Environmental monitoring : phase 5 final report (April 2019 - March 2020)

This report presents the results and interpretation for Phase 5 of an integrated environmental monitoring programme that is being undertaken around two proposed shale gas sites in England – Preston New Road, Lancashire and Kirby Misperton, North Yorkshire. The report should be read in conjunction with previous reports freely available through the project website1 . These provide additional background to the project, presentation of earlier results and the rationale for establishment of the different elements of the monitoring programme

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Dust in Supernovae and Supernova Remnants II: Processing and survival

Observations have recently shown that supernovae are efficient dust factories, as predicted for a long time by theoretical models. The rapid evolution of their stellar progenitors combined with their efficiency in precipitating refractory elements from the gas phase into dust grains make supernovae the major potential suppliers of dust in the early Universe, where more conventional sources like Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars did not have time to evolve. However, dust yields inferred from observations of young supernovae or derived from models do not reflect the net amount of supernova-condensed dust able to be expelled from the remnants and reach the interstellar medium. The cavity where the dust is formed and initially resides is crossed by the high velocity reverse shock which is generated by the pressure of the circumstellar material shocked by the expanding supernova blast wave. Depending on grain composition and initial size, processing by the reverse shock may lead to substantial dust erosion and even complete destruction. The goal of this review is to present the state of the art about processing and survival of dust inside supernova remnants, in terms of theoretical modelling and comparison to observations

Root‐lesion nematodes of potato: current status of diagnostics, pathogenicity and management

Root‐lesion nematodes of the genus Pratylenchus are migratory endoparasites with worldwide economic impact on several important crops including potato, where certain species like P. penetrans, P. neglectus and P. scribneri reduce the yield and quality of potato tubers. Morphological identification of Pratylenchus spp. is challenging, and recent advancements in molecular techniques provide robust and rapid diagnostics to differentiate species without need of specialist skills. However, the fact that molecular diagnostics are not available for all Pratylenchus species means that there are limitations in worldwide application. In general, root‐lesion nematodes are difficult to manage once introduced into agricultural land and damage can be related to pathogenicity and population densities. In addition, root‐lesion nematodes interact with fungi such as V. dahliae, resulting in disease complexes that enhance the damage inflicted on the potato crop. Management interventions are often focused on limiting nematode reproduction before planting crops and include the application of nematicides, and cultural practices such as crop rotation, cover crops, biofumigation, and biological control. Understanding the limitations of the available crop protection strategies is important and there are many gaps for further study. This review discusses the status of the diagnosis, distribution, pathogenicity and management of the main species of root‐lesion nematodes, reported to infect potatoes worldwide, and highlights areas for potential future research

The effects of chlorination of seawater on sulphate-reducing bacteria

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D77209 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo