Life Cycle Assessment of Bioplastics and Food Waste Disposal Methods

The environmental impacts of five waste management scenarios for polylactic acid (PLA)-based bioplastics and food waste were quantified using life cycle assessment. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated the potential for a pretreatment process to accelerate the degradation of bioplastics and were modeled in two of the five scenarios assessed. The five scenarios analyzed in this study were: (1a) Anaerobic digestion (1b) Anaerobic digestion with pretreatment; (2a) Compost; (2a) Compost with pretreatment; (3) Landfill. Results suggested that food waste and pretreated bioplastics disposed of with an anaerobic digester offers life cycle and environmental net total benefits (environmental advantages/offsets) in several areas: ecotoxicity (−81.38 CTUe), eutrophication (0 kg N eq), cumulative energy demand (−1.79 MJ), global warming potential (0.19 kg CO2), and human health non-carcinogenic (−2.52 CTuh). Normalized results across all impact categories show that anaerobically digesting food waste and bioplastics offer the most offsets for ecotoxicity, eutrophication, cumulative energy demand and non-carcinogenic. Implications from this study can lead to nutrient and energy recovery from an anaerobic digester that can diversify the types of fertilizers and decrease landfill waste while decreasing dependency on non-renewable technologies. Thus, using anaerobic digestion to manage bioplastics and food waste should be further explored as a viable and sustainable solution for waste management

Great Expectations: New Organizational Models for Overworked Liaisons Based on the UNCG Libraries Liaison Collections Responsibilities Task Force

Liaisons (subject specialists) keep getting busier. Research instruction, embedding in classes, outreach, collection development, weeding, assessing teaching and collections, promoting scholarly communication issues, and creating online learning objects are all potentially part of what a liaison is expected to do nowadays. So we hope every liaison is very interested—and very good—at all those responsibilities. Is that realistic? And does a liaison have time for all those things? At University of North Caroline at Greensboro (UNCG), library administrators decided it is time to examine how liaisons are organized to manage all of these competing responsibilities. The library formed a Liaison Collection Responsibilities Task Force to benchmark how other libraries might be handling the complexities of liaison responsibilities in innovative ways and to recommend several possible new organizational models for the collection development and public services work of liaisons. Members of the task force will review their benchmark findings and invite the audience to provide their own examples. Then we will present our recommendations for new organization models. Some recommendations will reflect incremental changes; others will be radical. We will ask the audience for feedback on the recommendations and suggestions for other models

Response to comment on "Human-specific gain of function in a developmental enhancer"

Duret and Galtier argue that human-specific sequence divergence and gain of function in the HACNS1 enhancer result from deleterious biased gene conversion (BGC) with no contribution from positive selection. We reinforce our previous conclusion by analyzing hypothesized BGC events genomewide and assessing the effect of recombination rates on human-accelerated conserved noncoding sequence ascertainment. We also provide evidence that AT → GC substitution bias can coexist with positive selection

More than skin deep: Functional genomic basis for resistance to Amphibian Chytridiomycosis

The amphibian-killing chytrid fungus Batrachochytriumdendrobatidis (Bd) is one of themost generalist pathogens known, capable of infecting hundreds of species globally and causing widespread population declines and extinctions. However, some host species are seemingly unaffected by Bd, tolerating or clearing infections without clinical signs of disease. Variation in host immune responses is commonly evoked for these resistant or tolerant species, yet to date,we have nodirect comparisonof amphibian species responses to infection at the level of gene expression. In this study,we challenged four CentralAmerican frog species that vary in Bd susceptibility, with a sympatric virulent strain of the pathogen. We compared skin and spleen orthologous gene expression using differential expression tests and coexpression gene network analyses.Wefound that resistant species have reduced skin inflammatory responses andincreased expressionofgenes involved inskin integrity. Incontrast, onlyhighly susceptible species exhibited suppressionof splenic T-cell genes. We conclude that resistance to chytridiomycosis may be related to a species’ ability to escape the immunosuppressive activity of the fungus. Moreover, our results indicate that within-species differences in splenic proteolytic enzyme gene expression may contribute to intraspecific variation in survival. This first comparison of amphibian functional immunogenomic architecture in response to Bd provides insights into key genetic mechanisms underlying variation in disease outcomes among amphibian species

Brief of Intellectual Property Law Scholars As Amici Curiae in Support of Neither Party, WesternGeco LLC v. Ion Geophysical Corp., No. 16-1011, US Supreme Court

This amici curiae brief was filed on behalf of Intellectual Property Law Scholars in WesternGeco LLC v. Ion Geophysical Corp. in the U.S. Supreme Court. The question presented is: Whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit erred in holding that lost profits arising from prohibited combinations occurring outside of the United States are categorically unavailable in cases in which patent infringement is proven under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f). In RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Community, 136 S. Ct. 2090 (2016), the Supreme Court articulated a two-step method for assessing the extraterritorial reach of a US statute: 1. A court should determine whether the presumption against extraterritoriality has been rebutted—that is, whether the statute gives a clear, affirmative indication that it applies extraterritorially. If the presumption is rebutted, the statute may have extraterritorial reach. 2. But even if the presumption has not been rebutted, a court should look at the focus of the statute. If the conduct relevant to the statute\u27s focus occurred in the United States, then the case involves a permissible domestic application even if other conduct occurred abroad; but if the conduct relevant to the focus occurred in a foreign country, then the case involves an impermissible extraterritorial application regardless of any other conduct that occurred in U.S. territory. The brief of amici curiae makes the follow points: 1. The Supreme Court has not squarely answered the question as to whether the presumption against extraterritoriality applies separately to remedial provisions of a statute generally (here whether it applies to § 284). We argue it does. 2. We argue that the territorial reach § 284 necessarily depends the relevant provision of § 271 used to find liability. Here, under § 271(f), the presumption is rebutted (though it would not be generally for a case under § 271(a), with NTP v. Research in Motion may be a counter-example when one looks at the focus at step 2)). 3. We also argue that the Court should offer more guidance as to what happens even if the RJR test is satisfied. RJR Nabisco seems to operate in binary fashion -- either the statute has extraterritorial reach or it doesn\u27t. But Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., and earlier Supreme Court decision also interpreting 35 U.S.C. § 271(f), suggests that the presumption may still have a role in interpreting a statute. We offer two suggestions on how the presumption should operate in this context. First, courts should seriously and formally consider issues of comity and potential conflicts with foreign law in assessing whether to apply U.S. law extraterritorially. Second, that territoriality should remain relevant in assessments of proximate cause

High resolution spectroscopy of methyltrioxorhenium: towards the observation of parity violation in chiral molecules

Originating from the weak interaction, parity violation in chiral molecules has been considered as a possible origin of the biohomochirality. It was predicted in 1974 but has never been observed so far. Parity violation should lead to a very tiny frequency difference in the rovibrational spectra of the enantiomers of a chiral molecule. We have proposed to observe this predicted frequency difference using the two photon Ramsey fringes technique on a supersonic beam. Promising candidates for this experiment are chiral oxorhenium complexes, which present a large effect, can be synthesized in large quantity and enantiopure form, and can be seeded in a molecular beam. As a first step towards our objective, a detailed spectroscopic study of methyltrioxorhenium (MTO) has been undertaken. It is an ideal test molecule as the achiral parent molecule of chiral candidates for the parity violation experiment. For the 187Re MTO isotopologue, a combined analysis of Fourier transform microwave and infrared spectra as well as ultra-high resolution CO2 laser absorption spectra enabled the assignment of 28 rotational lines and 71 rovibrational lines, some of them with a resolved hyperfine structure. A set of spectroscopic parameters in the ground and first excited state, including hyperfine structure constants, was obtained for the antisymmetric Re=O stretching mode of this molecule. This result validates the experimental approach to be followed once a chiral derivative of MTO will be synthesized, and shows the benefit of the combination of several spectroscopic techniques in different spectral regions, with different set-ups and resolutions. First high resolution spectra of jet-cooled MTO, obtained on the set-up being developed for the observation of molecular parity violation, are shown, which constitutes a major step towards the targeted objective.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure

The Milky Way Tomography With SDSS. III. Stellar Kinematics

We study Milky Way kinematics using a sample of 18.8 million main-sequence stars with r 20 degrees). We find that in the region defined by 1 kpc < Z < 5 kpc and 3 kpc < R < 13 kpc, the rotational velocity for disk stars smoothly decreases, and all three components of the velocity dispersion increase, with distance from the Galactic plane. In contrast, the velocity ellipsoid for halo stars is aligned with a spherical coordinate system and appears to be spatially invariant within the probed volume. The velocity distribution of nearby (Z < 1 kpc) K/M stars is complex, and cannot be described by a standard Schwarzschild ellipsoid. For stars in a distance-limited subsample of stars (< 100 pc), we detect a multi-modal velocity distribution consistent with that seen by HIPPARCOS. This strong non-Gaussianity significantly affects the measurements of the velocity-ellipsoid tilt and vertex deviation when using the Schwarzschild approximation. We develop and test a simple descriptive model for the overall kinematic behavior that captures these features over most of the probed volume, and can be used to search for substructure in kinematic and metallicity space. We use this model to predict further improvements in kinematic mapping of the Galaxy expected from Gaia and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.NSF AST-615991, AST-0707901, AST-0551161, AST-02-38683, AST-06-07634, AST-0807444, PHY05-51164NASA NAG5-13057, NAG5-13147, NNXO-8AH83GPhysics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) PHY 08-22648U.S. National Science FoundationMarie Curie Research Training Network ELSA (European Leadership in Space Astrometry) MRTN-CT-2006-033481Fermi Research Alliance, LLC, United States Department of Energy DE-AC02-07CH11359Alfred P. Sloan FoundationParticipating InstitutionsJapanese MonbukagakushoMax Planck SocietyHigher Education Funding Council for EnglandMcDonald Observator

Introducing scholarly communications: A cross-departmental approach for reaching students and faculty [slides]

Slides from a presentation discussing cross-departmental efforts to provide scholarly communications training to graduate students and faculty members at UNC Greensboro. This presentation was delivered on May 27, 2020 at the Azalea Coast Library Association Virtual Conference. Co-presented by Anna Craft, Amy Harris Houk, and Sam Harlow

Detection of SARS-CoV-2-specific mucosal antibodies in saliva following concomitant COVID-19 and influenza vaccination in the ComFluCOV trial

The ComFluCOV trial randomized 679 participants to receive an age-appropriate influenza vaccine, or placebo, alongside their second COVID-19 vaccine. Concomitant administration was shown to be safe, and to preserve systemic immune responses to both vaccines. Here we report on a secondary outcome of the trial investigating SARS-CoV-2-specific mucosal antibody responses. Anti-spike IgG and IgA levels in saliva were measured with in-house ELISAs. Concomitant administration of an influenza vaccine did not affect salivary anti-spike IgG positivity rates to Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 (99.1 cf. 95.6%), or AstraZeneca ChAdOx1 (67.8% cf. 64.9%), at 3-weeks post-vaccination relative to placebo. Furthermore, saliva IgG positively correlated with serum titres highlighting the potential utility of saliva for assessing differences in immunogenicity in future vaccine studies. Mucosal IgA was not detected in response to either COVID-19 vaccine, reinforcing the need for novel vaccines capable of inducing sterilising immunity or otherwise reducing transmission. The trial is registered as ISRCTN 14391248