Examining the graveside tributes left at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, this article considers the meaning-making work of decay. Green-Wood is a polysemous place, existing as a historical and active cemetery, an arboretum, an arts and performance space, a space of mourning, and a place of leisurely strolling and birdwatching. Through a site-specific analysis of the cemetery, I approach decay as an active and durational phase of material life and explore different decay-temporalities through the tributes left graveside. I argue that orienting ourselves to the decay-life of things necessarily entangles us in a larger ecological ethic and relational ontology of self, land, weather, animals (human and non-human), and time. While advocating for material attention to decay-life, I consider how the aesthetics and taboos of decay shape the cemetery’s relationship to visible and invisible rot and ruin. The cemetery staff, wildlife, visitors, ecology, climate, and the dead create a complex network of active actors experiencing and altering the material decay-life of the left-behind natural and artificial material tributes. Together, this active and entangled decay-life of the site forms a network of temporalities of decay that co-construct the affective and environmental space of the cemetery.

While the history and practices of collecting have received considerable attention over the past few decades, the notion of erasure – of the deleting, removal or destruction of material, whether deliberate or otherwise – has remained largely in the shadows. We challenge this neglect by placing erasure centre stage and treating it as a productive phenomenon in its own right. Indeed, we suggest that it forms a significant precondition for the very possibility of memory and collections. This article draws upon a recent turn to consider questions of forgetting, ignorance and ending to lay out the grounds for analysing the various roles played by erasure in making and unmaking our world. Inspired by Paul Connerton's discussion of different types of forgetting, we present five distinct forms of erasure that we regard as principally important: (i) repressive erasure, (ii) protective erasure, (iii) operative erasure, (iv) amending erasure and (v) calamitous and neglectful erasure. In each case, we discuss the characteristic logic of the erasure at hand and provide examples of the historical and media-specific forms in which it has been enacted. Our aim in doing so is to provide future researchers with some of the analytical tools and perspectives necessary to engage in further erasure studies. For if we are interested in making sense of the shifting and complex world we inhabit, then the interdisciplinary study of the compelling yet elusive phenomenon of erasure is an excellent place to start.

This study examines the role of distance in the decision among grammatical variants. The empirical test case is the English mandative subjunctive construction, which co-occurs with an embedded modal auxiliary, a subjunctive or an indicative verb form. The fact that the subjunctive is triggered by specific lexical items allows one to measure the distance between the triggering unit and the target verb. This distance is found to play a significant role in the grammatical decision process. With increasing distance between trigger and target, the probability of selecting a modal auxiliary increases and the probability of selecting the subjunctive decreases. The theoretical account hinges on the range and strength of linguistic units. Syntactic units (i.e. modals) are claimed to have a wider range than morphological units (i.e. indicative and subjunctive). Furthermore, the indicative is claimed to have a wider range than the subjunctive. Varying ranges are interpreted as varying decay rates. The lower decay rate of syntactic as compared to morphological units results from the syntactic level being superordinated to the morphological level in language production. The inclusion of the semantic and the phonological levels confirms that the position of a level in the structural hierarchy determines its range.

In popular religious traditions in Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar, spirits (or gods) become visible through their material realization in the corporeal bodies of shamans and spirit mediums and via ensouled statues and paintings that give the gods or spirits presence on altars. This discussion concerns a basic problem of material religion, that even ensouled, numinous, or otherwise empowered materials are subject to material decay. In the three cases presented and in many other places as well, the images are produced in commercial workshops where knowing craftsmanship entangles (what we commonly call) technique with what we might (more cautiously) call magic to produce an efficacious or agentive image. Questions of object efficacy are also linked to the prospect of decay, which may be hastened or postponed in relation to both individual choices and enveloping circumstance, from questions of climate to political economy.

The initial value problem for a semi-linear fractional heat equation is investigated. In the focusing case, global well-posedness and exponential decay are obtained. In the focusing sign, global and non global existence of solutions are discussed via the potential well method.

Using in situ data from 2011 and 2013, we evaluate the ability of CryoSat-2 (CS-2) to retrieve sea-ice freeboard over fast ice in McMurdo Sound. This provides the first systematic validation of CS-2 in the coastal Antarctic and offers insight into the assumptions currently used to process CS-2 data. European Space Agency Level 2 (ESAL2) data are compared with results of a Waveform Fitting (WfF) procedure and a Threshold-First-Maximum-Retracker-Algorithm employed at 40% (TFMRA40). A supervised freeboard retrieval procedure is used to reduce errors associated with sea surface height identification and radar velocity in snow. We find ESAL2 freeboards located between the ice and snow freeboard rather than the frequently assumed snow/ice interface. WfF is within 0.04 m of the ice freeboard but is influenced by variable snow conditions causing increased radar backscatter from the air/snow interface. Given such snow conditions and additional uncertainties in sea surface height identification, a positive bias of 0.14 m away from the ice freeboard is observed. TFMRA40 freeboards are within 0.03 m of the snow freeboard. The separation of freeboard estimates is primarily driven by the different assumptions of each retracker, although waveform alteration by variations in snow properties and surface roughness is evident. Techniques are amended where necessary, and automatic freeboard retrieval procedures for ESAL2, WfF and TFMRA40 are presented. CS-2 detects annual fast-ice freeboard trends using all three automatic procedures that are in line with known sea-ice growth rates in the region.

Effective weed seedbank management requires mechanistic understanding of ecological determinants of seed persistence in the soil seedbank. Chemical and physical defense of common lambsquarters, field pennycress, giant foxtail, kochia, velvetleaf, and yellow foxtail seeds were quantified in relation to short- and long-term seedbank persistence. Seed content of ortho-dihydroxyphenols (o-DHP), a class of putative seed defense compounds, varied more than threefold between the least protected species (common lambsquarters, 9.2 µg g seed−1) and the most protected species (kochia, 34.1 µg g seed−1). Seed o-DHP was inversely related (r = −0.77, P < 0.001) to seed half-life in the soil and to short-term seed persistence in burial assays (r = −0.82, P < 0.05). The relative importance of chemical seed protection in comparison to physical seed protection, as represented by the ratio of seed o-DHP concentration to seed coat thickness, decreased linearly with increasing short-term seed persistence (r = −0.96, P < 0.01) and nonlinearly with increasing long-term seed persistence in the soil seedbank (y = 0.16 + 0.21/(0.0432 + x), R2 = 0.99, P < 0.001). Mechanical damage to the seed coat, via piercing, slicing, or grinding treatments, increased short-term mortality during burial for all six species. Mortality of pierced seeds was negatively associated (r = −0.35, P < 0.05) with seed phenol concentration and positively associated with seed half-life (r = 0.42, P < 0.01) and seed coat thickness (r = 0.36, P < 0.05). Seed phenolics, as a class, supported the results for o-DHPs. Overall, these findings suggest a potential weakness, with respect to seedbank management, in the way weed seed defenses are constructed. Weed species with transient seedbanks appear to invest more in chemical defense than those species with highly persistent seedbanks. As a result, seeds in the latter category are relatively more dependent upon physical seed protection for persistence in the soil seedbank, and more vulnerable to management tactics that reduce the physical integrity of the weed seed coat.

This work is devoted to prove the exponential decay for the energyof solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation in a bounded intervalwith a localized damping term. Following the method in Menzala (2002)which combines energy estimates, multipliers and compactnessarguments the problem is reduced to prove the unique continuation ofweak solutions. In Menzala (2002) the case where solutions vanish on aneighborhood of both extremes of the bounded interval where equationholds was solved combining the smoothing results by T. Kato (1983)and earlier results on unique continuation of smooth solutions byJ.C. Saut and B. Scheurer (1987). In this article we address thegeneral case and prove the unique continuation property in twosteps. We first prove, using multiplier techniques, that solutionsvanishing on any subinterval are necessarily smooth. We then applythe existing results on unique continuation of smooth solutions.

Smells are extremely important in everyday life. They provide information concerning our environment and evoke associations. In archaeology, however, similarly to other aspects of life in the past, smells can be studied only indirectly. In this study, the organic remains of animal exploitation have been studied at various (prehistoric, classical and medieval) sites. Having identified the sources of bad smells, their distributions were studied in the light of prevailing wind directions and settlement structure. Culturally different attitudes to ‘bad’ smells are also discussed.

The influence of a rainfall gradient on the distribution and species richness of some groups of wood-inhabiting basidiomycetes was explored in Costa Rican tropical forests. The relationships between these fungi and wood size and decay stage were also studied. Basidiocarps of all poroid and some corticoid fungi were recorded in three plots of 30 logs in each of dry, moist, and wet forests. The logs were surveyed three times during one year, covering all seasons. The species richness gradient was inversely related to the rainfall gradient, with most species in the dry forest (51), least in the wet forest (37), and intermediate in the moist forest (44). A total of 102 species were identified. Only six species occurred at all three sites. Two of the four most common species were new to science. The composition of wood-inhabiting fungal species in the dry forest varied from both the moist and the wet forest, while species composition in the two latter forest types was difficult to distinguish. Both frequent and rare species utilized the different decay stages as expected from availability of substrate. Perennials and rare species tended to occur on large logs in the dry forest, while all species tended to occur on large logs in the moist forest, but not in the wet forest.

What conditions preserve archaeology, and what conditions accelerate decay? Here experts from York, using the wealth of experience and data gathered from that city, discuss the issues.

The gelatinous layer (G-layer) of tension-wood fibres in reaction wood of beech showed alterations as a result of the physiological processes involved in the conversion of sapwood into false heartwood or reaction-zone tissue. Using transmitted-light, fluorescence and UV microscopy, polyphenolic compounds were found to infiltrate and encrust the cellulose microfibrils within the G-layer. Experiments with naturally infected and artificially inoculated wood showed that these processes affect the rate and mode of degradation by wood-decaying fungi. Thus, although the ascomycete Ustulina deusta was able to degrade the G-layer from within the lumina of tension-wood fibres in unaltered sapwood, it failed to do so for a prolonged period within false heartwood and reaction zones. In both situations, however, there was some degradation of the underlying secondary wall in the form of erosion troughs which can be attributed to soft rot ‘type II’, and internal cavity formation typical for ‘type I’ attack. The present study indicates that not only cell type, but also alterations in the cell wall structure, affect the activity and degradation mode of decay fungi in beech.

A general pathway of mRNA turnover has been described for yeast in which the 3′ poly(A) tail is first deadenylated to an oligo(A) length, leading to decapping and subsequent 5′–3′ exonucleolytic decay. The unstable MFA2 mRNA and the stable PGK1 mRNAs both decay through this pathway, albeit at different rates of deadenylation and decapping. To determine the regions of the mRNAs that are responsible for these differences, we examined the decay of chimeric mRNAs derived from the 5′ untranslated, coding, and 3′ untranslated regions of these two mRNAs. These experiments have led to the identification of the features of these mRNAs that lead to their different stabilities. The MFA2 mRNA is unstable solely because its 3′ UTR promotes the rates of deadenylation and decapping; all other features of this mRNA are neutral with respect to mRNA decay rates. The PGK1 mRNA is stable because the sequence context of the PGK1 translation start codon and the coding region function together to stabilize the transcript, whereas the PGK1 3′ UTR is neutral with respect to decay. Importantly, changes in the PGK1 start codon context that destabilized the transcript also reduced its translational efficiency. This observation suggests that the nature of the translation initiation complex modulates the rates of mRNA decapping and decay.

Interferometry, a technique widely used in physics to study radiation fields, has been applied to the investigation of dowsing. Pairs of horizontal linear components, typically some metres in length and a metre or so apart, and parallel in a vertical plane, produce patterns of lines that can be mapped by dowsing rods. The lines are parallel to each other and to the components, and are equally spaced. The spacing of the lines depends on the length, separation and composition of the components. The existence of the patterns shows that the dowsing field is wave radiation. Since there is no detectable difference between patterns produced by pairs of components made of good electrical conductors such as copper, and those produced by good insulators such as uPVC, it is concluded that the radiation field is not electromagnetic. Furthermore, aluminium and tin behave differently from copper and steel. The spacing of the lines has been found to depend on time of year. It increases rapidly in late April and falls rapidly in late November; in between these times it appears to be relatively stable except for an isolated maximum in early March. It shows a high degree of repeatability from year to year.