Exergy-economic accounting for sea-coastal systems: a novel approach

Sustainable development requires an integrated evaluation of both economic and environmental dimensions. The ensuing debate on the topic, however, was focused on its environmental aspects, as if they were fully independent from the social and economic conditions of sustainability. In this paper, we intend to present a primal approach to develop an exergy-economic accounting allowing to overcome the limits of each analytic discipline through its integration in a sound economic scheme such as environmental accounting; this scheme will be adapted to sea-coastal systems. In order to complete the approach mentioned a specific indicator will be proposed aimed to evaluate the relationship between ecosystem quality and economic added value stemming from the anthropic use of the system

Efficiency and sustainability indicators for passenger and commodities transportation systems. The case of Siena, Italy

Three different energy analysis approaches (energy and embodied energy, exergy and emergy analysis) have been applied to the road and railway systems of a medium size district of central Italy, in order to shed light on the dynamics of the local transport sector and develop a tool for analysis capable of taking the system complexity into account. Road and railway systems, respectively, support passenger flows of 3.57E9 p-km (passengers per km) per year and 0.17E9 p-km per year and commodity flows of 2.5E9 t-km (tonnes per km) per year and 0.35E9 t-km per year, generating a total energy consumption equal to 1.84E5 tonnes of oil equivalent per year. The passenger mass transport on road (buses) shows globally the best performance among the patterns investigated, while railway ranks higher for commodity transport, according to most of the calculated intensity indicators. Several improvement options are also evaluated on the basis of the first- and second-order exergy efficiency. Some of the suggested improvements, even showing high theoretical possibility, do not match the transport needs of the investigated area, as indicated by their huge material and emergy intensities (measures of ecological footprints) even if it cannot be excluded that they may appear more appropriate to nationwide transportation patterns. In conclusion, although data and indicators refer to a well identified region under specific geographic and socio-economic conditions, results suggest that a complex system such as transport is very unlikely to be described by a linear relation between input resource and output service delivered. Even when thermodynamically based approaches are properly used to describe the system behavior, findings very often do not converge, and require that different indicators are compared to yield a comprehensive picture of the system dynamics. An integrated approach is therefore suggested to support decision making in the presence of diverging results

Metabolomic Signature in Sera of Multiple Sclerosis Patients during Pregnancy

Multiple sclerosis (MuS) is an autoimmune disease of the central nervous system characterized by neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, and degradation of the myelin sheath. Epidemiological studies have shown that the female gender is more susceptible than the male gender to MuS development, with a female-to-male ratio of 2:1. Despite this high onset, women have a better prognosis than men, and the frequency of the relapsing phase decreases during pregnancy, while it increases soon after birth. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy and whether they correlate with metabolic signatures. To gain a deeper inside into the biochemical mechanism of such a multifactorial disease, we adopted targeted metabolomics approaches for the determination of many serum metabolites in 12 pregnant women affected by MuS by mass spectrometry analysis. Our data show a characteristic hormonal fluctuation for estrogens and progesterone, as expected. They also highlight other interesting hormonal alterations for cortisol, corticosterone, 11-deoxycortisol, 4-androstene-3,17-dione, testosterone, and 17α-hydroxyprogesterone. Furthermore, a negative correlation with progesterone levels was observed for amino acids and for acylcarnitines, while an imbalance of different sphingolipids pathways was found during pregnancy. In conclusion, these data are in agreement with the characteristic clinical signs of MuS patients during pregnancy and, if confirmed, they may add an important tessera in the complex mosaic of maternal neuroprotection

Preliminary design of a mission to triton based on a concurrent engineering approach

The objective of this study is to investigate how a Concurrent Engineering (CE) approach can be integrated in the development of the pre-phase-A design of an interplanetary space mission and to highlight the advantages which can be obtained in terms of development resources, as time and cost. Indeed, the effectiveness of the CE approach and of its real-time interdisciplinary activities is particularly noticeable in the study of systems that exhibit a very high level of complexity, as space systems do. In this work a modern CE tool has been used to carry out a feasibility design of a space exploration probe named TRITO, TRIton Tomography Orbiter. It is conceived as a mission to investigate the Neptune system and its main moon Triton. The collaborative philosophy of CE has demonstrated to be very helpful in meeting the challenging mission requirements and the strict constraints imposed by the harsh environmental conditions encountered during the mission. A preliminary platform budgets sizing and some mission criticalities are studied