Black carbon (BC) is a significant component of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution, which has been linked to a series of adverse health effects, in particular premature mortality. Recent ...scientific research indicates that BC also plays an important role in climate change. Therefore, controlling black carbon emissions provides an opportunity for a double dividend. This study quantifies the national burden of mortality and morbidity attributable to exposure to ambient BC in the United States (US). We use GEOS–Chem, a global 3-D model of atmospheric composition to estimate the 2010 annual average BC levels at 0.5 x 0.667° resolution, and then re-grid to 12-km grid resolution across the continental US. Using PM2.5 mortality risk coefficient drawn from the American Cancer Society cohort study, the numbers of deaths due to BC exposure were estimated for each 12-km grid, and then aggregated to the county, state and national level. Given evidence that BC particles may pose a greater risk on human health than other components of PM2.5, we also conducted sensitivity analysis using BC-specific risk coefficients drawn from recent literature. We estimated approximately 14,000 deaths to result from the 2010 BC levels, and hundreds of thousands of illness cases, ranging from hospitalizations and emergency department visits to minor respiratory symptoms. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the total BC-related mortality could be even significantly larger than the above mortality estimate. Our findings indicate that controlling BC emissions would have substantial benefits for public health in the US.
Mission accomplished Barron, James
McClatchy - Tribune Business News,
07/2007
Newsletter
Afterward, Anna Trujillo called to mind a meeting the team had at center court in Ben Lujan Gymnasium the day after losing to Santa Fe Indian School in the District 2AAA Tournament semifinal. The ...players pointed out everybody's attributes, then talked about their own fears. Trujillo's was that she would not get a chance to contribute to her team's success and play in The Pit. "But with Jessica Montoya, we always talked about that one moment, that one shot," Trujillo said. "And these girls made that possible, that one moment." Trujillo said the injury reinforced the bond between player and coach, who has encouraged her to continue playing at the collegiate level. Trujillo says she has visits to three colleges scheduled -- to Johnson and Wales University in Denver, Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, Colo., and Bethel College in Kansas.
All farming systems, from rainfed to irrigated, are embedded in a landscape that has
an inherent capacity to provide a range of ecosystem services with various functions.
By managing these landscapes ...for agricultural production, different ecosystem services
may take precedence over others. These human-made shifts in agricultural landscapes
put emphasis on particular ecosystem services, and this emphasis may alter the natural
balances of ecosystems and linkages to adjacent ecosystems at lower or higher spatial
scales. The emphasis in agricultural landscapes is usually on the provisioning ecosystem
services, in particular increased biomass from certain crops or produce from livestock.
Widespread, high levels of tree mortality, termed forest die-off, associated with drought and rising temperatures, are disrupting forests worldwide. Drought will likely become more frequent with ...climate change, but even without more frequent drought, higher temperatures can exacerbate tree water stress. The temperature sensitivity of drought-induced mortality of tree species has been evaluated experimentally for only single-step changes in temperature (ambient compared to ambient + increase) rather than as a response surface (multiple levels of temperature increase), which constrains our ability to relate changes in the driver with the biological response. Here we show that time-to-mortality during drought for seedlings of two western United States tree species, Pinus edulis (Engelm.) and Pinus ponderosa (Douglas ex C. Lawson), declined in continuous proportion with increasing temperature spanning a 7.7 degrees C increase. Although P. edulis outlived P. ponderosa at all temperatures, both species had similar relative declines in time-to-mortality as temperature increased (5.2% per degrees C for P. edulis; 5.8% per. C for P. ponderosa). When combined with the non-linear frequency distribution of drought duration-many more short droughts than long droughts-these findings point to a progressive increase in mortality events with global change due to warming alone and independent of additional changes in future drought frequency distributions. As such, dire future forest recruitment patterns are projected assuming the calculated 7-9 seedling mortality events per species by 2100 under business-as-usual warming occur, congruent with additional vulnerability predicted for adult trees from stressors like pathogens and pests. Our progressive projection for increased mortality events was driven primarily by the non-linear shape of the drought duration frequency distribution, a common climate feature of drought-affected regions. These results illustrate profound benefits for reducing emissions of carbon to the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources and slowing warming as rapidly as possible to maximize forest persistence.
This paper reports on the very impressive outcome of a project designed and built by a group of engineering students. The project was dubbed Project G (short for Godzilla). The students were all ...undergraduate students, from various graduating classes and mostly from all five of our engineering departments. Their teamwork and their problem-solving skills were very exemplary throughout the project duration. Furthermore, the students accomplished their task from beginning to end without any faculty supervision. An impressive accomplishment which, for us faculty, is interpreted as a testimony that we must, after all, be doing something right in class. Or so we hope at least. Project G consists basically of a large Lego-built dragon that can move around, and spit fire. The intricacy in its details is a result of the countless hours that the students worked on it and the engineering problem solving skills that they demonstrated. Every step was documented and pictures and videos were recorded, a testimony to the high commitment to teamwork from this group of students who come from a wide variety of disciplines. We describe project G in an informal manner, and all the steps and solutions along the way of its creation. We demonstrate that with proper preparation, a good selection of courses, a high commitment to teaching and learning, a university can educate its engineering students to solve, without supervision, a very difficult problem that they (and we) can be very proud of. We suggest in conclusion that though project G in its current form would not yet be suitable for a senior design capstone project, it would be a very good example for a multi-disciplinary engineering design project. Background In the summer of 2005, nine students served as camp counselors for the Introduction to Engineering Program1 (IEP) at the University of Notre Dame 2. IEP is a summer engineering camp for high school students who have just completed their junior year. There are two sessions of three weeks each. IEP’s purpose is to provide participants with an overview of all fields in engineering, while giving the students a taste of college life, a look at career opportunities, and a chance to meet professional engineers as well as engineering faculty. Students work on several projects, attend lectures, write reports, code programs, give presentations, and do problem solving and design. The IEP counselors assist the students in their projects during the sessions in the Engineering Learning Center, and help enforce the rules in the residence halls. Seven of the nine IEP counselors were engineering students at Notre Dame (the other two were a pre-med student and a business student), and eight of them had either previously attended the camp back when they were in high school, or had worked as IEP counselors in previous summers. They ranged from sophomores to seniors and most of them were Engineering majors (Aerospace, Chemical, Computer, Mechanical, Electrical).
Flavonoid compounds represent a well known class of naturally occurring phenolic compounds. Among this group of phytochemicals, prenyl flavonoids are retaining more and more attention from the ...scientific community. Those compounds display a narrow distribution in the plant kingdom and are characterized by increased lipophilic properties. This confers to them a strong affinity to biological membranes. The design of new techniques for the organic synthesis of prenyl flavonoids allowed us to build a collection of reference compounds. Those compounds were tested for their activity on the mitochondrial inner membrane. Prenyl flavonoids inhibit the electronic transfer and act as un-couplers of oxidative phosphorylation. Their mode of actions seems to be mostly chaotropic.
We have previously reported on the development and use of a proprietary CHO-specific microarray and proteomics technology platforms to interrogate large and diverse sets of CHO cell samples, which ...embodied several industrially relevant phenotypes. In a collaboration between Wyeth BioPharma and NICB/Dublin City University, we have completed the analysis of 375 individual samples representing 29 different recombinant CHO cell lines expressing monoclonal antibody, receptor-Fc fusion molecules, coagulation factors or growth factors. In this paper, we will present key learnings and insights that we have made upon analysis of the large dataset generated by the collaboration. Of note is that, despite sometimes large differences in observed phenotypes, the changes that we measured in the genomics and proteomics experiments were relatively subtle. Lastly, functional validation is important to confirming the relevance of any particular target. The development of a robust, comprehensive, and high-throughput validation workflow will be discussed.
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