Seasonal characteristics of water and sediment qualities and potential effects of the freshwater discharge from a small tide embankment interior in a coastal area in Goheung county were investigated from May to September in 2012. Chemical oxygen demand values (COD) were mostly higher than 2 mg/L in summer ebb tide, which exceed the standard value of water quality criteria II of acceptable level for aquaculture activities. Nitrogen and phosphorus were found as the limiting nutrients for algae growth in summer and fall and in spring, respectively. Nitrogen was the limiting nutrient for diatom growth in the whole studied period. The sudden high values of COD, ammonia, dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN), dissolved inorganic phosphorus (DIP) were found in water sample collected from station 5 which located in front of the tide embankment sluice gate during spring ebb tide. The freshwater discharge form the tide embankment interior maybe affected the survey areas during a short time interval. Mean values of eutrophication index of the surveyed coastal region in spring, summer and fall were all bigger than 1. Water quality was mostly considered at level II which acceptable for aquaculture activities. Sediment quality in this study was generally in the range of standard for fisheries environment.

We report the effect of the fabric of the surface microstructure on the CO gas sensing properties of SnO2 thin films deposited on self-assembled Au nanodots (SnO2/Au) that were formed on SiO2/Si substrates. We characterized structural and morphological properties, comparing them to those of SnO2 thin films deposited directly onto SiO2/Si substrates. We observed a significant enhancement of CO gas sensing properties in the SnO2/Au gas sensors, specifically exhibiting a high maximum response at 200˚C and quite a low detection limit of 1 ppm level in dry air. In particular, the response of the SnO2/Au gas sensor was found to reach the maximum value of 32.5 at 200˚C, which is roughly 27 times higher than the response (~1.2) of the SnO2 gas sensor obtained at the same operating temperature of 200˚C. Furthermore, the SnO2/Au gas sensors displayed very fast response and recovery behaviors. The observed enhancement in the CO gas sensing properties of the SnO2/Au sensors is mainly ascribed to the formation of a nanostructured morphology in the active SnO2 layer having a high specific surface-reaction area by the insertion of a nanodot form of Au nucleation layer.

Advertisement songs play an important role on species recognition and mate choice in cicadas. Males generate complex species-specific calling songs to attract conspecific females. In central Korea, Cryptotympana atrata, Meimuna mongolica and Hyalessa fuscata are widely distributed, yet their songs have not been described. We analyzed acoustic characteristics of these cicadas’ advertisement songs in temporal and spectral domains. In sum, C. atrata’s songs followed the pulse-echeme pattern, in which each echeme consisted of groups of pulses with the peak frequency of 6423 ± 589 Hz. In M. mongolica, the calling song had the pulse-echeme-combined echeme-phrase structure. A group of three echemes formed one combined echeme, and one full phrase comprised hundreds of combined echemes. Lastly, the calling song of H. fuscata was constructed of the pulseecheme- phrase structure, in which one full phrase included a train of low and high-frequency echemes and the ending echeme at the end of the phrase. The carrier frequency of low frequency echeme was 4576 ± 151 Hz and that of high frequency one was 14089 ± 628 Hz.

IWRAP 프로그램은 수로에서의 위험성을 평가하는데 유용한 프로그램이다. 그러나 이 프로그램의 기본 버전의 경우 AIS 데이터를 수집하는 기능이 포함되지 않아서, 더구나 베트남과 같은 개발도상국에서는 해상교통량 통계 데이터가 없는 실정이다. 사용자들은 수동으로 준비하여 입력하여야 한다. 이 연구는 IWRAP Mk2 프로그램 기본 버전을 사용하는데 있어 AIS 데이터를 전처리(pre-process) 할 수 있는 프로그램을 개발하고자 하였으며, 선박 형태, 선박 크기, 통과 시간 등으로 분류한 통항로에서의 선박 통항 척수 및 항로 배치와 같이 해역 내 해상교통에 관한 정보들을 사용자에게 제공하도록 고안되었다. 이렇게 개발된 통합 AIS 프로그램(Total AIS, TOAIS)은 베트남 Vung Tau 해역의 AIS 수집 데이터를 전처리할 수 있는지에 대하여 검증하였다. 그 결과, 통합 AIS 프로그램에서 전처리한 데이터를 이용한 IWRAP 프로그램은 베트남 해역의 위험성을 효율적으로 평가할 수 있었다.

Worldwide there is concern about the continuing release of a broad range of environmental endocrine disrupting chemicals, including polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, phthalates, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), and other halogenated organochlorines persistent organic pollutants (POPs) into the environment. They are condemned for health adverse effects such as cancer, reproductive defects, neurobehavioral abnormalities, endocrine and immunological toxicity. These effects can be elicited via a number of mechanisms among others include disruption of endocrine system, oxidation stress and epigenetic. However, most of the mechanisms are not clear, thus several number of studies are ongoing trying to elucidate them in order to protect the public by reducing these adverse effects. In this review, we briefly limited review the process, the impacts, and the potential mechanisms of dioxin/dioxin like compound, particularly, their possible roles in adverse developmental and reproductive processes, diseases, and gene expression and associated molecular pathways in cells.

우리나라 참나리 2배체와 3배체 중 임의 선발된 56 개 지역의 참나리에 대하여 EST-SSR이용하여 각 genome 간의 유전적 변이와 유연관계를 분석하고자 수행되었다. 최근 백합속에서 개발된 19개의 EST-SSR 중에서 7개의 primer가 참나리 2, 3배체 종내 유전적 변이 분석에 적합한 것으로 나타났다. 서해안, 남해안 제주도의 원거리 지역에 분포하는 2배체 참나리들은 지역에 관계없이 다양한 유전적 변이를 나타내었으나, 소청도, 울릉도 및 내륙에 분포하는 3배체 참나리는 비교적 단순한 변이를 나타내었다. 다형성을 나타낸 총 121개의 SSR 밴드를 사용하여 UPGMA 방법으로 계 통도를 작성한 결과 2배체 집단에서는 유전적 변이가 다양한 반면 3배체 집단에서는 비교적 변이가 적은 것 으로 나타났다. 2배체 집단에서 아차도 계통들이 남해 안의 다른 2배체와 뚜렷이 구분되는 cluster를 형성하 였고, 3배체 집단에서는 소청도 참나리가 다른 지역과 는 구별되는 독특한 밴드패턴을 나타내었다. 본 연구에 서 선발된 EST-SSR마커들은 금후 참나리 2, 3배체 집단의 유연관계를 분석하는데 유용하게 사용될 수 있 을 것으로 생각된다.

The South China Sea has long been regarded as a major source of tension and instability in Pacific Asia. To clarify the position of claimants is a research task for creating the confidence building measures and promoting efforts to manage the possible conflicts in the region. The purpose of this article is to address the Vietnamese position on the sovereignty disputes over the Paracels and Spratlys, and maritime zones in the South China Sea. The Vietnamese position will be examined from three aspects: (1) the sovereignty of the Paracels and the Spratlys; (2) the maritime zones around these islands; and (3) the settlement of disputes in the South China Sea.

The study was conducted to determine the knowledge and practices of vegetable farmers in Hanoi, Vietnam in controlling mites, and their attitude towards N. longispinosus as biological control agent against T. urticae on green bean. The field surveys conducted in Tang My and Son Du hamlets, two of the largest vegetable production areas in Dong Anh district, show that the respondents in Tang My who had training on the vegetable IPM program had higher knowledge on green bean pest management and knew better about natural enemies and biological control than the ones without training in Son Du. However, both groups of respondents did not have enough knowledge on spider mite control and most of them did not know or hear about predatory mite before. Hence, 40 percent of the respondents said they would not use predatory mites, and 33 percent were still uncertain whether they will adopt this biological control. The paper suggests some recommendations to enhance farmers’ use of biological control against mites on green beans.

A basidiomycetous wood rotting fungus Pleurocybella porrigens (angel wings) has been well known as an excellent edible mushroom and named as Sugihiratake, in Japanese common name based on its morphological and ecological features. This mushroom has been favorably consuming by Japanese people. In 2004, an outbreak of serious acute encephalopathy exclusively occurred in patients with chronic kidney diseases after the intake of this mushroom. Thereafter, many researchers have conducted to examine the factor of onset of the encephalopathy, but the exact factors that induced the encephalopathy still remain unclear. Matsumoto et al. (2005) reported the mushroom specimens from different geographical areas in Japan were grouped into two distinct clusters based on ITS rDNA sequences. Vegetative growth of P. porrigens is extremely slow even cultivation on natural media surveyed and its physiological characteristic gives a disadvantage for the development of various fields of researches on this mushroom. Thus, we attempted to find a medium accelerating the vegetative growth of P. porrigens for further research to elucidate the possible association between its chemical constituent(s) and the onset of encephalopathy. Fifteen isolates of P. porrigens collected from different geographical areas in Japan were cultivated on PDA. The growth of the isolates was extremely slow as we know and most tested isolates formed mycelia look like those often observed in the cultivation of basidiomycetous ectomycorrhizal fungi. Among them, we chose five isolates based on the ranking of their higher growth rates. The top five isolates were cultured in five kinds of liquid media, PD medium, MY medium, Carrot medium, Ohta’s medium for ectomycorrhizal fungi (Ohta, 1990) and Amazake medium (Ishihara, 2007), and on a solid medium, PDA, at 20℃ in the dark. The dry biomasses of the isolates cultured in the liquid media were determined after 6 weeks of the stationary cultivation whereas the growth rates of the isolates cultured on PDA were compared by the colony diameter after 8 weeks of the cultivation. Among the tested liquid media, PD medium was the most suitable medium for their biomass growth (17 mg dry mycelium/flask - 127 mg dry mycelium/flask) and followed by Ohta’s medium (13 mg dry mycelia/flask - 79 mg dry mycelia/flask), MY medium (10 mg dry mycelium/flask - 72 mg dry mycelium/flask), Amazake medium (8 mg dry mycelium/flask - 47 mg dry mycelium/flask) and Carrot medium (4 mg dry mecelium/flask - 18 mg dry mycelium/flask). The average biomass growths of the isolates cultured in the synthetic medium, Ohta’s medium were 20-92% of those of the isolates cultured in PD medium. No correlation was observed between the cultivation in PD medium (liquid medium) and that on PDA (solid medium). Extremely large biomass variation was observed among the same isolates cultured on the same kind of the liquid medium. Large variation in colony features associated with their growth rates was also observed among the isolates cultured on PDA. These results suggest that PD medium would be a suitable one for most researches and Ohta’s medium for researches requiring clarity of its chemical constituents. The above results also indicate that the Japanese population of P. porrigens has large variation in vegetative growth although we have not yet examined whether the tested isolates comprise cryptic species or not.

Real-time rainfall monitoring is of great practical importance over the highly populated Indochina area, which is prone to natural disasters, in particular in association with rainfall. With the goal of d etermining near real-time half-hourlyrain estimates from satellite, the three-layer, artificial neural networks (ANN) approach was used to train the brightness temperatures at 6.7, 11, and 12-μm channels of the Japanese geostationary satellite MTSAT against passive microwavebased rain rates from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) and TRMM Precipitation Radar (PR) data for the June-September 2005 period. The developed model was applied to the MTSAT data for the June-September 2006 period. The results demonstrate that the developed algorithm is comparable to the PERSIANN (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks) results and can be used for flood monitoring across the Indochina area on a half-hourly time scale.