TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits—almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Measurement of the charge asymmetry in highly boosted top-quark pair production in √s=8 TeV pp collision data collected by the ATLAS experiment

In the pp→tt process the angular distributions of top and anti-top quarks are expected to present a subtle difference, which could be enhanced by processes not included in the Standard Model. This Letter presents a measurement of the charge asymmetry in events where the top-quark pair is produced with a large invariant mass. The analysis is performed on 20.3 fb-1 of pp collision data at √s=8TeV collected by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, using reconstruction techniques specifically designed for the decay topology of highly boosted top quarks. The charge asymmetry in a fiducial region with large invariant mass of the top-quark pair (mtt>0.75 TeV) and an absolute rapidity difference of the top and anti-top quark candidates within -2<|yt|-|yt|<2 is measured to be 4.2±3.2%, in agreement with the Standard Model prediction at next-to-leading order. A differential measurement in three tt- mass bins is also presented

Dietary intake of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and changes in body weight in European adults

Purpose: Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) can be formed in foods by the reaction of reducing sugars with proteins, and have been shown to induce insulin resistance and obesity in experimental studies. We examined the association between dietary AGEs intake and changes in body weight in adults over an average of 5 years of follow-up. Methods: A total of 255,170 participants aged 25–70 years were recruited in ten European countries (1992–2000) in the PANACEA study (Physical Activity, Nutrition, Alcohol, Cessation of smoking, Eating out of home in relation to Anthropometry), a sub-cohort of the EPIC (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition). Body weight was measured at recruitment and self-reported between 2 and 11 years later depending on the study center. A reference database for AGEs was used containing UPLC–MS/MS-measured Nε-(carboxymethyl)-lysine (CML), Nε-(1-carboxyethyl)-lysine (CEL), and Nδ-(5-hydro-5-methyl-4-imidazolon-2-yl)-ornithine (MG-H1) in 200 common European foods. This reference database was matched to foods and decomposed recipes obtained from country-specific validated dietary questionnaires in EPIC and intake levels of CEL, CML, and MG-H1 were estimated. Associations between dietary AGEs intake and body weight change were estimated separately for each of the three AGEs using multilevel mixed linear regression models with center as random effect and dietary AGEs intake and relevant confounders as fixed effects. Results: A one-SD increment in CEL intake was associated with 0.111 kg (95% CI 0.087–0.135) additional weight gain over 5 years. The corresponding additional weight gain for CML and MG-H1 was 0.065 kg (0.041–0.089) and 0.034 kg (0.012, 0.057), respectively. The top six food groups contributing to AGEs intake, with varying proportions across the AGEs, were cereals/cereal products, meat/processed meat, cakes/biscuits, dairy, sugar and confectionary, and fish/shellfish. Conclusion: In this study of European adults, higher intakes of AGEs were associated with marginally greater weight gain over an average of 5 years of follow-up. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Test beam evaluation of silicon strip modules for ATLAS phase-II strip tracker upgrade

The planned High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider is being designed to maximise the physics potential of the LHC with 10 years of operation at instantaneous luminosities of 7.5×10 34 cm ¿2 s ¿1 . A consequence of this increased luminosity is the expected radiation damage requiring the tracking detectors to withstand hadron fluence to over 1×10 15 1 MeV neutron equivalent per cm 2 in the ATLAS Strips system. Fast readout electronics, deploying 130 nm CMOS front-end electronics are glued on top of a silicon sensor to make a module. The radiation hard n-in-p micro-strip sensors used have been developed by the ATLAS ITk Strip Sensor collaboration and produced by Hamamatsu Photonics. A series of tests were performed at the DESY-II test beam facility to investigate the detailed performance of a strip module with both 2.5 cm and 5 cm length strips before irradiation. The DURANTA telescope was used to obtain a pointing resolution of 2 ¿m, with an additional pixel layer installed to improve timing resolution to ~25 ns. Results show that prior to irradiation a wide range of thresholds (0.5¿2.0 fC) meet the requirements of a noise occupancy less than 1×10 ¿3 and a hit efficiency greater than 99%. © 2018The research was supported and financed in part by Canada Foundation for Innovation, the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada under the Research and Technology Instrumentation (RTI) grant SAPEQ-2016-00015; the National Key Program for S&T Research and Development (Grant No. 2016YFA0400101) of China and CAS-Helmholtz Joint Research Group; theMinistry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Repub87lic coming from the projectLM2015058 - Research infrastructure for experiments at CERN; the DST/NRF in South 88 Africa; the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Particle Physics National Program, ref. 89 FPA2015-65652-C4-4-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), and co-financed with FEDER funds; the UK’s Science and Tech90nology Facilities Council; USA Department of Energy, Grant DE-SC0010107; and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement no. 654168. The measurements leading to these results have been performed at the Test Beam Facility at DESY Hamburg (Germany), a member of the Helmholtz Association (HGF)

Physics with e+ e- linear colliders

We describe the physics potential of $e^+e^-$ linear colliders in this report. These machines are planned to operate in the first phase at a center-of --mass energy of 500 GeV, before being scaled up to about 1 TeV. In the second phase of the operation, a final energy of about 2 TeV is expected. The machines will allow us to perform precision tests of the heavy particles in the Standard Model, the top quark and the electroweak bosons. They are ideal facilities for exploring the properties of Higgs particles, in particular in the intermediate mass range. New vector bosons and novel matter particles in extended gauge theories can be searched for and studied thoroughly. The machines provide unique opportunities for the discovery of particles in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, the spectrum of Higgs particles, the supersymmetric partners of the electroweak gauge and Higgs bosons, and of the matter particles. High precision analyses of their properties and interactions will allow for extrapolations to energy scales close to the Planck scale where gravity becomes significant. In alternative scenarios, like compositeness models, novel matter particles and interactions can be discovered and investigated in the energy range above the existing colliders up to the TeV scale. Whatever scenario is realized in Nature, the discovery potential of $e^+e^-$ linear colliders and the high-precision with which the properties of particles and their interactions can be analysed, define an exciting physics programme complementary to hadron machines.Comment: 103 pages, Late