An Investigation of Thermal Comfort at High Humidities

Climate chamber experiments were performed to investigate thermal comfort at high humidities. Subjective reports were recorded for a total of 411 subjects at frequent intervals during the three-hour experiments with 65 selected subjects equipped with instrumentation to record skin wettedness and skin temperature. The exposures ranged from 20°C (68°F)/60% RH to 26°C (78.8°F)/90% RH with two clothing levels, 0.5 and 0.9 clo, and three levels of metabolic activity, 1.2, 1.6, and 4 met. Clear differences in humidity response were not found for sedentary subjects; however, non-sedentary activities produced differences on several subjective scales. These differences, though, are dictated via heat balance and thermoregulation and cannot be separated from humidity-related effects. For metabolic rates 1.6 met and above, these data suggest that no practical limit on humidity will lower the percent dissatisfied below 25%

A Brassica napus mRNA expressed specifically in developing microspores

The I3 cDNA isolated from a library made from 2–4 mm (immature) anthers of Brassica napus shows microspore-specific expression. Homologous transcripts are detected in buds and anthers of male-fertile plants, but not in green tissues, roots, or in cytoplasmic male-sterile buds. High expression of the transcript is limited to microspores entering and undergoing mitosis. The predicted peptide sequence of the cDNA shows an unusual repeated alanine/proline motif at the C-terminus, which may be of importance in the native protein structure