Genetic diversity of equine herpesvirus 1 isolated from neurological, abortigenic and respiratory disease outbreaks

Equine herpesvirus 1 (EHV-1) causes respiratory disease, abortion, neonatal death and neurological disease in equines and is endemic in most countries. The viral factors that influence EHV-1 disease severity are poorly understood, and this has hampered vaccine development. However, the N752D substitution in the viral DNA polymerase catalytic subunit has been shown statistically to be associated with neurological disease. This has given rise to the term “neuropathic strain,” even though strains lacking the polymorphism have been recovered from cases of neurological disease. To broaden understanding of EHV-1 diversity in the field, 78 EHV-1 strains isolated over a period of 35 years were sequenced. The great majority of isolates originated from the United Kingdom and included in the collection were low passage isolates from respiratory, abortigenic and neurological outbreaks. Phylogenetic analysis of regions spanning 80% of the genome showed that up to 13 viral clades have been circulating in the United Kingdom and that most of these are continuing to circulate. Abortion isolates grouped into nine clades, and neurological isolates grouped into five. Most neurological isolates had the N752D substitution, whereas most abortion isolates did not, although three of the neurological isolates from linked outbreaks had a different polymorphism. Finally, bioinformatic analysis suggested that recombination has occurred between EHV-1 clades, between EHV-1 and equine herpesvirus 4, and between EHV-1 and equine herpesvirus 8

Carbon Capture and Storage

Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important long-lived anthropogenic greenhouse gas, can be reduced by Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS involves the integration of four elements: CO 2 capture, compression of the CO2 from a gas to a liquid or a denser gas, transportation of pressurized CO 2 from the point of capture to the storage location, and isolation from the atmosphere by storage in deep underground rock formations. Considering full life-cycle emissions, CCS technology can reduce 65–85% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion from stationary sources, although greater reductions may be possible if low emission technologies are applied to activities beyond the plant boundary, such as fuel transportation. CCS is applicable to many stationary CO2 sources, including the power generation, refining, building materials, and the industrial sector. The recent emphasis on the use of CCS primarily to reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity production is too narrow a vision for CCS. Interest in CCS is growing rapidly around the world. Over the past decade there has been a remarkable increase in interest and investment in CCS. Whereas a decade ago, there was only one operating CCS project and little industry or government investment in R&D, and no financial incentives to promote CCS. In 2010, numerous projects of various sizes are active, including at least five large-scale full CCS projects. In 2015, it is expected that 15 large-scale, full-chain CCS projects will be running. Governments and industry have committed over USD 26 billion for R&D, scale-up and deployment. The technology for CCS is available today, but significant improvements are needed to support widespread deployment. Technology advances are needed primarily to reduce the cost of capture and increase confidence in storage security. Demonstration projects are needed to address issues of process integration between CO2 capture and product generation, for instance in power, cement and steel production, obtain cost and performance data, and for industry where capture is more mature to gain needed operational experience. Large-scale storage projects in saline aquifers are needed to address issues of site characterization and site selection, capacity assessment, risk management and monitoring. Successful experiences from five ongoing projects demonstrate that, at least on this limited scale, CCS can be safe and effective for reducing emissions. Five commercial-scale CCS projects are operational today with over 35 million tonnes of CO2 captured and stored since 1996. Observations from commercial storage projects, commercial enhanced oil recovery projects, engineered and natural analogues as well as theoretical considerations, models, and laboratory experiments suggest that appropriately selected and managed geological storage reservoirs are very likely to retain nearly all the injected CO2 for very long times, more than long enough to provide benefits for the intended purpose of CCS. Significant scale-up compared to existing CCS activities will be needed to achieve large reductions in CO2 emissions. A 5- to 10-fold scale-up in the size of individual projects is needed to capture and store emissions from a typical coal-fired power plant (500 to 1000 MW). A thousand fold scale-up in size of today’s CCS enterprise would be needed to reduce emissions by billions of tonnes per year (Gt/yr). The technical potential of CCS on a global level is promising, but on a regional level is differentiated. The primary technical limitation for CCS is storage capacity. Much more work needs to be done to realistically assess storage capacity on a worldwide, regional basis and sub-regional basis. Worldwide storage capacity estimation is improving but more experience is needed. Estimates for oil and gas reservoirs are about 1000 GtCO2, saline aquifers are estimated to have a capacity ranging from about 4000 to 23,000 GtCO2. However, there is still considerable debate about how much storage capacity actually exists, particularly in saline aquifers. Research, geological assessments and, most importantly, commercial-scale demonstration projects will be needed to improve confidence in capacity estimates. Costs and energy requirements for capture are high. Estimated costs for CCS vary widely, depending on the application (e.g. gas clean-up vs. electricity generation), the type of fuel, capture technology, and assumptions about the baseline technology. For example, with today’s technology, CCS would increase cost of generating electricity by 50–100%. In this case, capital costs and parasitic energy requirements of 15–30% are the major cost drivers. Research is underway to lower costs and energy requirements. Early demonstration projects are likely to cost more. The combination of high cost and low or absent incentives for large-scale deployment are a major factor limiting the widespread use of CCS. Due to high costs, CCS will not take place without strong incentives to limit CO2 emissions. Certainty about the policy and regulatory regimes will be crucial for obtaining access to capital to build these multi-billion dollar projects. Environmental risks of CCS appear manageable, but regulations are needed. Regulation needs to ensure due diligence over the lifecycle of the project, but should, most importantly, also govern site selection, operating guidelines, monitoring and closure of a storage facility. Experience so far has shown that local resistance to CO2 storage projects may appear and can lead to cancellation of planned CCS projects. Inhabitants of the areas around geological storage sites often have concerns about the safety and effectiveness of CCS. More CCS projects are needed to establish a convincing safety record. Early engagement of communities in project design and site selection as well as credible communication can help ease resistance. Environmental organisations sometimes see CCS as a distraction from a sustainable energy future. Social, economic, policy and political factors may limit deployment of CCS if not adequately addressed. Critical issues include ownership of underground pore space (primarily an issue in the US); long-term liability and stewardship; GHG accounting approaches and ve rification; and regulatory oversight regimes. Governments and the private sector are making significant progress on all of these issues. Government support to lower barriers for early deployments is needed to encourage private sector adoption. Developing countries will need support for technology access, lowering the cost of CCS, developing workforce capacity and training regulators for permitting, monitoring and oversight. CCS combined with biomass can lead to negative emissions . Such technologies are likely to be needed to achieve atmospheric stabilization of CO2 and may provide an additional incentive for CCS adoption

Numerical convergence of the block-maxima approach to the Generalized Extreme Value distribution

In this paper we perform an analytical and numerical study of Extreme Value distributions in discrete dynamical systems. In this setting, recent works have shown how to get a statistics of extremes in agreement with the classical Extreme Value Theory. We pursue these investigations by giving analytical expressions of Extreme Value distribution parameters for maps that have an absolutely continuous invariant measure. We compare these analytical results with numerical experiments in which we study the convergence to limiting distributions using the so called block-maxima approach, pointing out in which cases we obtain robust estimation of parameters. In regular maps for which mixing properties do not hold, we show that the fitting procedure to the classical Extreme Value Distribution fails, as expected. However, we obtain an empirical distribution that can be explained starting from a different observable function for which Nicolis et al. [2006] have found analytical results.Comment: 34 pages, 7 figures; Journal of Statistical Physics 201

Annual mass budget of Antarctic ice shelves from 1997 to 2021

Antarctic ice shelves moderate the contribution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to global sea level rise; however, ice shelf health remains poorly constrained. Here, we present the annual mass budget of all Antarctic ice shelves from 1997 to 2021. Out of 162 ice shelves, 71 lost mass, 29 gained mass, and 62 did not change mass significantly. Of the shelves that lost mass, 68 had statistically significant negative mass trends, 48 lost more than 30% of their initial mass, and basal melting was the dominant contributor to that mass loss at a majority (68%). At many ice shelves, mass losses due to basal melting or iceberg calving were significantly positively correlated with grounding line discharge anomalies; however, the strength and form of this relationship varied substantially between ice shelves. Our results illustrate the utility of partitioning high-resolution ice shelf mass balance observations into its components to quantify the contributors to ice shelf mass change and the response of grounded ice

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02

Measurement of the polarisation of W bosons produced with large transverse momentum in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV with the ATLAS experiment

This paper describes an analysis of the angular distribution of W->enu and W->munu decays, using data from pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of about 35 pb^-1. Using the decay lepton transverse momentum and the missing transverse energy, the W decay angular distribution projected onto the transverse plane is obtained and analysed in terms of helicity fractions f0, fL and fR over two ranges of W transverse momentum (ptw): 35 < ptw < 50 GeV and ptw > 50 GeV. Good agreement is found with theoretical predictions. For ptw > 50 GeV, the values of f0 and fL-fR, averaged over charge and lepton flavour, are measured to be : f0 = 0.127 +/- 0.030 +/- 0.108 and fL-fR = 0.252 +/- 0.017 +/- 0.030, where the first uncertainties are statistical, and the second include all systematic effects.Comment: 19 pages plus author list (34 pages total), 9 figures, 11 tables, revised author list, matches European Journal of Physics C versio

Observation of a new chi_b state in radiative transitions to Upsilon(1S) and Upsilon(2S) at ATLAS

The chi_b(nP) quarkonium states are produced in proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV and recorded by the ATLAS detector. Using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.4 fb^-1, these states are reconstructed through their radiative decays to Upsilon(1S,2S) with Upsilon->mu+mu-. In addition to the mass peaks corresponding to the decay modes chi_b(1P,2P)->Upsilon(1S)gamma, a new structure centered at a mass of 10.530+/-0.005 (stat.)+/-0.009 (syst.) GeV is also observed, in both the Upsilon(1S)gamma and Upsilon(2S)gamma decay modes. This is interpreted as the chi_b(3P) system.Comment: 5 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 1 table, corrected author list, matches final version in Physical Review Letter

Search for displaced vertices arising from decays of new heavy particles in 7 TeV pp collisions at ATLAS

We present the results of a search for new, heavy particles that decay at a significant distance from their production point into a final state containing charged hadrons in association with a high-momentum muon. The search is conducted in a pp-collision data sample with a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and an integrated luminosity of 33 pb^-1 collected in 2010 by the ATLAS detector operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Production of such particles is expected in various scenarios of physics beyond the standard model. We observe no signal and place limits on the production cross-section of supersymmetric particles in an R-parity-violating scenario as a function of the neutralino lifetime. Limits are presented for different squark and neutralino masses, enabling extension of the limits to a variety of other models.Comment: 8 pages plus author list (20 pages total), 8 figures, 1 table, final version to appear in Physics Letters

Measurement of the inclusive isolated prompt photon cross-section in pp collisions at sqrt(s)= 7 TeV using 35 pb-1 of ATLAS data

A measurement of the differential cross-section for the inclusive production of isolated prompt photons in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 7 TeV is presented. The measurement covers the pseudorapidity ranges |eta|<1.37 and 1.52<=|eta|<2.37 in the transverse energy range 45<=E_T<400GeV. The results are based on an integrated luminosity of 35 pb-1, collected with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. The yields of the signal photons are measured using a data-driven technique, based on the observed distribution of the hadronic energy in a narrow cone around the photon candidate and the photon selection criteria. The results are compared with next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations and found to be in good agreement over four orders of magnitude in cross-section.Comment: 7 pages plus author list (18 pages total), 2 figures, 4 tables, final version published in Physics Letters