Defining the scope for altering rice leaf anatomy to improve photosynthesis: a modelling approach.

Leaf structure plays an important role in photosynthesis. However, the causal relationship and the quantitative importance of any single structural parameter to the overall photosynthetic performance of a leaf remains open to debate. In this paper, we report on a mechanistic model, eLeaf, which successfully captures rice leaf photosynthetic performance under varying environmental conditions of light and CO .

Chatting in the face of the eyewitness: The impact of extraneous cell-phone conversation on memory for a perpetrator.

Cell-phone conversation is ubiquitous within public spaces. The current study investigates whether ignored cell-phone conversation impairs eyewitness memory for a perpetrator. Participants viewed a video of a staged crime in the presence of 1 side of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful halfalogue), 2 sides of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful dialogue), 1 side of an incomprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningless halfalogue), or quiet.

The role of forest trees and their mycorrhizal fungi in carbonate rock weathering and its significance for global carbon cycling.

On million-year timescales, carbonate rock weathering exerts no net effect on atmospheric CO2 concentration. However, on timescales of decades-to-centuries, it can contribute to sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 and increase land-ocean alkalinity flux, counteracting ocean acidification. Historical evidence indicates this flux is sensitive to land use change, and recent experimental evidence suggests that trees and their associated soil microbial communities are major drivers of continental mineral weathering.

Configural and featural information in facial-composite images.

Eyewitnesses are often invited to construct a facial composite, an image created of the person they saw commit a crime that is used by law enforcement to locate criminal suspects. In the current paper, the effectiveness of composite images was investigated from traditional feature systems (E-FIT and PRO-fit), where participants (face constructors) selected individual features to build the face, and a more recent holistic system (EvoFIT), where they 'evolved' a composite by repeatedly selecting from arrays of complete faces. Further participants attempted to name these composites when seen as an unaltered image, or when blurred, rotated, linearly stretched or converted to a photographic negative.