Genome wide association mapping of grain arsenic, copper, molybdenum and zinc in rice (Oryza sativa L.) grown at four international field sites

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

LCA of greywater management within a water circular economy restorative thinking framework

Greywater reuse is an attractive option for the sustainable management of water under water scarcity circumstances, within a water circular economy restorative thinking framework. Its successful deployment relies on the availability of low cost and environmentally friendly technologies. The life cycle assessment (LCA) approach provides the appropriate methodological tool for the evaluation of alternative treatments based on environmental decision criteria and, therefore, it is highly useful during the process conceptual design. This methodology should be employed in the early design phase to select those technologies with lower environmental impact. This work reports the comparative LCA of three scenarios for greywater reuse: photocatalysis, photovoltaic solar-driven photocatalysis and membrane biological reactor, in order to help the selection of the most environmentally friendly technology. The study has been focused on the removal of the surfactant sodium dodecylbenzenesulfonate, which is used in the formulation of detergents and personal care products and, thus, widely present in greywater. LCA was applied using the Environmental Sustainability Assessment methodology to obtain two main environmental indicators in order to simplify the decision making process: natural resources and environmental burdens. Energy consumption is the main contributor to both indicators owing to the high energy consumption of the light source for the photocatalytic greywater treatment. In order to reduce its environmental burdens, the most desirable scenario would be the use of solar light for the photocatalytic transformation. However, while the technological challenge of direct use of solar light is approached, the environmental suitability of the photovoltaic solar energy driven photocatalysis technology to greywater reuse has been demonstrated, as it involves the smallest environmental impact among the three studied alternatives.Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and from FEDER funds for projects CTM2013-43539-R, CTM2015-69845-R and CTQ2015-66078-R(MINECO/FEDER, UE) is gratefully acknowledged. Sara Dominguez and Jara Laso would also like to express their gratitude for the FPI postgraduate research grants (BES-2013-064055 and BES-2014-069368)

Search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum in pp collisions at √ s = 8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

Results of a search for new phenomena in final states with an energetic jet and large missing transverse momentum are reported. The search uses 20.3 fb−1 of √ s = 8 TeV data collected in 2012 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. Events are required to have at least one jet with pT > 120 GeV and no leptons. Nine signal regions are considered with increasing missing transverse momentum requirements between Emiss T > 150 GeV and Emiss T > 700 GeV. Good agreement is observed between the number of events in data and Standard Model expectations. The results are translated into exclusion limits on models with either large extra spatial dimensions, pair production of weakly interacting dark matter candidates, or production of very light gravitinos in a gauge-mediated supersymmetric model. In addition, limits on the production of an invisibly decaying Higgs-like boson leading to similar topologies in the final state are presente

The Frequency Following Response (FFR) May Reflect Pitch-Bearing Information But is Not a Direct Representation of Pitch

The frequency following response (FFR), a scalp-recorded measure of phase-locked brainstem activity, is often assumed to reflect the pitch of sounds as perceived by humans. In two experiments, we investigated the characteristics of the FFR evoked by complex tones. FFR waveforms to alternating-polarity stimuli were averaged for each polarity and added, to enhance envelope, or subtracted, to enhance temporal fine structure information. In experiment 1, frequency-shifted complex tones, with all harmonics shifted by the same amount in Hertz, were presented diotically. Only the autocorrelation functions (ACFs) of the subtraction-FFR waveforms showed a peak at a delay shifted in the direction of the expected pitch shifts. This expected pitch shift was also present in the ACFs of the output of an auditory nerve model. In experiment 2, the components of a harmonic complex with harmonic numbers 2, 3, and 4 were presented either to the same ear (“mono”) or the third harmonic was presented contralaterally to the ear receiving the even harmonics (“dichotic”). In the latter case, a pitch corresponding to the missing fundamental was still perceived. Monaural control conditions presenting only the even harmonics (“2 + 4”) or only the third harmonic (“3”) were also tested. Both the subtraction and the addition waveforms showed that (1) the FFR magnitude spectra for “dichotic” were similar to the sum of the spectra for the two monaural control conditions and lacked peaks at the fundamental frequency and other distortion products visible for “mono” and (2) ACFs for “dichotic” were similar to those for “2 + 4” and dissimilar to those for “mono.” The results indicate that the neural responses reflected in the FFR preserve monaural temporal information that may be important for pitch, but provide no evidence for any additional processing over and above that already present in the auditory periphery, and do not directly represent the pitch of dichotic stimuli

Search for long-lived neutral particles produced in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV decaying into displaced hadronic jets in the ATLAS inner detector and muon spectrometer

A search is presented for pair production of long-lived neutral particles using 33     fb − 1 of √ s = 13     TeV proton–proton collision data, collected during 2016 by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This search focuses on a topology in which one long-lived particle decays in the ATLAS inner detector and the other decays in the muon spectrometer. Special techniques are employed to reconstruct the displaced tracks and vertices in the inner detector and in the muon spectrometer. One event is observed that passes the full event selection, which is consistent with the estimated background. Limits are placed on scalar boson propagators with masses from 125 GeV to 1000 GeV decaying into pairs of long-lived hidden-sector scalars with masses from 8 GeV to 400 GeV. The limits placed on several low-mass scalars extend previous exclusion limits in the range of proper lifetimes c τ from 5 cm to 1 m