Stabilisation of river dykes with drainage elements

In recent times, enormous damage has been caused by dyke failures during and after river flood disasters throughout the world. Besides extreme meteorological conditions the reasons for these failures are inadequate design and the actual condition of affected dyke structures. <br><br> To minimize the occurrence of dyke failures in future, in a national BMBF research project (BMBF: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) an alternative stabilisation technique has been investigated as an instrument for short term refurbishment and as an improvement to existing and endangered dyke structures. <br><br> It is intended to improve the stability of dyke structures by the mechanical installation of drainage devices, thus preventing dyke failure by controlling the seepage in the structure. <br><br> Within the scope of this paper selected results concerning stabilizing capability and feasibility of the stabilisation technique are presented in detail. Concerning feasibility the focus is placed on natural scale model tests to verify numerical calculations and to investigate the suitability of the adapted installation methods in situ

The morality of attitudes toward nanotechnology: about God, techno-scientific progress, and interfering with nature

Using survey data, we examine public attitudes toward and awareness of nanotechnology in Germany (N = 750). First, it is shown that a majority of the people are still not familiar with nanotechnology. In addition, diffusion of information about nanotechnology thus far mostly seems to reach men and people with a relative higher educational background. Also, pro-science and technology views are positively related with nanotech familiarity. Results further show that a majority of the people have an indifferent, ambiguous, or non-attitude toward nanotechnology. Multinomial logit analyses further reveal that nanotech familiarity is positively related with people’s attitudes. In addition, it is shown that traditional religiosity is unrelated to attitudes and that individual religiosity is weakly related to nanotechnology attitudes. However, moral covariates other than religiosity seem of major importance. In particular, our results show that more negative views on technological and scientific progress as well as more holistic views about the relation between people and the environment increase the likelihood of having a negative attitude toward nanotechnology

Operational flood management under large-scale extreme conditions, using the example of the Middle Elbe

In addition to precautionary or technical flood protection measures, short-term strategies of the operational management, i.e. the initiation and co-ordination of preventive measures during and/or before a flood event are crucially for the reduction of the flood damages. This applies especially for extreme flood events. These events are rare, but may cause a protection measure to be overtopped or even to fail and be destroyed. In such extreme cases, reliable decisions must be made and emergency measures need to be carried out to prevent even larger damages from occurring. <br><br> Based on improved methods for meteorological and hydrological modelling a range of (physically based) extreme flood scenarios can be derived from historical events by modification of air temperature and humidity, shifting of weather fields and recombination of flood relevant event characteristics. By coupling the large scale models with hydraulic and geotechnical models, the whole flood-process-chain can be analysed right down to the local scale. With the developed GIS-based tools for hydraulic modelling <i>FlowGIS</i> and the Dike-Information-System, (IS-dikes) it is possible to quantify the endangering shortly before or even during a flood event, so the decision makers can evaluate possible options for action in operational mode

Agonistic Interventions into Public Commemorative Art:An Innovative Form of Counter-memorial Practice?

In light of recent controversies around the removal or modification of public commemorative art, such as memorials and monuments, this paper interrogates the value of competing approaches to counter-memorial practice using the framework of agonistic memory. It argues that much counter-memorial practice today, as it relates to historical memory, is dominated by a “cosmopolitan” mode that fails to offer a convincing response to the rise of right-wing populism and its instrumentalization of conflicts over public commemorative art. The article investigates two case studies of counter-memorial interventions that focus on the memory of fascism in Europe today and seeks to identify and assess emergent agonistic practices

DGW: an exploratory data analysis tool for clustering and visualisation of epigenomic marks

Background Functional genomic and epigenomic research relies fundamentally on sequencing based methods like ChIP-seq for the detection of DNA-protein interactions. These techniques return large, high dimensional data sets with visually complex structures, such as multi-modal peaks extended over large genomic regions. Current tools for visualisation and data exploration represent and leverage these complex features only to a limited extent. Results We present DGW, an open source software package for simultaneous alignment and clustering of multiple epigenomic marks. DGW uses Dynamic Time Warping to adaptively rescale and align genomic distances which allows to group regions of interest with similar shapes, thereby capturing the structure of epigenomic marks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in a simulation study and on a real epigenomic data set from the ENCODE project. Conclusions Our results show that DGW automatically recognises and aligns important genomic features such as transcription start sites and splicing sites from histone marks. DGW is available as an open source Python package

The In Vivo Kinetics of RNA Polymerase II Elongation during Co-Transcriptional Splicing

Kinetic analysis shows that RNA polymerase elongation kinetics are not modulated by co-transcriptional splicing and that post-transcriptional splicing can proceed at the site of transcription without the presence of the polymerase

Genome-Wide Distribution of RNA-DNA Hybrids Identifies RNase H Targets in tRNA Genes, Retrotransposons and Mitochondria

During transcription, the nascent RNA can invade the DNA template, forming extended RNA-DNA duplexes (R-loops). Here we employ ChIP-seq in strains expressing or lacking RNase H to map targets of RNase H activity throughout the budding yeast genome. In wild-type strains, R-loops were readily detected over the 35S rDNA region, transcribed by Pol I, and over the 5S rDNA, transcribed by Pol III. In strains lacking RNase H activity, R-loops were elevated over other Pol III genes, notably tRNAs, SCR1 and U6 snRNA, and were also associated with the cDNAs of endogenous TY1 retrotransposons, which showed increased rates of mobility to the 5'-flanking regions of tRNA genes. Unexpectedly, R-loops were also associated with mitochondrial genes in the absence of RNase H1, but not of RNase H2. Finally, R-loops were detected on actively transcribed protein-coding genes in the wild-type, particularly over the second exon of spliced ribosomal protein genes