Why wastelands matter for rural livelihoods in south India

LSE’s Jennifer Baka argues that India’s wastelands are political constructions, and the political processes to define them are reshaping rural livelihoods in unanticipated ways

Wasteland energy-scapes: a comparative energy flow analysis of India's biofuel and biomass economies

Through a comparative energy flow analysis, this paper examines the energy security impacts of growing biofuels on wastelands in South India. India's National Policy on Biofuels claims that wastelands are well suited for biofuel production because they are empty and unused. However, in rural Tamil Nadu, a Prosopis juliflora fuelwood energy economy already exists on these lands and services a mix of rural and urban consumers at household and industrial levels. This Prosopis economy currently provides 2.5–10.3 times more useful energy than would the government's proposed Jatropha curcas biodiesel economy, depending on Jatropha by-product usage. Contrary to the government's claims, growing biofuels on wastelands can weaken, rather than improve, the country's energy security. Further, replacing Prosopis with Jatropha could engender changes in economic and property relations that could further weaken energy security. These findings are not specific to rural Tamil Nadu as Prosopis is widely used as a fuelwood throughout Asia and Africa. Calls to ‘develop’ degraded lands through biofuel promotion similarly exist in these regions. This study underscores the importance of analyzing wasteland-centered biofuel policies at local levels in order to better understand the changes in human–environment relationships resulting from this policy push

Wasteland energy-scapes: a comparative energy flow analysis of India's biofuel and biomass economies

Through a comparative energy flow analysis, this paper examines the energy security impacts of growing biofuels on wastelands in South India. India's National Policy on Biofuels claims that wastelands are well suited for biofuel production because they are empty and unused. However, in rural Tamil Nadu, a Prosopis juliflora fuelwood energy economy already exists on these lands and services a mix of rural and urban consumers at household and industrial levels. This Prosopis economy currently provides 2.5–10.3 times more useful energy than would the government's proposed Jatropha curcas biodiesel economy, depending on Jatropha by-product usage. Contrary to the government's claims, growing biofuels on wastelands can weaken, rather than improve, the country's energy security. Further, replacing Prosopis with Jatropha could engender changes in economic and property relations that could further weaken energy security. These findings are not specific to rural Tamil Nadu as Prosopis is widely used as a fuelwood throughout Asia and Africa. Calls to ‘develop’ degraded lands through biofuel promotion similarly exist in these regions. This study underscores the importance of analyzing wasteland-centered biofuel policies at local levels in order to better understand the changes in human–environment relationships resulting from this policy push

Dutch Economic Value of Radium-223 in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer (vol 16, pg 133, 2018)

The article Dutch Economic Value of Radium-223 in Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer, written by Michel L. Peters, Claudine de Meijer, Dirk Wyndaele, Walter Noordzij, Annemarie M. Leliveld-Kors, Joan van den Bosch, Pieter H. van den Berg, Agni Baka, Jennifer G. Gaultney was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 2nd September, 2017 without open access

Search for gravitational-lensing signatures in the full third observing run of the LIGO-Virgo network

Gravitational lensing by massive objects along the line of sight to the source causes distortions of gravitational wave-signals; such distortions may reveal information about fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics. In this work, we have extended the search for lensing signatures to all binary black hole events from the third observing run of the LIGO--Virgo network. We search for repeated signals from strong lensing by 1) performing targeted searches for subthreshold signals, 2) calculating the degree of overlap amongst the intrinsic parameters and sky location of pairs of signals, 3) comparing the similarities of the spectrograms amongst pairs of signals, and 4) performing dual-signal Bayesian analysis that takes into account selection effects and astrophysical knowledge. We also search for distortions to the gravitational waveform caused by 1) frequency-independent phase shifts in strongly lensed images, and 2) frequency-dependent modulation of the amplitude and phase due to point masses. None of these searches yields significant evidence for lensing. Finally, we use the non-detection of gravitational-wave lensing to constrain the lensing rate based on the latest merger-rate estimates and the fraction of dark matter composed of compact objects

Ultralight vector dark matter search using data from the KAGRA O3GK run

Among the various candidates for dark matter (DM), ultralight vector DM can be probed by laser interferometric gravitational wave detectors through the measurement of oscillating length changes in the arm cavities. In this context, KAGRA has a unique feature due to differing compositions of its mirrors, enhancing the signal of vector DM in the length change in the auxiliary channels. Here we present the result of a search for U(1)B−L gauge boson DM using the KAGRA data from auxiliary length channels during the first joint observation run together with GEO600. By applying our search pipeline, which takes into account the stochastic nature of ultralight DM, upper bounds on the coupling strength between the U(1)B−L gauge boson and ordinary matter are obtained for a range of DM masses. While our constraints are less stringent than those derived from previous experiments, this study demonstrates the applicability of our method to the lower-mass vector DM search, which is made difficult in this measurement by the short observation time compared to the auto-correlation time scale of DM

Search for eccentric black hole coalescences during the third observing run of LIGO and Virgo

Despite the growing number of confident binary black hole coalescences observed through gravitational waves so far, the astrophysical origin of these binaries remains uncertain. Orbital eccentricity is one of the clearest tracers of binary formation channels. Identifying binary eccentricity, however, remains challenging due to the limited availability of gravitational waveforms that include effects of eccentricity. Here, we present observational results for a waveform-independent search sensitive to eccentric black hole coalescences, covering the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. We identified no new high-significance candidates beyond those that were already identified with searches focusing on quasi-circular binaries. We determine the sensitivity of our search to high-mass (total mass M>70 M⊙) binaries covering eccentricities up to 0.3 at 15 Hz orbital frequency, and use this to compare model predictions to search results. Assuming all detections are indeed quasi-circular, for our fiducial population model, we place an upper limit for the merger rate density of high-mass binaries with eccentricities 0<e≤0.3 at 0.33 Gpc−3 yr−1 at 90\% confidence level