Biodiversity climate change impacts report card technical paper:10. Implications of climate change for coastal and inter-tidal habitats in the UK

Executive summary - Coastal habitats are complex, dynamic and interdependent. They are important in providing sea defences, areas for recreation, biodiversity and a range of other ecosystem services. - Increased air- and sea-surface temperatures have resulted in changes in the distribution of marine and coastal species. Both warmer- and colder-water species are shifting northwards. However, warmer-water species are shifting northwards faster than colder-water species are retreating, resulting in changes in community composition. Changes in the abundance of keystone taxa can cause a cascade of responses, further altering community composition. - Changes in the phenology of coastal species have been observed, with the rates of change in marine species being considerably greater than those in terrestrial and freshwater systems. Recent advances in the phenology of species have not all occurred at the same rate, in some cases resulting in mismatches of timing of annual cycles of animals and their food organisms. - Changes in precipitation are likely to affect coastal habitats, but the projected increase in winter rainfall and decrease in summer rainfall will tend to have opposing effects; the net result of these is not known. High winter rainfall and milder winter temperatures may extend the growing season and lead to faster succession and dominance by taller competitive plant species. This will be exacerbated by anthropogenic nutrient enrichment. However, increasing frequency and severity of summer droughts may counteract the effects of nutrient enrichment and winter precipitation. Increased drought will have impacts on habitats that are highly dependent on the maintenance of hydrological regimes, such as machair lochs and dune slacks. - Rising sea levels have been associated with the loss of coastal habitats. Predicted future rises will have significant impacts on coastal and intertidal habitats, including changing geomorphological processes, further habitat loss and increasing the vulnerability of infrastructure. However, coastal systems are dynamic and have the potential to adapt to rising sea levels, but only if there is an adequate supply of sediment to allow accretion and if there is landward space for the coast to roll-back into. Sea defences and other coastal management interrupt the movement of sediment between systems and prevent natural coastal realignment. - Managed coastal realignment is beneficial because it offers the potential to create habitat and provide flood defence benefits. Inevitably, there will be conflict between the need to maintain intertidal and other coastal habitats (e.g. saltmarsh, mud flat and sand dune) by realignment, and the need to protect valuable inland coastal habitats, such as grazing marsh and saline lagoons. - Future changes in coastal habitats are hard to predict because it is difficult to separate the impacts of rising sea levels from those of coastal management, including sea defences. Coastal zone management and adaptation, and the interactions with other climate drivers, nutrient deposition and habitat management, will have significant influence on the quantity, quality and location of future coastal habitats

A Forensic Analysis And Comparison Of Solid State Drive Data Retention With Trim Enabled File Systems

Solid State Drives offer significant advantages over traditional hard disk drives. No moving parts, superior resistance to shock, reduced heat generation and increased battery life for laptops. However, they are susceptible to cell failure within the chips. To counter this, wear levelling is used so that cells are utilised for data at approximately the same rate. An improvement to the original wear levelling routine is TRIM, which further enhances the lifetime of the cells by allowing the garbage collection process as one operation rather than an on going process. The advantages of TRIM for the user is that it increases efficiency of the drive’s wear levelling algorithms, meaning quicker access times and longer lifetimes. The basic wear levelling routines have caused significant difficulties for forensic investigators as data is moved to different random locations without user input. Whilst this problem has been examined in past research, the implementation of TRIM has not had much attention. This research examines SSD drives across three TRIM enabled file systems, Windows, Linux and MAC OS X operating systems. The results show that TRIM leaves far less data for forensic investigators than drives without TRIM enabled

Measurement Error in Google Ticker Search

We quantify and illustrate the effects of measurement error in the Google ticker search volume index (“SVI”)—a commonly used proxy for investor attention. Based on a dataset of roughly 2.7 billion website visits following S&P 500 ticker searches, we estimate that 69% of searches are not by investors searching for information, and find that this measurement error is highly correlated with firm characteristics. We then show that measurement error in SVI can cause erroneous inferences in three common types of tests. First, in tests of investor attention around information events, measurement error biases coefficients towards zero and can generate false-negative results (type 2 errors). Second, because SVI measurement error is correlated with firm characteristics, it can easily generate false-positive results in cross-sectional tests (type 1 errors). Third, tests that compare SVI to other attention proxies can produce erroneous inferences due to difference

Excitation of remarkably nondispersive surface plasmons on a nondiffracting, dual-pitch metal grating

Copyright © 2002 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 80 (2002) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/80/2410/1A nondiffracting metallic lamellar grating formed from three equally spaced grooves per repeat period, with one being slightly shallower than the other two is examined at microwave frequencies. When filled with a slightly lossy dielectric, this structure supports a remarkably nondispersive surface plasmon polariton mode, which exhibits strong selective absorption of incident power. Measured reflectivities show excellent agreement with the results predicted by a rigorous coupled wave theory

Coupling of near-grazing microwave photons to surface plasmon polaritons via a dielectric grating

Copyright © 2000 by the American Physical SocietyA dielectric grating on top of a planar metal substrate is shown to couple near-grazing microwave photons to surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). It is shown that when the grating grooves are oriented such that they are parallel to the plane of incidence (φ=90°), coupling to SPPs with both s- and p-polarized photons is possible at three different energies. It is demonstrated that one mode is coupled via p-polarized radiation and the other two modes are both coupled via s-polarized radiation. A multilayer, multishape differential grating theory allows the identities of each of the modes to be confirmed by modeling the electromagnetic fields above the metal substrate. In addition, a comparison between the experimentally derived reflectivity scans and the theoretical model is made.Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), Farnboroug

Gratingless enhanced microwave transmission through a subwavelength aperture in a thick metal plate

Copyright © 2002 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 81 (2002) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/81/4661/1Remarkably enhanced transmission of microwave radiation through a single subwavelength slit in a thick metallic substrate surrounded by just a pair of parallel deep and narrow grooves is recorded. By also patterning the output face of the metal slab with two grooves there is strong exit beam confinement. There are no gratings in this structure and, hence, the transmission mechanism is not related to the conventional grating coupling of surface plasmons on the upper and lower surfaces of the substrate. Instead, the slit and the four grooves are all resonant, which is the essence of the functioning of the arrangement. The enhancement is due to the collective excitation of the Fabry–Pérot mode in the slit and the cavity modes in the grooves. A finite-element modeling code is used to optimize the response of the structure, and to investigate the electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the substrate

Regulating Medicines in a Globalized World With Increased Recognition and Reliance Among Regulators: A National Academies Report

Research and development of pharmaceuticals are now complex global endeavors, with drug companies operating worldwide using global supply chains. Pharmaceutical companies source their products from many countries, conduct trials in multiple sites, and market essential drugs and vaccines globally. Yet oversight of drug safety and effectiveness is primarily the responsibility of national regulators of variable capacities. National agencies often undertake product reviews without recognizing that similar reviews are occurring elsewhere, sometimes simultaneously. The result is duplication and redundancy, which benefits neither national nor global public health. Supported by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an expert committee to explore the benefits of mutual recognition and other reliance activities among regulators. Even well-resourced regulators (for example, the FDA, the European Medicines Agency, the Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency Japan, and Health Canada) find it difficult to ensure the safety, efficacy, and quality of medicines in a globalized world. Regulatory failures cause harm to the population and undermine public trust in government. In 2008, following discovery of contaminated heparin originating from China, the Bush administration authorized the FDA to coordinate certain product manufacturing inspections with Australian and European regulators in China and India—setting the stage for “third country” inspections (ie, inspections conducted outside the jurisdiction of either regulator). Yet concerns about the quality of active pharmaceutical ingredients and finished pharmaceutical products persist. For example, in 2018, the FDA recalled generic medications used to treat hypertension and cardiovascular disease because of contamination

Remarkable transmission of microwaves through a wall of long metallic bricks

Copyright © 2001 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 79 (2001) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/79/2844/1The transmitted intensity of a microwave beam through a thick continuous metal wall will be effectively zero due to the almost complete exclusion of the electric field from the metal. However, it is shown here that by removing less than 20% of the wall material to produce a regular array of bricks, up to 90% of the radiation is transmitted, despite the gaps between the bricks being less than 5% of the incident wavelength. This result is attributed to the excitation of a set of resonant waves along the cavity length through the coupling together of surface–plasmon modes across its width

Low angular-dispersion microwave absorption of a dual-pitch nondiffracting metal bigrating

Copyright © 2003 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Applied Physics Letters 83 (2003) and may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/83/806/1The surface plasmon modes supported by a nondiffracting 90° bigrating consisting of three grooves per repeat period with one slightly shallower than the other two are characterized by studying the reflectivity from the structure as a function of the angle of incidence and the incident wavelength (11.3<λ0<16.7 mm). This structure supports two remarkably angle-independent modes plus a further, lower-energy mode which is more dispersive. Experimental reflectivity is compared with that calculated using a finite element model. In addition, to understand the character of each of the modes, the spatial form of the electromagnetic fields at the resonant frequencies are explored

Modeling meiotic chromosomes indicates a size dependent contribution of telomere clustering and chromosome rigidity to homologue juxtaposition.

Meiosis is the cell division that halves the genetic component of diploid cells to form gametes or spores. To achieve this, meiotic cells undergo a radical spatial reorganisation of chromosomes. This reorganisation is a prerequisite for the pairing of parental homologous chromosomes and the reductional division, which halves the number of chromosomes in daughter cells. Of particular note is the change from a centromere clustered layout (Rabl configuration) to a telomere clustered conformation (bouquet stage). The contribution of the bouquet structure to homologous chromosome pairing is uncertain. We have developed a new in silico model to represent the chromosomes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in space, based on a worm-like chain model constrained by attachment to the nuclear envelope and clustering forces. We have asked how these constraints could influence chromosome layout, with particular regard to the juxtaposition of homologous chromosomes and potential nonallelic, ectopic, interactions. The data support the view that the bouquet may be sufficient to bring short chromosomes together, but the contribution to long chromosomes is less. We also find that persistence length is critical to how much influence the bouquet structure could have, both on pairing of homologues and avoiding contacts with heterologues. This work represents an important development in computer modeling of chromosomes, and suggests new explanations for why elucidating the functional significance of the bouquet by genetics has been so difficult