Biodynamic farming is a growing branch of organic farming which uses various so-called biodynamic preparations with the aim to enhance plant growth and soil quality. These preparations comprise plant parts fermented in animal sheaths (e.g., cow intestines or deer bladders) which are then applied to manures and composts before applying to the field (compost preparations). Two special preparations based on manure and silica are applied to the crops as field sprays (spray preparations). The effect of these biodynamic preparations, however, is a matter of debate. In a long-term experiment over 27 yrs, within an organic crop rotation, the use of biodynamic compost preparations has recently been shown to impact the soil biological community. Using the same experiment, we investigated whether these soil-level effects also displayed in agronomic parameters of arable crops. We found that the use of biodynamic compost preparations, when compared with farmyard manure (FYM) compost application without preparations, had no effect on yield in any of the investigated crops (spring wheat, winter wheat, oats, winter rye, faba bean, potatoes, maize, and grass/clover), or when data from all crops were pooled. Temporal yield stability of spring wheat and grass/clover was also unaffected by the biodynamic compost preparations. The application of FYM compost, however, led to significant increases in both yield and yield stability as compared to the non-fertilized control. We conclude that while biodynamic compost preparations did influence biological processes in the soil, they did not increase the crop yields in our long-term trial.

Since the sex of the speaker is normally as obvious as can be, there is no point in coding first-person singular gender – or so it may seem. This typological study examines the extent of sex-based gender marking in personal pronouns, possessive determiners, predicative adjectives, and verbs across first-, second-, and third-person singular. A worldwide perusal of grammars in addition to data elicitation yields a total of 115 languages with first-person gender. The paradigms of pronouns and possessives are found to be highly inconsistent, whereas those of verbs show a tendency towards consistency. Gender marking on adjectives is fully consistent. The likelihood of first-person gender is increased by a general sensitivity to gender and a dedicated gender morpheme. A distinction is made between pronouns and possessives as referential units and gender markers on verbs and adjectives as grammatical units. By their very nature, referential markers are sensitive to the contingencies of the extralinguistic world and subject to communicative constraints such as redundancy and economy. They therefore end up being organized in inconsistent paradigms. By contrast, grammatical units are largely untouched by these extraneous influences and may therefore develop consistent paradigms.

We examined the influence of racial and ethnic identity of residents and housing market economic conditions on redlining. Data were extracted from archival area description forms from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation for 568 Ohio neighborhoods from 1934–1940. Logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the relationships between neighborhood characteristics and redlining. Bivariate results indicated a strong association between the presence of African American residents and neighborhood redlining (OR = 40.9, 95% CI 22.9-72.8). Multivariable analysis demonstrated that some neighborhood characteristics were contributors to the decision to redline, including homes in poor condition (OR = 4.3, 95% CI 1.2-15.1), home vacancy (OR = 1.4, 95% CI 1.1-1.6), and housing prices (per thousand dollars) (OR = 0.7, 95% CI 0.4-1.2). Adjusting for these and other factors, the presence of African American residents remained a powerful predictor of redlining (OR = 13.8, 95% CI 4.4-42.8). Racial discrimination was the overriding factor in decisions to redline neighborhoods.

The present study evaluated the effects of increasing the dietary levels of EPA and DHA in Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) reared in sea cages, in terms of growth performance, welfare, robustness and overall quality. Fish with an average starting weight of 275 g were fed one of four different diets containing 10, 13, 16 and 35 g/kg of EPA and DHA (designated as 1·0, 1·3, 1·6 and 3·5 % EPA and DHA) until they reached approximately 5 kg. The 3·5 % EPA and DHA diet showed a significantly beneficial effect on growth performance and fillet quality compared with all other diets, particularly the 1 % EPA and DHA diet. Fish fed the diet containing 3·5 % EPA and DHA showed 400–600 g higher final weights, improved internal organ health scores and external welfare indicators, better fillet quality in terms of higher visual colour score and lower occurrence of dark spots and higher EPA and DHA content in tissues at the end of the feeding trial. Moreover, fish fed the 3·5 % EPA and DHA diet showed lower mortality during a naturally occurring cardiomyopathy syndrome outbreak, although this did not reach statistical significance. Altogether, our findings emphasise the importance of dietary EPA and DHA to maintain good growth, robustness, welfare and fillet quality of Atlantic salmon reared in sea cages.

Two hundred days after the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Brazil, the epidemic has rapidly spread in metropolitan areas and advanced throughout the countryside. We followed the temporal epidemic pattern at São Paulo State, the most populous of the country, the first to have a confirmed case of COVID-19, and the one with the most significant number of cases until now. We analysed the number of new cases per day in each regional health department and calculated the effective reproduction number (Rt) over time. Social distance measures, along with improvement in testing and isolating positive cases, general population mask-wearing and standard health security protocols for essential and non-essential activities, were adopted and impacted on slowing down epidemic velocity but were insufficient to stop transmission.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, holding that religious schools cannot be excluded from a state program of financial aid to private schools, is another incremental step in the Court's long-running project to reform the constitutional law of financial aid to religious institutions. There was nothing surprising about the decision, and it changed little; it was the inevitable next link in a long chain of decisions. To those observers still attached to the most expansive rhetoric of no-aid separationism, it is the world turned upside down. But the Court has been steadily marching away from that rhetoric for thirty-five years now. The more recent decisions, including Espinoza, do a far better job than no-aid separationism of separating the religious choices and commitments of the American people from the coercive power of the government. And that is the separation that is and should be the ultimate concern of the Religion Clauses—to minimize the government's interference with or influence on religion, and to leave each American free to exercise or reject religion in his or her own way, neither encouraged by the government nor discouraged or penalized by the government.

A shared feature of the Germanic languages is the occurrence of complex verbs consisting of the verb itself and what I refer to as the adverbal unit (AU). I examine the nature of the units that can be inserted into such complex verbs and compare intercalation patterns in AU-Vs and V-AUs. AU-Vs are found to be much more resistant to intercalation than V-AUs. The former accommodate the past participle marker, the infinitival linker, and—less commonly—verbs, whereas the latter accommodate NPs, ADVPs, and—less commonly—both phrase types concurrently. Thus, V-AUs may be split by more syntactic as well as heavier material than AU-Vs. I argue that this difference in cohesiveness is due to varying degrees of coactivation of Vs and AUs. The constituents of AU-Vs show a higher degree of coactivation than those of V-AUs. Adverbal units depend for their activation on the prior activation of verbs more than verbs depend for their activation on the prior activation of adverbal units. These different activation patterns lead to different degrees of cohesiveness and hence to different intercalation possibilities in the two verb types. Although intercalation is compulsory in some contexts, it proves to be a dispreferred option.*