Assessing the dynamics of organic aerosols over the North Atlantic Ocean

© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 45476, doi:10.1038/srep45476.The influence of aerosols on climate is highly dependent on the particle size distribution, concentration, and composition. In particular, the latter influences their ability to act as cloud condensation nuclei, whereby they impact cloud coverage and precipitation. Here, we simultaneously measured the concentration of aerosols from sea spray over the North Atlantic on board the exhaust-free solar-powered vessel “PlanetSolar”, and the sea surface physico-chemical parameters. We identified organic-bearing particles based on individual particle fluorescence spectra. Organic-bearing aerosols display specific spatio-temporal distributions as compared to total aerosols. We propose an empirical parameterization of the organic-bearing particle concentration, with a dependence on water salinity and sea-surface temperature only. We also show that a very rich mixture of organic aerosols is emitted from the sea surface. Such data will certainly contribute to providing further insight into the influence of aerosols on cloud formation, and be used as input for the improved modeling of aerosols and their role in global climate processes.We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the H. Dudley Wright and the Henri Moser Foundations, the Rector’s Office and the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva, as well as a generous anonymous donator

Children’s Perspective on Learning: the Experience of the Bulgarian Students

This paper presents the results of an international project “Joy to Learn” with participants from Bulgaria, Germany, Japan, Spain, Poland, Romania and USA. The research focuses on joyful and happy situations for students connected to learning in school. It is important to obtain information on the thoughts, feelings, needs, desires, and the fears of the children. This would enable to promote the improvement of the learning process in terms of the student. The survey covered 300 students (from 1st to 8th grade) from Bulgaria. The results show that most of the students prefer to be active in the process of learning, however a presence of negative attitude towards learning in general was found