore, we found that 12% of beach-dominated coast with coarse mud and detrital substrate in 2009 and 22% in 2018. These findings highlighted that anthropogenic factors were principal drivers of coastline changes at Moorea Island. In order to inform conservation and management strategies for coastlines in the South Pacific Islands, it is imperative to conduct ongoing monitoring of coastlines through the creation of dedicated coastline observatories. This work will enhance our understanding of the impact of human-induced environmental changes on this ecologically, economically and culturally important ecosystem.

Impacts of past and future coastal changes on the Yukon coast — threats for cultural sites, infrastructure, and travel routes

Yukon’s Beaufort coast, Canada, is a highly dynamic landscape. Cultural sites, infrastructure, and travel routes used by the local population are particularly vulnerable to coastal erosion. To assess threats to these phenomena, rates of shoreline change for a 210 km length of the coast were analyzed and combined with socioeconomic and cultural information. Rates of shoreline change were derived from aerial and satellite imagery from the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s, and 2011. Using these data, conservative (S1) and dynamic (S2) shoreline projections were constructed to predict shoreline positions for the year 2100. The locations of cultural features in the archives of a Parks Canada database, the Yukon Archaeological Program, and as reported in other literature were combined with projected shoreline position changes. Between 2011 and 2100, approximately 850 ha (S1) and 2660 ha (S2) may erode, resulting in a loss of 45% (S1) to 61% (S2) of all cultural features by 2100. The last large, actively used camp area and two nearshore landing strips will likely be threatened by future coastal processes. Future coastal erosion and sedimentation processes are expected to increasingly threaten cultural sites and influence travelling and living along the Yukon coast.

Poetry, Painting and Change on the Edge of England

AbstractIn this article we discuss our creative research on and with a contested coastal community on one of the UK's last existing plotlands, the humberston Fitties. Plotlands can be briefly defined as places where individuals have historically self‐built holiday houses. This 56‐acre strip of land with 319 chalets is on the Humber estuary and lies close to Cleethorpes, a seaside resort, and Grimsby, a seaport now facing post‐industrial decline. Our cross‐disciplinary collaborative practice between poetry and visual art explores open, environmentally aware engagements and methodologies with landscape and rural place. We investigate the relation of social, environmental and energy politics, looking out to land and sea and back to the community. Our results include original art and poetry presented innovatively together in exhibitions and books, in addition to local people's responses to our methodologies and the work itself.

A Systematic Comparison of Cultural and Ecological Landscape Corridors in Europe

Landscape corridors are narrow strips of land that differ from the matrix on either side. In addition to providing connectivity between fragmented landscapes, these corridors serve scenic, cultural, social, ecological, and recreational purposes. We systematically reviewed reports and studies related to 92 cultural and ecological landscape corridors in Europe, focusing, in particular, on their planning and management, problems addressed, approaches and tools used, stakeholders involved and spatial scales. Biodiversity conservation was found to be the most frequently stated aim (67% of the cases), followed by recreation and tourism (62%). The planning processes for cultural and ecological landscape corridors were dominated by similar, quite narrow, stakeholder groups, but via a wide variety of approaches and tools. Ecological corridors existed at larger and more variable scales relative to cultural landscape corridors. Significant differences were found in many aspects of the two types of corridors, although a complete separation of the two categories was difficult since most of the cases reviewed were designed to serve multiple aims. We close the paper by making a few recommendations for decision makers concerning future corridor planning.

Methane Emissions From the Salt Marshes of Doñana Wetlands: Spatio-Temporal Variability and Controlling Factors

Coastal wetlands are significant sources of methane to the atmosphere, but emissions in these ecosystems are still poorly quantified, as in situ data are limited. In this study, we present the first assessment of spatio-temporal changes in air-water CH4 fluxes in the salt marshes of Donana wetlands (SW Spain), one of the most emblematic protected areas in Europe due to its high biotic diversity and unique importance for aquatic wildfowl. The marshes are flooded by estuarine waters from the adjacent Guadalquivir River by tidal intrusion, which must influence aquatic CH4 dynamics through changes in salinity and water chemistry that affects sedimentary methanogenesis. During sixteen samplings conducted between March 2016 and March 2018, surface water CH4 concentrations were measured by using static-head space equilibration gas chromatography in seven sites representing salt marshes located in the land strip close to the estuary. Because of meteorological conditions and tide variations, salinity markedly changed across the salt marshes, although sites located closer to the river mouth could be categorized as polyhaline marshes whereas upstream sites formed a group of mesohaline marshes. The CH4 saturation range was 252-36,735 % (average 5,170%) and 374-620,007 % (average 31,541%) in polyhaline and mesohaline marshes respectively, suggesting inhibitory effect of sulfate on methanogenesis, although a linear trend between dissolved CH4 concentration and salinity was not observed. In contrast, water temperature and chlorophyll a were significantly and positively correlated with methane, indicating sedimentary methanogenesis control by temperature and organic matter availability boosted by primary productivity. This does not exclude the possibility that some CH4 might come from estuarine inputs. Air-water CH4 fluxes ranged from 2.6 to 720 μmol m−2d−1 (average 104 μmol m−2 d−1) in the polyhaline marshes and from 5.6 to 12,715 μmol m−2d−1 (average 637 μmol m−2 d−1) in the mesohaline marshes, with the higher emissions being measured during the summer months in all sites. Even though the strongest environmental drivers of dissolved CH4 accumulation seemed to be temperature and productivity, the spatio-temporal patterns observed suggest that methane dynamics in Donana salt marshes are controlled by a mosaic of processes rather than by a single environmental force.

The hydro-fluctuation belt of the Three Gorges Reservoir: Source or sink of microplastics in the water?

Reservoirs can be an important environmental compartment for microplastic pollution. Previous investigations have found that surface waters and sediments in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) have had high microplastic abundance, and the Xiangxi River, which is one of the largest primary tributaries of the TGR, has had much higher microplastic abundance than several marine and freshwater systems in China. A strip of land on the bank of the reservoir area, which is called the hydro-fluctuation belt (HFB), is periodically exposed due to the special hydrodynamic conditions in the TGR. The HFB may be an important source and/or sink of microplastics in TGR. In this study, microplastic occurrence in sediments from the Xiangxi River HFB was investigated to reflect the local microplastic pollution status and to evaluate its potential to serve as a source/sink of microplastics in the TGR. Seven sampling sites were selected, and sediments within the HFB and above the belt were collected in summer when the water level was low. The results showed that the microplastic abundance ranged from 0.55 ± 0.12 × 103 to 14.58 ± 5.67 × 103 particles m−2, which was one to two orders of magnitude higher than that in sediments from the Xiangxi River in our previous study (80–846 particles m−2). Statistical analysis revealed that the microplastic abundance within the HFB was significantly higher than that of the area above the HFB. The results indicate that the HFB can be an important microplastic sink when the water level is low, and the belt can turn into a potential source when the water level is high. Cluster analysis was applied to reveal the characteristics of the microplastics collected at different sites, and the results suggest that the cluster analysis may be a useful tool in elucidating the source and fate of microplastics.

How big is enough? Vegetation structure impacts effective fuel treatment width and forest resiliency

AbstractFuel treatments are designed with multiple management goals, including improving suppression capacity and restoring the historical structure of dry forests. Fuelbreaks are a class of fuel treatment that remove fuels within a wide strip of land, with an overarching objective to reduce fire behavior and provide safe access for suppression. In an empirical analysis of shaded fuelbreaks that burned during the 2014 Bald Fire (15,950 ha on the Lassen National Forest, California, USA), we found that overall fire severity was reduced in the treated areas relative to untreated. A non‐linear mixed effects model estimates that the reduction was detected more than 400 m into the treated area, greater than the standard width of the prescribed fuelbreak. Both pre‐ and post‐fire species composition differed between treated and untreated forest, with few living stems remaining in the measured untreated areas. In the post‐fire treated area, we documented a mixed conifer forest dominated by larger diameter Pinus, implying that the fuelbreak did result in a more resilient post‐fire structure and composition. These results indicate that fuelbreak design may need to be wider than generally prescribed and that even during extreme fire conditions fuel treatments can result in resilient forest structures.

Dredge a River, Make a Nation Great: Shipping, Commerce, and Territoriality in the Detroit River, 1870–1905

The Michigan Historical Review 45:1 (Spring 2019): 27-46©2019 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Dredge a River, Make a Nation Great: Shipping, Commerce, and Territoriality in the Detroit River, 1870-1905 By Ramya Swayamprakash Bob-Lo, or Bois Blanc Island, on the Canadian side of the lower Detroit River, is now full of expensive houses. There is no public transportation to or on the island, so to get there you would need to take the car ferry to cross the 1,000-foot channel. If you avoid the houses and go south (in the general direction of the “space needle”), you would enter the remains of Bob-Lo amusement park, which served the area from 1898 until 1994. If you walk to the end of the park, you will get to the head of a long, narrow strip of land. At the end of that strip, with Clifford the family dog’s grave for company, you will see Lake Erie stretching from a mile or so downstream all the way to the horizon. What you probably would not notice is that the long strip of land at the tip of Bois Blanc is all dredged material deposited to create an “upbound” sheltered shipping channel—the one you cross to get on the island in the first place. If you look towards the United States, you will see another sliver of land, covered with trees. That is the tail end of the “downbound” Livingstone Channel, created in the early twentieth century to make lake shipping in the lower Detroit River more efficient by separating it into unidirectional channels. Upstream of Bois Blanc Island and Fort Malden near Amherstburg, Ontario, lies the Limekiln Crossing.1 Dredged since the 1890s, the crossing is the subject of this article. Between 1874 and 1968 (when major dredging operations stopped), construction projects in the Detroit River created 96.5 kilometers (60 miles) of shipping channels, removed over 46,200,000 cubic meters of material, covered 4,050 hectares (40.5 square kilometers) of river bottom with dredge spoils, and built 85 hectares of above-waterline compensating works at a total cost of $283 million, all in the service of commercial 1 Historical sources also refer to the area as “Lime Kiln,” “Limekilns,” and “Limekiln.” For consistency, this article uses “Limekiln Crossing” except when quoting primary sources. 28 The Michigan Historical Review shipping in the Great Lakes.2 Even today, dredging continues as a maintenance act, to keep channels navigable and capable of handling bigger ships with deeper drafts. Dredging is clearly big business. The strip of land on which Clifford rests was constructed in the mid-twentieth century; however, the antecedents of this strip lie in the nineteenth century. This essay conceptualizes dredging as a process that was not merely a technological challenge but also had political underpinnings and territorial ambitions. Dredging is an act of claiming territory through “improvements.” Using the Detroit River in the late nineteenth century as a case study, I contend that dredging involved a process of making place—both physically, as dredge spills created new territory, and in imagination, as dredging helped promote state sovereignty. Dredging exposes the complications of boundary making, territorial control, and commerce. I examine dredging in the Detroit River from 1870 to 1905 for two reasons. First, dredging did not actually begin in the Great Lakes until the second half of the nineteenth century. Second, the possibility of railroad development brought together the shipping industry in its attempt to wield its substantial economic and political clout to stop railroads in their tracks by “improving” the channels through dredging as an important strategy. By 1906, the Detroit-Windsor rail tunnel was under construction. Completed in 1910, the tunnel allowed railroads to bypass the rail ferries that had been the primary means for railroads to cross the river. While the tunnel did not immediately terminate dredging operations, it did present a slow breaking-down of the hegemony of the shipping industry. Between 1870 and 1905, the shipping industry enjoyed almost unparalleled commercial success and political power; thus, this essay also chronicles the heyday of that industry. Why the Detroit River? From the height...

The Making and Unmaking of Mediterranean Landscape in Italian Literature: The Case of Liguria by Tullio Pagano

Reviewed by: The Making and Unmaking of Mediterranean Landscape in Italian Literature: The Case of Liguria by Tullio Pagano Rossana Barbera, Ph.D. Tullio Pagano, The Making and Unmaking of Mediterranean Landscape in Italian Literature: The Case of Liguria, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2015 This book starts with a Preface dense with biographical memories tracing back to Tullio Pagano's childhood and arriving at his adulthood: memories of colors, scents, tactile sensations; memories of Pagano's Liguria, to which the author—a native of Genoa who worked for thirty years in academic American institutions—feels that he belongs, and at the same time does not belong, anymore. The reason is soon expressed by Pagano himself, who claims the need to understand "to which part of Liguria I belonged" (xvii). This matter represents the core of the book itself and expresses the reason for its being written, that is, the realization that a large part of the Ligurian territory has been modified – and not for the better – across several decades, by uncontrolled forces driven by economic interests, and the landscape is very different now from what it was in the past. The future appears even worse if Pagano considers recent laws on new infrastructures for high speed trains (TAV) to connect Italy with France, which can damage further not only the landscape but even the ecosystem of the valley. "Who owns the landscape?" (192) is the powerful question, almost a suffocated cry, that a very concerned Pagano poses toward the end of his book. In the Introduction Pagano reflects on the theoretical concept of landscape, and its multiple meanings and interpretations given by critics and thinkers throughout two centuries, with semantic differences of terms such as landscape, nature, place, space, and territory. Can the term landscape be conceptualized in a single meaning? Of course not. There are as many landscapes as the number of viewers who see them. Italy is a country of many differences in each region. Liguria is a land of differences par excellence, starting from its unique shape, a strip of land, narrow and long, that extends from east to west along the coast. This is the Liguria that the ancient Romans preferred to conquer, avoiding the more impervious areas of its mountains, when they opened a road along the sea that connected Levante with Ponente. This is the Liguria that has been viewed by most tourists' eyes an attraction of a wealthy industry, "the sunny side of the Italian Riviera" (xiv). But there is, and there has always been, a vertical Liguria, that is less known and less visible: an "intimidating territory behind the steep slopes of the Apennine" (26). This vertical Liguria can be reached in a short time and not many miles from the coast. In opposition to the horizontal Liguria, it creates the differences that establish the main characteristic of its own nature. Pagano's book highlights, from beginning to end, this dual nature of his region, which constitutes also the DNA of its people: it is in this rough inland that the author ultimately finds the real soul of the region "the landscape of the interior", "the only authentic one" (xvii). Liguria has given birth to several poets and writers. To embark on an idealized voyage through memory, a collective memory, along the sun-drenched [End Page 200] coasts of the Riviera, and in the "dark side" of the region, Pagano revisits—in seven chapters, spanning two hundred years—the literary portraits of Liguria given by Giuseppe Ruffini, Camillo Sbarbaro, Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Caproni, Italo Calvino, Francesco Biamonti, and Annie Hawes. Literature has had the power of making and unmaking the Mediterranean landscape. The subtitle—The Case of Liguria—suggests that Liguria has a unique story to tell. So Pagano make us see Ruffini's Bordighera through his Il dottor Antonio, "as a space endowed with its own history, culture and memory" (42). In Camillo Sbarbaro's collections of poems, Trucioli and Pianissimo, outdoor space becomes suffocating in its urban setting as well as in the wilderness of the countryside, and can be both a Paradise and a Hell, where the poet can be lost adrift or find a shore: "my Liguria; the...

Science and islands in Indo-Pacific worlds.

This Introduction offers a conceptualization of the Indo-Pacific, its islands and their place within the history of science. We argue that Indo-Pacific islands present a remarkable combination of social, political and spatial circumstances, which speak to themes that are central to the history of science. Having driven movements of people and represented staging grounds for explorations, expansions and cross-cultural exchanges, these spaces have been at the forefront of historical change. The historiographies of the two oceans have traditionally emphasized indigenous agency while downplaying European historical trajectories, and therefore they provide historians of science with materials and methodologies that promise nuanced portrayals of knowledge production in cross-cultural settings. Rather than unifying the oceans into a cohesive narrative, we seek to uncover the many horizons of Indo-Pacific worlds and pluralize the spaces within which knowledge travelled at specific times, but not at others. Offering a middle plane between the globe and the region, islands are particularly productive sites for such analyses, as they bring to attention both localized kinds of agency and the impacts of colonialism and globalization. This special issue investigates what happens to knowledge within island spaces and demonstrates that even as small strips of land, islands can significantly enhance our understanding of the practices of knowledge making within the broader contours of world history. In bringing to the fore the contributions of actors from across the wider social spectrum and, especially, the interacting roles of indigenous agents and their traditions, Indo-Pacific worlds thus offer exciting new directions for a field which has often been dominated by a focus on European institutions.

The rise of neurology in Haiti

The rise of neurology in Haiti

A Proposal for Desert House Design in Egypt Using Passive Ground Cooling Techniques

An area less than 5.5% of Egyptian territory is where most of Egypt‘s population lives in. A narrow strip of land forms the Nile Valley and Delta sector. The National Project for Desert Hinterlands is one of the urban projects targeting rehabilitation of the poor in alternative villages in the near desert to stop urban sprawl over agricultural land and decrease the congestion in the old habitats. Low cost energy efficient houses are the aim of the architect in similar projects taking in consideration the high electricity consumption of Egypt’s residential sector. Based on a literature review, this paper presents a proposal for designing desert dwellings that accommodates the hot dry climate by incorporating passive elements and using stabilized earth blocks as a local building material. Furthermore, simulation is used to test alternative proposals. The results show that an underground constructed house with a sunken courtyard incorporating an Earth to Air Heat Exchanger System (EAHE) can reduce between 42-72% of energy consumption used to achieve thermal comfort compared to contemporary desert housing projects.