Farmers grow crops in the dryland region of the Pacific Northwest (PNW) using tillage practices ranging from moldboard plowing to no-tillage. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of tillage on persistence of imazamox herbicide in intermediate and high precipitation zones of the inland PNW. Along with a nontreated control, imazamox was applied to imidazolinone-tolerant winter wheat in the fall and spring at one, two, and three times the maximum labeled rate at locations near Genesee, ID, Davenport, WA, and Pendleton, OR. Moldboard plow, chisel plow, and no-till tillage treatments were implemented soon after wheat harvest and yellow mustard was planted the following season to determine crop response. Experiments were conducted at each location in 2005 to 2007 and 2006 to 2008. There were significant location by year and year and location interactions. There was no significant tillage by imazamox rate interaction, except at Pendleton in year 2, for all measured yellow mustard responses (crop injury, biomass, and yield). Genesee was colder than Pendleton and had more precipitation than Davenport, resulting in more injury to yellow mustard at Genesee than at Pendleton but less than at Davenport. Davenport had greater injury than the other two locations, likely due to lower soil pH, higher organic matter (OM), and cooler, drier climate, which allowed imazamox to persist longer in the soil. Overall, Pendleton had the least yellow mustard injury, which likely was related to its warmer, wetter climate and the concomitant rapid soil dissipation of imazamox. Tillage did not reduce the persistence of imazamox. Yellow mustard had the lowest injury and had greater mature biomass and seed yield in no-till seeded plots when averaged across imazamox rates compared to moldboard and chisel-plowed plots.

The purpose of this study was to conduct a descriptive analysis of multiple dimensions of religious belief and practice among older people in Japan with data from a nationwide sample. Six dimensions were evaluated: religious affiliation, involvement in formal religious organisations, private religious practices, the functions of prayer, belief in punishment by supernatural forces, and beliefs about the afterlife. In addition to describing these dimensions for the sample as a whole, tests were performed to see if they varied by age, sex, marital status, education and for those living in rural or urban areas. The findings suggest that even though older people in Japan are not highly involved in formal religious institutions, they engage frequently in private religious practices, and that while many older people in Japan do not endorse some religious beliefs (e.g. about the quality of the afterlife), there is strong adherence to others (e.g. beliefs about punishment by supernatural forces). It was found that older women are more deeply involved in religion than older men, and that levels of religious involvement appear to be higher in rural than in urban areas. Less pronounced differences were found with respect to age, but compared to the ‘young-old’, the ‘oldest-old’ aged 75 or more years were more deeply involved in those aspects of religion that take place outside formal institutions.

Aflatoxins (AFs) are secondary metabolites produced mainly by Aspergillus parasiticus and A. flavus. To study AF regulation, previously isolated non-toxigenic A. parasiticus sec− (for secondary metabolism minus) variants were genetically analysed. In parasexual crossing, the sec− strains failed to form heterokaryons and diploids with other sec− strains. Heterokaryon test results suggested that involvement of cytoplasmic elements in the formation of sec− phenotype was unlikely. At the molecular level, the coding sequence of the sec− aflR (the only known positive regulator of AF pathway) was identical to that of their toxigenic sec+ (for secondary metabolism plus) parents. However, the sec− aflR expression was 5- to 10-fold lower compared to that in the sec+ forms. RT–PCR analysis demonstrated that the AF pathway genes were expressed in the sec− forms but in trace amounts and in their unprocessed forms. Combined, these results suggest that aflR is necessary but not sufficient for AF production and that elements involved in fungal development directly or indirectly influence its proper function.

The quarrel between Adam and Eve in book 9 concerns not only relations between the sexes but also the nature of human government. Prelapsarian Adam and Eve, who, like the antinomian Christian, possess total spiritual liberty, deal with an epistemological dilemma that confronted antinomians like Milton during the English revolution: In the absence of intrinsically authoritative external laws, how can one know when one's decision to act is based on the direction of God's spirit dwelling in one's heart and when it is based on personal desire? In the light of Milton's historical answer to this question, we can see that Milton dramatizes in Eve the voluntarist antinomian's tendency to overconfidence and in Adam the humanist antinomian's struggle with right reason. While neither person sins in this scene, both lose their balance in particularly antinomian ways that grant us insight into the necessarily precarious nature of human freedom.

Between the interpretation in Milton's prose works of the monarchy of Charles I and the portrayal in Paradise Lost of the tyranny of Satan there exists an extensive and complex consistency based on the concept of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that informs the character and world view of Satan as well as of King Charles. In his effort to counteract the Eikon Basilike's picture of Charles as a Christlike martyr-king, Milton drew in Eikonoklastes—albeit in fragmentary form—his own essentially fictional characterization of Charles as a tyrant. This analysis, continued in the Defences, studies Charles's personal heroism, political behavior, delusions about himself, his followers, and his cause and is extensively paralleled in the depiction of Satan. These prose works thus serve as a valuable literary gloss on Paradise Lost—on certain details of imagery and characterization and on Milton's conception of true liberty and revolution.

Sir Thomas Browne has puzzled his critics. His high rank as one of the great writers of English prose is well established, but he has been read in different and sometimes incompatible ways. Professor Basil Willey, in his illuminating chapters on Browne in The Seventeenth Century Background, reminds us that “It is a romantic falsification to ‘relish’ Browne for his ‘quaintness’”. This was the nineteenth-century tendency from the time when Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge rediscovered him to the essays of Walter Pater (Macmillan's liv, 1886; Appreciations, 1889) and Sir Leslie Stephen (Hours in a Library, Second Series, 1876) at the close of the period. Pater uses the word quaint and also humourist, although he circumscribes each with definitions.