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"Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as 'terrorist' on the one hand, and 'model minority' on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection"--

In this essay, I draw on ethnographic research with South Asian Muslim American gay men of Pakistani descent in Houston to explore everyday negotiations of religion, race, sexuality and transnationalism. The essay highlights three intersecting registers that situate gay Muslim American sexual cultural formations in local, transnational and cultural contexts. Drawing on participant observation and oral life history interviews, this essay examines: (a) culturally constructed male sexualities that are informed by the scripts, language, and cultural idioms of homo-sociality and same-sex eroticism, love and relationships in the homeland; (b) the increasing centrality of belonging to a transnational Muslimummah; and (c) the appropriation of western terminologies and categories of sexuality in constructing a gay identity. The narratives examined in this essay contribute to cultural analyses of transnational sexual cultures, and ethnographies of Muslim Americans and LGBTQIA immigrant communities in the West.

AbstractThe purpose of this research was to understand how to minimise the destructive effects of floods by establishing a bio‐shield of natural vegetation. Experiments were conducted in a water flume to determine the flow properties under different vegetation conditions whereas; volume of fluid (VOF) multiphase approach with a standard k‐ɛ turbulence model was developed for a simulation. The study involved comparative analysis of flow structures and loss of energy in a single patch of finite length, layered (single or double layer with gaps) and continuous (full width) vegetation models. The results showed that, for a single patch, the increase in vegetation density and aspect ratio increased the backwater rise in front of vegetation, reduced velocity and enhanced energy dissipation. Furthermore, in the case of horizontally layered vegetation models (single and double horizontal layers), the loss of energy was higher in double horizontally layered vegetation layouts. Gaps between vegetation patches of a single horizontally layered vegetation model possessed high flow velocity, which was countered by providing a second horizontal layer of vegetation with an alternate gap. The findings from this research are critical in designing optimum vegetation layouts for flood mitigation.

Organic amendments (animal manure and biochar) to agricultural soils may enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) contents, improve soil fertility and crop productivity but also contribute to global warming through nitrous oxide (N2O) emission. However, the effects of organic amendments on N2O emissions from agricultural soils seem variable among numerous research studies and remains uncertain. Here, eighty-five publications (peer-reviewed) were selected to perform a meta-analysis study. The results of this meta-analysis study show that the application of animal manure enhanced N2O emissions by 17.7%, whereas, biochar amendment significantly mitigated N2O emissions by 19.7%. Moreover, coarse textured soils increased [ = 182.6%, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 151.4%, 217.7%] N2O emission after animal manure, in contrast, N2O emission mitigated by 7.0% from coarse textured soils after biochar amendment. In addition, this study found that 121–320 kg N ha−1 and ⩽ 30 T ha−1 application rates of animal manure and biochar mitigated N2O emissions by 72.3% and 22.5%, respectively. Soil pH also played a vital role in regulating the N2O emissions after organic amendments. Furthermore, > 10 soil C: N ratios increased N2O emissions by 121.4% and 27.6% after animal and biochar amendments, respectively. Overall, animal manure C: N ratios significantly enhanced N2O emissions, while, biochar C: N ratio had not shown any effect on N2O emissions. Overall, average N2O emission factors (EFs) for animal manure and biochar amendments were 0.46% and −0.08%, respectively. Thus, the results of this meta-analysis study provide scientific evidence about how organic amendments such as animal manure and biochar regulating the N2O emission from agricultural soils. ; The part of work contributed by Muhammad Aammar Tufail, has received funding form the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under the Maria Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 722642 (project INTER-FUTURE