Synthetic microbial ecosystems : an exciting tool to understand and apply microbial communities

Many microbial ecologists have described the composition of microbial communities in a plenitude of environments, which has greatly improved our basic understanding of microorganisms and ecosystems. However, the factors and processes that influence the behaviour and functionality of an ecosystem largely remain black boxes when using conventional approaches. Therefore, synthetic microbial ecology has gained a lot of interest in the last few years. Because of their reduced complexity and increased controllability, synthetic communities are often preferred over complex communities to examine ecological theories. They limit the factors that influence the microbial community to a minimum, allowing their management and identifying specific community responses. However, besides their use for basic research, synthetic ecosystems also found their way towards different applications, like industrial fermentation and bioremediation. Here, we review why and how synthetic microbial communities are applied for research purposes and for which applications they have been and could be successfully used

1991 NASA Life Support Systems Analysis workshop

The 1991 Life Support Systems Analysis Workshop was sponsored by NASA Headquarters' Office of Aeronautics and Space Technology (OAST) to foster communication among NASA, industrial, and academic specialists, and to integrate their inputs and disseminate information to them. The overall objective of systems analysis within the Life Support Technology Program of OAST is to identify, guide the development of, and verify designs which will increase the performance of the life support systems on component, subsystem, and system levels for future human space missions. The specific goals of this workshop were to report on the status of systems analysis capabilities, to integrate the chemical processing industry technologies, and to integrate recommendations for future technology developments related to systems analysis for life support systems. The workshop included technical presentations, discussions, and interactive planning, with time allocated for discussion of both technology status and time-phased technology development recommendations. Key personnel from NASA, industry, and academia delivered inputs and presentations on the status and priorities of current and future systems analysis methods and requirements

CFD modelling of erosion-corrosion of steel in aqueous environments : particle concentration effects on the regime boundaries

In this study, a new methodology is used to model the effects of particle concentration on the inner surfaces of a circular pipe 90º bend, assuming applied potential controlled aqueous slurry flow at room temperature. This enables the regimes of the component to be mapped according to the intensity of erosion and corrosion contributions. The results show that for a constant inlet particle concentration, it is shown how transitions between erosion-corrosion regimes are observed around the pipe. For increases in particle concentration, significant variation of the erosion-corrosion regimes are observed, with a reduction of the corrosion dominated regime. The results are interpreted in the terms of the changes in local erosion conditions along the component in the flowing environments. Typical results from the model are shown illustrating how this new mapping method can be used effectively to optimize process conditions and materials in such environments

Landslide risk management through spatial analysis and stochastic prediction for territorial resilience evaluation

Natural materials, such as soils, are influenced by many factors acting during their formative and evolutionary process: atmospheric agents, erosion and transport phenomena, sedimentation conditions that give soil properties a non-reducible randomness by using sophisticated survey techniques and technologies. This character is reflected not only in spatial variability of properties which differs from point to point, but also in multivariate correlation as a function of reciprocal distance. Cognitive enrichment, offered by the response of soils associated with their intrinsic spatial variability, implies an increase in the evaluative capacity of the contributing causes and potential effects in failure phenomena. Stability analysis of natural slopes is well suited to stochastic treatment of uncertainty which characterized landslide risk. In particular, this study has been applied through a back- analysis procedure to a slope located in Southern Italy that was subject to repeated phenomena of hydrogeological instability (extended for several kilometres in recent years). The back-analysis has been carried out by applying spatial analysis to the controlling factors as well as quantifying the hydrogeological hazard through unbiased estimators. A natural phenomenon, defined as stochastic process characterized by mutually interacting spatial variables, has led to identify the most critical areas, giving reliability to the scenarios and improving the forecasting content. Moreover, the phenomenological characterization allows the optimization of the risk levels to the wide territory involved, supporting decision-making process for intervention priorities as well as the effective allocation of the available resources in social, environmental and economic contexts