671 research outputs found
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The assessment of the implementation of fuel related legislations and their impact on air quality and public health
The main focus of Work Package 6 of the Aphekom project was: to develop innovative methods to analyse the decrease in air pollution levels following implementation of an European regulation to reduce the sulphur content in liquid fuels; to follow the evolution of health risks over time; to track related effect modifiers; and to quantify the monetary costs of health impacts of the implemented regulation
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Profiling SO2 air pollution patterns in 9 EU Aphekom cities: The Aphekom Project
A detailed analysis of hourly pollutant concentrations mainly focusing on SO2 data obtained from 9 centres involved in the Aphekom project was conducted. This involved the generation of individual diurnal SO2 profiles in order to:
(i) identify city specific patterns including source apportionment and quantification,
(ii) track changes over time,
(iii) analyse the changes in SO2 concentrations from different emission sources, i.e. traffic, heating, shipping and industrial sources, overtime
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Mortality impacts of sulphur concetrations in 20 European cities in the APHEKOM Project
The implementation of three EU directives to reduce sulphur content in fuel was assessed for mortality impacts
in 20 European cities, between 1990 and 2007 in the APHEKOM project. This specific study aimed to examine whether different lag structures apply to the relationships between cardiovascular and respiratory events and SO2 concentrations, which will therefore result in differences in mortality impacts from regulation implementation. Prior evidence has shown that cardiovascular mortality is more likely to be affected by SO2 concentrations on the same or the previous day of the event, while respiratory mortality more likely to show a delayed effect of exposure to the same pollutant
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The APHEKOM Project: A literature review of air pollution interventions and their impact of public health
Intervention studies play an important role in supporting and complementing scientific validation of results of epidemiological non-intervention studies linking air pollution and health. In this paper a collection of existing published intervention studies is reviewed with the aim to give a summarized overview spanning a variety of approaches regarding the type of the intervention and findings with the main focus on studies that assessed interventions that improved air quality and the associated positive impact on public health. Air pollution interventions were defined as events aimed at reducing air pollution and also events where air pollution reductions occurred as a side effect
Measurement of shower development and its Moli\`ere radius with a four-plane LumiCal test set-up
A prototype of a luminometer, designed for a future e+e- collider detector,
and consisting at present of a four-plane module, was tested in the CERN PS
accelerator T9 beam. The objective of this beam test was to demonstrate a
multi-plane tungsten/silicon operation, to study the development of the
electromagnetic shower and to compare it with MC simulations. The Moli\`ere
radius has been determined to be 24.0 +/- 0.6 (stat.) +/- 1.5 (syst.) mm using
a parametrization of the shower shape. Very good agreement was found between
data and a detailed Geant4 simulation.Comment: Paper published in Eur. Phys. J., includes 25 figures and 3 Table
Performance of fully instrumented detector planes of the forward calorimeter of a Linear Collider detector
Detector-plane prototypes of the very forward calorimetry of a future
detector at an e+e- collider have been built and their performance was measured
in an electron beam. The detector plane comprises silicon or GaAs pad sensors,
dedicated front-end and ADC ASICs, and an FPGA for data concentration.
Measurements of the signal-to-noise ratio and the response as a function of the
position of the sensor are presented. A deconvolution method is successfully
applied, and a comparison of the measured shower shape as a function of the
absorber depth with a Monte-Carlo simulation is given.Comment: 25 pages, 32 figures, revised version following comments from
referee
Luminometer for the future International Linear Collider - simulation and beam test results
LumiCal will be the luminosity calorimeter for the proposed International
Large Detector of the International Linear Collider (ILC). The ILC physics
program requires the integrated luminosity to be measured with a relative
precision on the order of 10e-3, or 10e-4 when running in GigaZ mode.
Luminosity will be determined by counting Bhabha scattering events coincident
in the two calorimeter modules placed symmetrically on opposite sides of the
interaction point. To meet these goals, the energy resolution of the
calorimeter must be better than 1.5% at high energies. LumiCal has been
designed as a 30-layer sampling calorimeter with tungsten as the passive
material and silicon as the active material. Monte Carlo simulation using the
Geant4 software framework has been used to identify design elements which
adversely impact energy resolution and correct for them without loss of
statistics. BeamCal, covering polar angles smaller than LumiCal, will serve for
beam tuning, luminosity optimisation and high energy electron detection.
Secondly, prototypes of the sensors and electronics for both detectors have
been evaluated during beam tests, the results of which are also presented here.Comment: Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics 2011, Chicago, IL,
USA. Presented June 11, 2011, and submitted to Physics Procedi
ECFA Detector R&D Panel, Review Report
Two special calorimeters are foreseen for the instrumentation of the very
forward region of an ILC or CLIC detector; a luminometer (LumiCal) designed to
measure the rate of low angle Bhabha scattering events with a precision better
than 10 at the ILC and 10 at CLIC, and a low polar-angle
calorimeter (BeamCal). The latter will be hit by a large amount of
beamstrahlung remnants. The intensity and the spatial shape of these
depositions will provide a fast luminosity estimate, as well as determination
of beam parameters. The sensors of this calorimeter must be radiation-hard.
Both devices will improve the e.m. hermeticity of the detector in the search
for new particles. Finely segmented and very compact electromagnetic
calorimeters will match these requirements. Due to the high occupancy, fast
front-end electronics will be needed. Monte Carlo studies were performed to
investigate the impact of beam-beam interactions and physics background
processes on the luminosity measurement, and of beamstrahlung on the
performance of BeamCal, as well as to optimise the design of both calorimeters.
Dedicated sensors, front-end and ADC ASICs have been designed for the ILC and
prototypes are available. Prototypes of sensor planes fully assembled with
readout electronics have been studied in electron beams.Comment: 61 pages, 51 figure
Using structural motif descriptors for sequence-based binding site prediction
All authors are with the Biotechnological Center, TU Dresden, Tatzberg 47-51, 01307 Dresden, Germany and -- Wan Kyu Kim is with the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USABackground: Many protein sequences are still poorly annotated. Functional characterization of a protein is often improved by the identification of its interaction partners. Here, we aim to predict protein-protein interactions (PPI) and protein-ligand interactions (PLI) on sequence level using 3D information. To this end, we use machine learning to compile sequential segments that constitute structural features of an interaction site into one profile Hidden Markov Model descriptor. The resulting collection of descriptors can be used to screen sequence databases in order to predict functional sites. -- Results: We generate descriptors for 740 classified types of protein-protein binding sites and for more than 3,000 protein-ligand binding sites. Cross validation reveals that two thirds of the PPI descriptors are sufficiently conserved and significant enough to be used for binding site recognition. We further validate 230 PPIs that were extracted from the literature, where we additionally identify the interface residues. Finally we test ligand-binding descriptors for the case of ATP. From sequences with Swiss-Prot annotation "ATP-binding", we achieve a recall of 25% with a precision of 89%, whereas Prosite's P-loop motif recognizes an equal amount of hits at the expense of a much higher number of false positives (precision: 57%). Our method yields 771 hits with a precision of 96% that were not previously picked up by any Prosite-pattern. -- Conclusion: The automatically generated descriptors are a useful complement to known Prosite/InterPro motifs. They serve to predict protein-protein as well as protein-ligand interactions along with their binding site residues for proteins where merely sequence information is available.Institute for Cellular and Molecular [email protected]
Search for Doubly-Charged Higgs Boson Production at HERA
A search for the single production of doubly-charged Higgs bosons H^{\pm \pm}
in ep collisions is presented. The signal is searched for via the Higgs decays
into a high mass pair of same charge leptons, one of them being an electron.
The analysis uses up to 118 pb^{-1} of ep data collected by the H1 experiment
at HERA. No evidence for doubly-charged Higgs production is observed and mass
dependent upper limits are derived on the Yukawa couplings h_{el} of the Higgs
boson to an electron-lepton pair. Assuming that the doubly-charged Higgs only
decays into an electron and a muon via a coupling of electromagnetic strength
h_{e \mu} = \sqrt{4 \pi \alpha_{em}} = 0.3, a lower limit of 141 GeV on the
H^{\pm\pm} mass is obtained at the 95% confidence level. For a doubly-charged
Higgs decaying only into an electron and a tau and a coupling h_{e\tau} = 0.3,
masses below 112 GeV are ruled out.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
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