'Behind Enemy Lines' Menzies, Evatt and Passports for Peking

This article focuses primarily on Australian government responses to the 1952 Peace Conference for Asia and the Pacific Regions. Because the conference was to be held in Peking, it was the subject of immense controversy: Chinese communists were fighting Australian soldiers in Korea and Australian peace activists, most communist or 'fellow travellers', sought to travel behind the 'bamboo curtain'. In this context, the Menzies government's policies on passports were sharply silhouetted. Although this conference has been overlooked in the literature, we can infer from the trajectory of relevant Cold War historiography that Prime Minister Menzies would adopt restrictive, even draconian, policies. This article argues otherwise. It suggests that it was that consistent champion of civil liberties, former deputy prime minister, attorney-general and secretary of the General Assembly of the United Nations and now, in 1952, Leader of the Opposition, Dr Evatt, who favoured more repressive action towards prospective delegates. In contrast, Menzies and his Cabinet were more lenient and shifted towards a harsher policy belatedly and reluctantly. This episode, therefore, challenges some comfortable assumptions about how the early Cold War was fought in Australia

Gross Biomass and Root/Shoot Ratio Mediated Drought Sensitivities of Ecosystem Carbon Exchange in a Meadow Steppe

According to IPCC’s Report (2007), global precipitation regimes will change largely in the future, with more annual precipitation at the mid-latitude regions. Simultaneously, due to the accelerating industrialization and use of nitrogen (N) fertilizer, significant increase in nitrogen deposition has been widely documented (Liu et al., 2013). Water and nitrogen are the two most important limiting factors for the ecological processes of arid and semi-arid grassland ecosystems; therefore, altered precipitation regimes and enhanced nitrogen deposition are likely to change vegetation composition, ecosystem productivity, and aboveground vs belowground biomass distribution. In addition to these long-term changes, short-term climate extremes, such as drought, are projected to increase in frequency and intensity in the future, and thus there is a clear need to understand how they will impact ecosystem carbon exchange, especially after the vegetation structure has been modified by altered precipitation regimes and nitrogen deposition (Reichstein et al., 2013). However, not much information is available in the literature about the sensitivity of ecosystem carbon exchange to extreme drought, particularly when the ecosystem productivity and biomass distribution were altered by nitrogen deposition and changed precipitation regimes

Colorimetric Detection of Copper Ion Based on Click Chemistry

Two colorimetric assays, lateral flow biosensor (LFB) and hemin/G-Quadruplex DNAzyme-based colorimetric assay, were developed for the detection of copper ion based on click chemistry. Two single-strand DNA (ssDNA) with azide- and alkyne-modified at 3′ and 5′ separately can be linked by the Cu+-catalyzed click chemistry. For hemin/G-Quadruplex DNAzyme-based assay, the two ssDNA fragments linked by Cu+-catalyzed click chemistry could form a complete G-rich sequence that severed as a horse-radish peroxidase. In the presence of hemin and K+, the colorless substrate tetramethyl benzidine (TMB) is catalyzed into a colored product by the G-rich sequence. The concentration of Cu2+ can then be quantitatively analyzed by measuring the color density. For the LFB assay, the two ligated ssDNA fragments could form a sandwich complex between an ssDNA fragment immobilized on gold nanoparticles and another ssDNA fragment on test zone of a biosensor, respectively. The biosensor enables visual detection of copper ion with excellent specificity. In comparison with conventional methods, the present assays are simpler to operate and more cost-effective to use, and so have great potential in point-of-care diagnosis and environmental monitoring