bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Urban Change and Modernity
Authors: Stapleton Kristin
Published: June 2013

China has a long and rich urban tradition. At many periods in human history, Chinese cities were the world’s largest. However, beginning in the 19th century western European and American cities began to be seen as model modern cities, because they seemed to promote industrial development, advanced transportation technology and utilities, democratic governance, and an atmosphere of cultural creativity and cosmopolitanism. Compared with London and New York, a city like Suzhou, which had once been the most populous in the world, then seemed economically, technologically, politically, and culturally “backward.” Since that time the study of Chinese cities has evolved from approaches that tended to confirm that verdict of backwardness and to analyze the reasons for it (the classic study is the sociologist Max Weber’s Die Stadt [The city], originally published posthumously in 1921); see Theoretical Perspectives) to approaches that explore Chinese urban development on its own terms. In the late 19th century Chinese cities started to be affected by the new technologies, administrative systems, and urban culture that had been developed in western Europe and the United States (and adopted or adapted enthusiastically in nearby Japan). Research on the period between the 1890s and 1940s generally focuses on the transformation of Chinese cities in the absence of a strong central government but with a relatively free economy and flow of information and goods from abroad. The victory of the Maoist revolution in 1949 caused a radical shift in urban development, closing the cities off from most international influences. Scholarship on that period examines, among other topics, the attempts to shift industry to rural areas and the increasing but uneven regimentation of urban life. After Mao’s death in 1976, the new leadership under Deng Xiaoping opened up the country and encouraged the rapid development of industries and cities, resulting in the most spectacular urban boom in human history. Major topics of study in this period include the place of municipalities and cities in the political system, the politics concerning control over urban land and development, the vast “floating population” of migrants who lack residency rights in the cities, and the growth of a lively consumer culture. Over the whole range of scholarship on Chinese urbanism, the question of how Chinese cities have shaped and are shaping what “modernity” means is often raised but has not by any means been answered satisfactorily.
Mao Zedong
Authors: Davin Delia
Published: June 2013

Mao Zedong (b. 1893–d. 1976) was one of the most remarkable political leaders of the 20th century, an all-powerful leader in China, and a major world figure. His career as a Communist revolutionary lasted fifty-five years. Half this time was spent in revolutionary struggle, and half, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, in the struggle to build a revolutionary state. Mao’s rise to leadership was gradual: starting as an obscure Communist Party functionary, he was in turn a labor organizer, a guerrilla commander, and a leader in the Communist base areas before finally becoming chairman of the party in 1943. As the unchallenged leader of the new People’s Republic of China in 1949, with his colleagues Mao began the revolutionary transformation of China through land reform, collectivization, industrialization, and the comprehensive politicization of daily life. Under Mao’s leadership the country was unified and began a process of modernization and industrialization that would allow it to become a major power after his death. However, within a few years of taking power, Mao began to suspect his colleagues of backsliding and refusing to recognize the danger to socialism that he believed a new elite would pose. His disputes with them convulsed China and dominated the last twenty years of his life. His efforts to achieve his vision of a China that was both egalitarian and prosperous failed and ultimately visited enormous suffering on his people. Moreover, his ruthlessness toward his opponents and his cynical exploitation of his cult of personality during the Cultural Revolution disillusioned many of his followers. His successors reversed Mao’s policies, seeking a new legitimacy for the party state in improved standards of living, achieved through a return to a marketized economy. Mao’s life and record still spark great interest inside and outside China. The large and growing literature on Mao covered in this article includes biographies, monographs on almost every aspect of his life and work, assessments of his legacy, and multivolume editions of his writing. Mao scholars struggle to come to terms with his legacy. He has been portrayed by some as China’s redeemer and by others, as a monster. Chinese appraisals are inevitably affected by the official line that he was a great revolutionary leader who made very serious errors. Late-20th- and early-21st-century Western scholarship tends to insist on Mao’s complexity and his many dimensions.
China and the World, 1900-1949
Authors: Wang Dong
Published: June 2013

Thematically and chronologically organized, this highly condensed annotated bibliography includes works that provide insights into the long-term, core themes of China and the world during the first half of the 20th century. The fifty years from 1900 to 1949 were marked by revolution, civil war, and foreign invasion but also witnessed change and progress in China’s relations with the outside world. These include the transformation from an empire (Qing) to a nation-state, the rise of Chinese nationalism, the restoration of China’s tariff autonomy, the abolition of extraterritoriality, China’s participation in the two world wars, and its role in the world economy and international organizations. Historiographical debates bring out three interdependent methodological and thematic issues: the state behavior of the Qing (1900–1911), Beijing (1912–1928), and Nanjing governments (1928–1949) in foreign affairs; the role of external forces in China’s nation-building and integration into the world system and community in modern times; and the relationship between nationalism and globalization and between national and international histories. Three influential conceptual frameworks are John K. Fairbank’s Western impact/stimulation and China’s response paradigm, Paul A. Cohen’s China-centered and most recently China-unbound or human-centered approach, and William C. Kirby’s internationalization proposition. What these different strands of research share, in this author’s judgment, is far more important than what separates them. Out of controversy, most scholars today tend to agree that during the period from 1900 to 1949 the Qing, Beijing, and Nanjing regimes were weak but resourceful states in hostile national and international environments. China’s international status markedly improved by the end of the 1940s, as one of the “great powers” (daguo大国) and a founder of the United Nations in the new world order. National, regional, and global concerns as well as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and internationalism have entangled bearings on studies of nearly all subjects that hold significance in modern China and the world.
Macroregions
Authors: Henderson Mark
Published: June 2013

As a vast sociopolitical entity, China defies easy generalizations. Many regional subdivisions have been invoked to make China’s varied landscapes and populations more tractable. Traditionally, distinctions have been drawn between “north” and “south” China, and since 1949 a dichotomous “coastal” versus “interior” regionalization has been popular. Most scholars, “for reasons of both habit and convenience, find it hard to resist dividing China up into provinces” (Cohen 1984, p. 166; cited under Introductory Works). Provincial boundaries, however, rarely correspond to the limits of either natural or socioeconomic systems. The watersheds of major rivers provide an alternative regionalization: natural resource flows (through river systems) and social and economic exchanges (across the transport network, which is invariably more dense and efficient in riverine lowlands than across mountain passes) have mutually reinforced the historical importance of these kinds of regions. Starting with watershed boundaries, G. William Skinner introduced the concept of “physiographic macroregions” in an essay in The City in Late Imperial China: “In late imperial times, [Chinese cities] formed not a single integrated urban system but several regional systems, each only tenuously connected with its neighbors. In tracing out the overlapping hinterlands of the cities in each one of these regional systems, I came to the realization that they . . . coincided with minor exceptions to a physiographic unit” (Skinner 1977, p. 211; cited under Introductory Works). Skinner postulated that the macroregions were the natural marketing areas of the major metropolises of China, representing a culmination of the hierarchical market systems starting with local market towns that he had previously described (Skinner 1964, cited under Introductory Works). Skinner’s analysis identified nine physiographic macroregions covering agrarian China, identifying the core zones of each and delineating boundaries between them. In subsequent work, Skinner developed the Hierarchical Regional Space (HRS) framework, further identifying regional systems below the macroregional level and offering social scientists a means to control the systematic spatial variation observed in many socioeconomic phenomena. The macroregional framework for China has been widely adopted among historians and anthropologists for contextualizing local studies, but it has also found detractors, especially among economists and geographers, who viewed it as overly deterministic. Skinner addressed some criticisms in elaborating the HRS framework, incorporating concepts from quantitative geography, and identifying “socioeconomic macroregions” that deviate from physiographic boundaries as social patterns and transportation networks develop. Even so, the nine physiographic macroregions of agrarian China remain useful for introducing students to the major geographical variations in China’s landscape and society.
The Chinese Communist Party Since 1949
Authors: Brødsgaard Kjeld Erik
Published: June 2013

During the 1950s and 1960s, the study of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was an important part of Western scholarship on Econtemporary China. However, after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, studies of the CCP decreased in numbers. Instead, the focus of the field shifted to studies of the state and structural and bureaucratic aspects of the Chinese polity. This focus included important works on decision-making structures in relation to, for example, hydropower management and foreign policy and gave rise to new concepts such as “fragmented authoritarianism.” In the wake of the Tiananmen debacle, many scholars declared the CCP had lost its legitimacy and was bound to wither away. It was only in the early 2000s that scholars began to realize that the CCP not only remained a crucial actor, but also that it had actually undergone a process of revitalization and renewal. Since the book Bringing the Party Back In, edited by Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard and Zheng Yongnian, was published in 2004 (Brødsgaard and Zheng 2004, cited under General Overviews), a number of important studies on the role of the CCP have appeared. They cover themes such as Party ideology, Party organization, and Party reform, as well as issues such as cadre management, which includes nomenklatura (a list of leading positions about whom decisions of appointment are made by the Party, as described in Nomenklatura); recruitment; and training. Even though the general consensus is that the CCP is the key factor in maintaining the Chinese power structure and making the political system work, there is disagreement as to the Party’s future. Some scholars are optimistic concerning the Party’s continued ability to adapt to the internal and external pressures generated by modernization and economic development, whereas others argue that the CCP is bound to constitute an obstacle to democratization and political reform and therefore will atrophy and eventually lose its monopoly of power. The author gratefully acknowledges the suggestions and comments of Huang Yanjie and Nis Grunberg.
Modern Chinese Fiction and Prose
Authors: Denton Kirk A.
Published: June 2013

Modern Chinese literature has conventionally been seen as erupting suddenly in conjunction with the May Fourth New Culture movement (1915–1925), which denounced the Confucian tradition and sought to replace it with Western-influenced intellectual and literary models. However, in recent years, working in what is generally called the “alternative modernities” framework, scholars have sought to debunk May Fourth “hegemony” and expand the nature of what constitutes Chinese literary modernity to include late Qing (1840–1911) fiction, popular entertainment fiction (including love stories and martial arts novels), prose literature of leisure, and private “domestic fiction” by women writers. Although a literature in the service of political and cultural causes had been an important facet of the literary field since the late Qing, after 1949 it was promoted by the state, both on the mainland and on Taiwan. The field has tended to dismiss this literature as propaganda, but scholars have very recently begun to revisit it. With the death of Mao (1976) on the mainland and the end of martial law on Taiwan (1987), the state’s stranglehold on literature lessened greatly, creating relatively liberal environments for free expression, though on the mainland writers continue to feel the effects of censorship. With the end of martial law, writers self-consciously produced “Taiwan literature,” related to but different from the Chinese-language literature on the mainland. The early development of modern literature in Hong Kong was deeply indebted to immigrants from the mainland and cultural interaction with Taiwan, but as retrocession (1997) approached, writers began to grapple with questions of Hong Kong identity and history, though Western scholarly attention to this literature has only just begun. In the “post societies” of Greater China (post-Mao/postsocialist on the mainland, post-martial law in Taiwan, and postcolonial in Hong Kong) literature has diversified, but it is constrained, as it is around the world, by market forces. Modern Chinese fiction and prose as a field of study developed in the 1930s, and the scholarly enterprise was promoted and shaped by the socialist state after 1949. In the West, the field took shape initially in the context of the Cold War during the 1960s, when fiction was often analyzed as sociological documents. Over the decades, the field has grown dramatically (especially after the 1980s influx of scholars coming from the People’s Republic of China to study and teach in the West) and has become more sophisticated in its theoretical frameworks and analytical methodologies. This bibliography focuses on major English-language studies, with less attention paid to the vast Chinese-language scholarship. Its scope comprises studies of fiction and prose in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Poetry and drama studies are not considered. With the exception of a study of Lu Xun (see Lee 1987, cited under Literary Modernity), it treats only studies of a general nature, not studies of individual writers.
Local Elites in Ming-Qing China
Authors: Hon Tze-ki
Published: June 2013

Also known as late imperial China, the Ming-Qing period (1368–1911) has received increasing attention in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a result of debates over China’s modernization. At issue in the debates is whether China was able to modernize without foreign interventions. For a long time after World War II, China was viewed as politically and socially stagnant. Shaped by the Weberian notion of bureaucracy and the Marxist concept of “the Asiatic mode of production,” scholars argued that the Chinese could not revitalize their political and social systems until external stimuli (such as imperialism) arrived. In stark contrast to this earlier view, the Ming-Qing period is now seen as a turning point when fundamental transformations took place owing to a robust economy, a vibrant society, and strong local leadership. Research shows that before widespread contact with Europeans in the mid-19th century, China had already created a mobile and diverse society. One thing that separates the new view from the old is the definition of local elites. From the 1950s to the 1970s local elites were considered a homogeneous group of scholar-officials who worked for the imperial government after passing the civil service examinations. Commonly known as gentry or literati, scholar-officials were said to have exercised their power as government officials and local leaders. In both capacities their power came directly from the imperial state. In contrast, since the mid-1980s local elites have been understood more broadly as a diverse group of degree holders who might or might not work for the imperial government. This expansion of the meaning of local elites has led to research on various forms of local organization, such as market towns, charity, lineages, and religions. In addition, the expansion of the meaning of local elites calls attention to regional differences, because the structure of local power in the Pearl River delta was significantly different from those in the lower Yangzi River delta and the North China plain. As a result, the power of local elites is traced to a variety of sources, including commerce, landownership, local militia, philanthropy, and rituals. The expanded scope of study of local elites has led to a new perspective on the late Qing (1895–1911). Rather than being the end of the imperial period, the late Qing is now seen as the beginning of a new era when political power was shared between the central government and local leaders. Some scholars contend that this trend of decentralization continued after 1911, when warlords and regional leaders became dominant players in national politics. As such, the late Qing and the early republican periods (1911–1927) are the high point of local power before the rise of the party-state.
Deng Xiaoping
Authors: Davin Delia
Published: June 2013

Deng Xiaoping became China’s effective leader in 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong. He formally retired in 1992 but was referred to in the Chinese press as the paramount leader and remained influential until his death in 1997. Deng presided over the economic reforms of the post-Mao years, which produced dramatic growth, profound social transformation, and, eventually, a market economy. He also oversaw the arrangements by which Hong Kong was returned to China. He did not favor political liberalization, was suspicious of dissent, and suppressed the prodemocracy movement in 1989. Deng was born in rural Sichuan in 1904. He traveled to France when he was only sixteen and, in his six years there, became involved in the nascent Chinese Communist movement. After a further year of study in Moscow, Deng returned to China. He worked as a political commissar with the Communist armies in South China, participated in the Long March in 1934–1935, and served with the Communist armies both in the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949). When the Communists took power nationally in 1949, Deng became mayor of Chongqing and held various posts in Southwest China. Transferred to Beijing in 1952, he played a major role in the Eighth Party Congress in 1956, at which he was elected general secretary. Although Deng had not opposed Mao’s Great Leap Forward in advance, he expressed concern about the food shortages to which it gave rise, and in its aftermath worked with Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai to bring about economic recovery by increasing peasant family incentives within collective agriculture. In the Cultural Revolution, Deng was criticized, with Liu Shaoqi, for revisionism and dismissed from his posts. Mao brought him back to Beijing in 1973 and subsequently gave him day-to-day control of the government as vice-premier. However, Mao became concerned that Deng valued production more highly than class struggle and that he might one day reverse Mao’s radical policies. On the death of Zhou Enlai in January 1976, Deng was passed over for the premiership, and in April he was again dismissed from office. At Mao’s own death in September 1976, his chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, took his place. But by the end of 1978, Deng’s wealth of experience and his network of loyal supporters in the army, the party, and the government allowed the veteran leader de facto to oust Hua Guofeng from the leadership. Deng’s program of market reform and modernization produced rapid economic advance, greatly improved living standards, and enhanced China’s international standing. However, he did not encourage political reform and is remembered for the military suppression of the student movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Art Markets and Auctions
Authors: Horowitz Noah
Published: June 2013

This article surveys the growing body of literature covering the international art market. Though discussions about collecting and patronage are as old as the market itself, the academic field of study is relatively new and continues to expand rapidly. Gerald Reitlinger’s Economics of Taste remains the foundational historical survey of its kind, and Baumol and Bowen’s Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, which looks at the economics of the performing arts, is credited with catalyzing the field of cultural economics (ultimately leading to the founding of The Journal of Cultural Economics in 1977). This has led, in subsequent years, to detailed inquiry into historical market structures and public policy issues. More recently, as the art world has spread globally and sales of modern and contemporary art have reached unprecedented heights, there has been a flood of writing on the investment value of art and on new types of collectors and market practices. The Internet, meanwhile, has enabled scholars and market professionals alike to actively mine the trade for up-to-the-minute data and analytics. This article aims to ground this sprawling debate and begins with an introduction to the literature on art market history and continues with sections on the following: how the market works, investment issues, critical theory, current market issues; plus there is an overview of analytical and research tools. This article should speak to scholars across a variety of disciplines, from art historians, critics, and journalists to economists and sociologists. Certainly one goal of future art market studies is to bridge this gap by providing intelligent economic analysis of the global trade that is equally in tune with the sensibilities of the diverse actors and positions that constitute it.
Romanesque
Authors: Ambrose Kirk
Published: June 2013

Coined at the turn of the 19th century to signal a perceived Roman aspect to architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries, Romanesque is today a contested term, with some scholars preferring century descriptors. Romanesque typically refers to the arts produced in western Europe sometime after 1000 ce until the middle of the 12th century, a time marked by the rise of Gothic art in France. The term “Romanesque” can likewise be extended to the arts of central Europe and Russia, but, for reasons of space, the monuments of these regions cannot be considered here. In some parts of western Europe, including Germany and Portugal, scholars classify monuments from the early 13th century as Romanesque. Broadly construed, this period witnessed a remarkable flourishing of the arts in a host of media, as well in other cultural spheres. Many continue to refer in general terms to a “renaissance of the 12th century.” With the benefit of nearly a century of scholarship preceding this publication, it has become increasingly difficult to generalize about the scope and variety of cultural activities across Europe. As eclecticism characterizes the visual arts of the period, most studies on Romanesque tend to be based largely on specific monuments, media, or regions. In addition, many scholars approach their subject with an eye to thematic or key methodological concerns, resulting in a rich and complex historiographic tradition. This article provides an overview, by no means comprehensive, of major trends of investigation, as well as offering an introduction to key sources.
Installation Art
Authors: Reiss Julie
Published: June 2013

“Installation art” is a term applied to room-sized works of art that are large enough for the viewer to enter. While the term has been in use since the end of the 1980s, large-scale spatial works appeared sporadically in Europe beginning decades earlier and have been retroactively seen as precursors of this contemporary practice. In the 1960s and 1970s, a few scholars began to identify an increasing tendency for artists to create room-sized works of art. They variously called these works environments, art spaces, or situations and proposed art historical lineages for them, particularly the work of the Italian Futurists, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. Initially the holistic ideals that led De Stijl and Russian Constructivist artists to create three-dimensional environments were cited alongside the gestures of Dada artists and Marcel Duchamp. A distinction between the latter and Modernist sources is more evident in recent scholarship. By the end of the 1990s, there were a considerable number of artists producing installation art in Europe and the United States, and the literature soon caught up, growing rapidly in the first decade of the 21st century. Initially, emphasis in the literature was on installation art’s formal qualities. Encyclopedias and glossaries of art identified ephemerality and response to the properties of a physical site as its key characteristics. However, this focus shifted as installation artists increasingly began engaging with cultural and social contexts, expanding the discussion of space to include these less tangible concerns. In recent years viewer participation has emerged as a central critical issue for installation art. While an emphasis on the viewer’s experience was discussed in response to some 1960s and 1970s installations, by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, viewer participation was foregrounded as a major entry point for analyses, and recent scholarship has continued this trend. Installation art defies traditional divisions between specific mediums, which continues to earn it both support and criticism. As a medium it challenges not only critics but historians as well. Ephemeral in nature, installation art initially posed similar difficulties to the historian as performance and body art, leaving few material remains. This has changed to a degree, as installation art is no longer assumed to be uncollectible. Conservation and preservation issues have also captured significant attention in recent years. Projects involving the sharing of information by international teams of curators, conservators, and artists not only have addressed practical concerns but also have raised questions about the essence of an installation that was conceived for a given space at a particular moment in time. The debate on reinstallation is a testament to installation art’s challenging nature and is an important consideration for the art historian.
Jackson Pollock
Authors: Karmel Pepe
Published: June 2013

There is a critical consensus that Jackson Pollock was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but there is surprisingly little agreement about what makes his work important. As a rule, critics find in Pollock whatever it is that interests them about modern art. The two best-known approaches to Pollock’s work are probably those of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg; the former saw Pollock’s pictures as examples of “all-over” composition, the latter as examples of “action painting.” Pollock’s classic “drip” paintings were mostly done within the brief time span of the years 1947–1950. Some critics have looked for a key to these paintings in Pollock’s earlier work, which reflects the influence of his teacher Thomas Hart Benton, the Mexican muralists, and Pablo Picasso. Other critics have vigorously disputed the relevance of these figurative works to his later abstractions. Similarly, the heads and figures that reemerge in his paintings of 1951–1953 have been the subjects of heated dispute. His meteoric rise to fame, his “cowboy” persona, and his self-destructive behavior, leading to his early death in 1956, have also attracted much attention. In recent decades, however, scholarly attention has shifted away from Pollock’s personal biography toward the cultural contexts of his work. His paintings have been interpreted in terms of totemism, Jungian imagery, the cultural context of postwar America, gender roles, and many other topics. Much Pollock criticism focuses on a mere handful of works, principally those in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It is often assumed that the technique is the important thing about Pollock’s work and that the results of that technique are relatively homogenous; therefore, any one Pollock serves to illustrate his work as well as any other. In fact, Pollock’s paintings are strikingly different from one another, and, ideally, the study of his work should begin with a review of as many of his pictures as possible, with attention to the specific characteristics of each one.
Natural Selection
Authors: McPeek Mark A.
Published: June 2013

Natural selection is the evolutionary process by which individuals with particular attributes in a population change in relative frequency because of their differential survival or reproduction. These attributes may be alleles at a particular gene or set of genes, or particular phenotypic traits. Natural selection is the cornerstone of evolutionary theory, because it is the only process causing evolution that can make a population of individuals better adapted to its environment. Natural selection occurs when (1) individuals in a population differ in some phenotypic attribute; (2) these phenotypic differences cause differences in the survival, mating success, or fecundity among the individuals (i.e., individuals have different fitnesses); and (3) these phenotypic differences are caused by heritable genetic differences among the individuals.
Impact of Heat Treatment on Wheat Flour Solvent Retention Capacity (SRC) Profiles
Authors: Van Steertegem Bénédicte , Pareyt Bram , Slade Louise , Levine Harry , Brijs Kristof , Delcour Jan A.
Published: June 2013

The impact of heat treating wheat flour (for 2 or 5 h at 80 or 100°C) on its functional properties was studied with solvent retention capacity (SRC) tests and related to changes in individual groups of flour constituents. Heat treatments increased the overall water retention capacity (from 55.6% for control flour to 62.4% for flour heated 5 h at 100°C) as well as sucrose SRC (from 85.0 to 113.5%), although no changes were observed in sodium carbonate SRC. The decrease in lactic acid SRC values (from 113.1 to 97.4%) indicated that heat treatment restricted swelling of the protein network. As deduced from a decrease in both the level of proteins extractable in sodium dodecyl sulfate–containing medium and the level of free sulfhydryl groups, the restricted swelling was related to protein cross‐linking within the flour particles. Such upfront polymerization prevented proper hydration and gluten network formation during mixing. Starch (swelling) properties were also affected by heat treatment. Finally, the impact of heat treatment on flour SRC profiles was comparable to that noted when chlorinating wheat flour.
Effect of Moisture Content on the Viscoelastic Properties of Individual Wheat Kernels Evaluated by the Uniaxial Compression Test Under Small Strain
Authors: Ponce‐García Néstor , Ramírez‐Wong Benjamín , Torres‐Chávez Patricia Isabel , de Dios Figueroa‐Cárdenas Juan , Serna‐Saldívar Sergio Othón , Cortez‐Rocha Mario Onofre
Published: June 2013

Wheat product quality is related to its physicochemical properties and to the viscoelastic properties of the kernel. The aim of this work was to evaluate the viscoelastic properties of individual wheat kernels using the uniaxial compression test under small strain (3%) to create experimental conditions that allow the use of the elasticity theory to explain the wheat kernel viscoelasticity and its relationships to physicochemical characteristics, such as weight tests, size, and ash and protein contents. The following viscoelastic properties of the kernels of hard and soft wheat cultivars at two different moisture contents (original and tempered at 15%) were evaluated: total work (Wt), elastic work (We), plastic work (Wp), and modulus of elasticity (E). There was a significant decrease in Wt as the moisture content increased. In the soft wheat Saturno, Wt decreased 80% (from 0.217 to 0.044 N·mm) as the moisture content increased. Individual wheat kernels at their original moisture content showed higher We than under the tempered condition. Wp increased as the moisture content increased. E decreased as the moisture content increased. The soft wheat Saturno showed the highest decline (54.9%) in E (from 14.18 to 6.39 MPa) as the moisture content increased. There were significant negative relationships between the viscoelastic properties and the 1,000‐kernel weight and kernel thickness. The uniaxial compression test under small strain can be applied to evaluate the viscoelastic properties of individual wheat kernels from different classes and cultivars.
First Report of Wood Canker Caused by Neoscytalidium dimidiatum on Grapevine in California
Authors: Rolshausen P. E. , Akgül D. S. , Perez R. , Eskalen A. , Gispert C.
Published: June 2013

In May 2012 in the Coachella valley, Riverside County, California, the decline of vines in table grape (Vitis vinifera) vineyards was observed. Foliar symptoms consisted of shoot blight with wilting and necrosis of leaves and drying and shriveling of berries. In some cases, the entire vine collapsed in the middle of the growing season (apoplexia). Wood cankers in the spurs, cordons, and trunks of affected vines were also present. The nine isolates recovered from the cankers were identified as Neoscytalidium dimidiatum (Penz.) Crous & Slippers based on morphological characteristics and DNA sequence comparisons. Two isolates were grown on potato dextrose agar (PDA) medium and a total of 50 conidia were measured per isolate. Conidia were ellipsoid to ovoid, with a truncate base and an acutely rounded apex, initially aseptate, becoming brown and two-celled at maturity, 7.2 ± 1.2 μm × 3.8 ± 0.4 μm. The rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS), and β-tubulin (BT) loci were amplified using primer pairs and methods previously described (4). A total of five isolates were sequenced. The DNA sequences of one N. dimidiatum grapevine isolate (UCR-Neo1) were deposited in the GenBank database (ITS, KC937066; BT, KC937067). Pathogenicity tests were performed by inoculating 12 grape cuttings cv. Thompson Seedless with isolate UCR-Neo1 and 12 control cuttings with sterile medium using a technique previously described (1). The experiment was repeated twice. After 20 weeks of incubation period in the greenhouse, the lesions length produced by N. dimidiatum averaged 13.5 mm and was significantly longer (P < 0.05) from the control (average 3 mm). N. dimidiatum was reisolated from all the inoculated plants and identified by colony morphology. The incidence of N. dimidiatum in table grape vineyards of the Coachella valley has been estimated at 15%, with nine vines infected out of 60 vines total. This pathogen has been identified in California in walnut nursery causing the death of trees due to the development of canker at the graft union (2). N. dimidiatum has also been identified as the causal agent of shoot blight, canker, and gummosis on citrus in Italy (3). The crop is also being grown in the Coachella valley and these findings warrant further investigation in order to determine the host range, distribution, and incidence of this pathogen in the area.

References: (1) K. Baumgartner et al. Plant Dis. 97:912, 2013. (2) S. F. Chen et al. Plant Dis. 97:993, 2013. (3) G. Polizzi et al. Plant Dis 93:1215, 2009. (4) J. R. Urbez-Torres et al. Plant Dis. 92:519, 2008.
Effect of Cultivation and Timing of Nitrogen Fertilization on Large Patch Disease of Zoysiagrass
Authors: Obasa Ken , Fry Jack , Bremer Dale , John Rodney St. , Kennelly Megan
Published: June 2013

Large patch of zoysiagrass (Zoysia spp.) is caused by Rhizoctonia solani anastomosis group 2-2 LP. The effects of summer cultivation (core-aerification, verticutting, and sand topdressing) and spring and fall versus summer nitrogen (N) fertilization on large patch in fairway height ‘Meyer’ zoysiagrass were investigated from 2008 to 2011 in Manhattan, Haysville, and Olathe, KS. Disease was assessed by measuring patch diameters or analyzing digital images of affected plot areas to determine the percentage of non-green turfgrass within patches. Cultivation did not affect thatch temperature, soil temperature, soil water content, or turf recovery from large patch in early summer. Furthermore, cultivation did not result in overall significant reductions in patch diameters or average weekly rate of patch diameter increase among plots at the three experimental locations. In some site–year combinations, spring and fall N fertility was associated with lower percentages of non-green turf within affected plot areas in Manhattan and Haysville. In some cases, applications of N during spring and fall may alleviate large patch symptoms.
Plasticity of parental care under the risk of predation: how much should parents reduce care?
Authors: Ghalambor Cameron K. , Peluc Susana I. , Martin Thomas E.
Published: June 2013

Predation can be an important agent of natural selection shaping parental care behaviours, and can also favour behavioural plasticity. Parent birds often decrease the rate that they visit the nest to provision offspring when perceived risk is high. Yet, the plasticity of such responses may differ among species as a function of either their relative risk of predation, or the mean rate of provisioning. Here, we report parental provisioning responses to experimental increases in the perceived risk of predation. We tested responses of 10 species of bird in north temperate Arizona and subtropical Argentina that differed in their ambient risk of predation. All species decreased provisioning rates in response to the nest predator but not to a control. However, provisioning rates decreased more in species that had greater ambient risk of predation on natural nests. These results support theoretical predictions that the extent of plasticity of a trait that is sensitive to nest predation risk should vary among species in accordance with predation risk.
The architectural design of networks of protein domain architectures
Authors: Hsu Chia-Hsin , Chen Chien-Kuo , Hwang Ming-Jing
Published: June 2013

Protein domain architectures (PDAs), in which single domains are linked to form multiple-domain proteins, are a major molecular form used by evolution for the diversification of protein functions. However, the design principles of PDAs remain largely uninvestigated. In this study, we constructed networks to connect domain architectures that had grown out from the same single domain for every single domain in the Pfam-A database and found that there are three main distinctive types of these networks, which suggests that evolution can exploit PDAs in three different ways. Further analysis showed that these three different types of PDA networks are each adopted by different types of protein domains, although many networks exhibit the characteristics of more than one of the three types. Our results shed light on nature's blueprint for protein architecture and provide a framework for understanding architectural design from a network perspective.
Turtle embryos move to optimal thermal environments within the egg
Authors: Zhao Bo , Li Teng , Shine Richard , Du Wei-Guo
Published: June 2013

A recent study demonstrated that the embryos of soft-shelled turtles can reposition themselves within their eggs to exploit locally warm conditions. In this paper, we ask whether turtle embryos actively seek out optimal thermal environments for their development, as do post-hatching individuals. Specifically, (i) do reptile embryos move away from dangerously high temperatures as well as towards warm temperatures? and (ii) is such embryonic movement due to active thermoregulation, or (more simply) to passive embryonic repositioning caused by local heat-induced changes in viscosity of fluids within the egg? Our experiments with an emydid turtle (
Chinemys reevesii
) show that embryos avoid dangerously high temperatures by moving to cooler regions of the egg. The repositioning of embryos is an active rather than passive process: live embryos move towards a heat source, whereas dead ones do not. Overall, our results suggest that behavioural thermoregulation by turtle embryos is genuinely analogous to the thermoregulatory behaviour exhibited by post-hatching ectotherms.
Social learning of a brood parasite by its host
Authors: Feeney William E. , Langmore Naomi E.
Published: June 2013

Arms races between brood parasites and their hosts provide model systems for studying the evolutionary repercussions of species interactions. However, how naive hosts identify brood parasites as enemies remains poorly understood, despite its ecological and evolutionary significance. Here, we investigate whether young, cuckoo-naive superb fairy-wrens,
Malurus cyaneus
, can learn to recognize cuckoos as a threat through social transmission of information. Naive individuals were initially unresponsive to a cuckoo specimen, but after observing conspecifics mob a cuckoo, they made more whining and mobbing alarm calls, and spent more time physically mobbing the cuckoo. This is the first direct evidence that naive hosts can learn to identify brood parasites as enemies via social learning.
Scaling down DNA circuits with competitive neural networks
Authors: Genot Anthony J. , Fujii Teruo , Rondelez Yannick
Published: June 2013

DNA has proved to be an exquisite substrate to compute at the molecular scale. However, nonlinear computations (such as amplification, comparison or restoration of signals) remain costly in term of strands and are prone to leak. Kim
et al.
showed how competition for an enzymatic resource could be exploited in hybrid DNA/enzyme circuits to compute a powerful nonlinear primitive: the winner-take-all (WTA) effect. Here, we first show theoretically how the nonlinearity of the WTA effect allows the robust and compact classification of four patterns with only 16 strands and three enzymes. We then generalize this WTA effect to DNA-only circuits and demonstrate similar classification capabilities with only 23 strands.
High-speed camera characterization of voluntary eye blinking kinematics
Authors: Kwon Kyung-Ah , Shipley Rebecca J. , Edirisinghe Mohan , Ezra Daniel G. , Rose Geoff , Best Serena M. , Cameron Ruth E.
Published: June 2013

Blinking is vital to maintain the integrity of the ocular surface and its characteristics such as blink duration and speed can vary significantly, depending on the health of the eyes. The blink is so rapid that special techniques are required to characterize it. In this study, a high-speed camera was used to record and characterize voluntary blinking. The blinking motion of 25 healthy volunteers was recorded at 600 frames per second. Master curves for the palpebral aperture and blinking speed were constructed using palpebral aperture versus time data taken from the high-speed camera recordings, which show that one blink can be divided into four phases; closing, closed, early opening and late opening. Analysis of data from the high-speed camera images was used to calculate the palpebral aperture, peak blinking speed, average blinking speed and duration of voluntary blinking and compare it with data generated by other methods previously used to evaluate voluntary blinking. The advantages of the high-speed camera method over the others are discussed, thereby supporting the high potential usefulness of the method in clinical research.
Hydrophobic–hydrophilic dichotomy of the butterfly proboscis
Authors: Lehnert Matthew S. , Monaenkova Daria , Andrukh Taras , Beard Charles E. , Adler Peter H. , Kornev Konstantin G.
Published: June 2013

Mouthparts of fluid-feeding insects have unique material properties with no human-engineered analogue: the feeding devices acquire sticky and viscous liquids while remaining clean. We discovered that the external surface of the butterfly proboscis has a sharp boundary separating a hydrophilic drinking region and a hydrophobic non-drinking region. The structural arrangement of the proboscis provides the basis for the wetting dichotomy. Theoretical and experimental analyses show that fluid uptake is associated with enlargement of hydrophilic cuticular structures, the legulae, which link the two halves of the proboscis together. We also show that an elliptical proboscis produces a higher external meniscus than does a cylindrical proboscis of the same circumference. Fluid uptake is additionally facilitated in sap-feeding butterflies that have a proboscis with enlarged chemosensory structures forming a brush near the tip. This structural modification of the proboscis enables sap feeders to exploit films of liquid more efficiently. Structural changes along the proboscis, including increased legular width and presence of a brush-like tip, occur in a wide range of species, suggesting that a wetting dichotomy is widespread in the Lepidoptera.
A dynamic discrete dislocation plasticity method for the simulation of plastic relaxation under shock loading
Authors: Gurrutxaga-Lerma Beñat , Balint Daniel S. , Dini Daniele , Eakins Daniel E. , Sutton Adrian P.
Published: June 2013

In this article, it is demonstrated that current methods of modelling plasticity as the collective motion of discrete dislocations, such as two-dimensional discrete dislocation plasticity (DDP), are unsuitable for the simulation of very high strain rate processes (10
6
 s
−1
or more) such as plastic relaxation during shock loading. Current DDP models treat dislocations quasi-statically, ignoring the time-dependent nature of the elastic fields of dislocations. It is shown that this assumption introduces unphysical artefacts into the system when simulating plasticity resulting from shock loading. This deficiency can be overcome only by formulating a fully time-dependent elastodynamic description of the elastic fields of discrete dislocations. Building on the work of Markenscoff & Clifton, the fundamental time-dependent solutions for the injection and non-uniform motion of straight edge dislocations are presented. The numerical implementation of these solutions for a single moving dislocation and for two annihilating dislocations in an infinite plane are presented. The application of these solutions in a two-dimensional model of time-dependent plasticity during shock loading is outlined here and will be presented in detail elsewhere.
Coral reef calcification: carbonate, bicarbonate and proton flux under conditions of increasing ocean acidification
Authors: Jokiel P. L.
Published: June 2013

Data on calcification rate of coral and crustose coralline algae were used to test the proton flux model of calcification. There was a significant correlation between calcification (G) and the ratio of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) to proton concentration ([DIC] : [H
+
] ratio). The ratio is tightly correlated with [CO
3
2−
] and with aragonite saturation state (
Ω
a
). An argument is presented that correlation does not prove cause and effect, and that
Ω
a
and [CO
3
2−
] have no basic physiological meaning on coral reefs other than a correlation with [DIC] : [H
+
] ratio, which is the driver of G.