Widespread gas hydrate instability on the upper U.S. Beaufort margin

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2014. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 119 (2014): 8594–8609, doi:10.1002/2014JB011290.The most climate-sensitive methane hydrate deposits occur on upper continental slopes at depths close to the minimum pressure and maximum temperature for gas hydrate stability. At these water depths, small perturbations in intermediate ocean water temperatures can lead to gas hydrate dissociation. The Arctic Ocean has experienced more dramatic warming than lower latitudes, but observational data have not been used to study the interplay between upper slope gas hydrates and warming ocean waters. Here we use (a) legacy seismic data that constrain upper slope gas hydrate distributions on the U.S. Beaufort Sea margin, (b) Alaskan North Slope borehole data and offshore thermal gradients determined from gas hydrate stability zone thickness to infer regional heat flow, and (c) 1088 direct measurements to characterize multidecadal intermediate ocean warming in the U.S. Beaufort Sea. Combining these data with a three-dimensional thermal model shows that the observed gas hydrate stability zone is too deep by 100 to 250 m. The disparity can be partially attributed to several processes, but the most important is the reequilibration (thinning) of gas hydrates in response to significant (~0.5°C at 2σ certainty) warming of intermediate ocean temperatures over 39 years in a depth range that brackets the upper slope extent of the gas hydrate stability zone. Even in the absence of additional ocean warming, 0.44 to 2.2 Gt of methane could be released from reequilibrating gas hydrates into the sediments underlying an area of ~5–7.5 × 103 km2 on the U.S. Beaufort Sea upper slope during the next century.This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), grant DE-FE0010180 to SMU and a USGS-DOE interagency agreement DE-FE0005806.2015-06-0

Barriers to the Effective Implementation of Immunization Information Systems in a Private Provider Setting

One of the goals of Healthy People 2010 is to increase the proportion of children less than 6 years of age with two or more vaccinations recorded in a fully operational population-based immunization information system to 95%. In 2008, we piloted the Nevada web-based immunization information system (WEBIZ) in a large private pediatric clinic in north-west Las Vegas. Our objectives were: (1) to determine compliance with the recommendation that all vaccine providers report immunization activities to the WEBIZ without a state mandate and (2) to determine perceived barriers to compliance and suggestions on how to overcome expressed barriers. We documented the number of newly created and updated immunization records as outcome measures of compliance following initial training, ongoing technical support and feedback to the clinic staff on the use of WEBIZ. We found low compliance with the recommendation to document immunization activities and clinic staffs were more likely to document immunization activities when there is an established record in WEBIZ compared to when a new record had to be created by the staff. Our survey of participating clinic staff, identified time to create new records as the most common reported barrier to compliance with recommendation. We concluded that without a state mandate, compliance with the recommendation would remain low and that documentation of hepatitis B birth dose in WEBIZ, thus creating an initial record, could potentially reduce barriers to compliance with recommendation to document immunization activity in WEBIZ

Radar Measurements of NHTSA’s Surrogate Vehicle ‘SS-V’

NHTSA seeks to objectively quantify the performance of forward-looking advanced technologies such as Crash Imminent Braking (CIB) and Dynamic Brake Support (DBS) on the test track. Since these evaluations are expected to result in collisions between the subject vehicle (SV) and a principal other vehicle (POV) positioned directly in front of it, safety necessitates that the POV be a surrogate. However, to insure the tests will provide an accurate assessment of the SV’s CIB and/or DBS capabilities, the surrogate must present as realistic. One way “realism” must be quantified involves a surrogate’s radar return characteristics. The tests described in this report were performed to assess the radar return characteristics of NHTSA’s Strikeable Surrogate Vehicle (SS_V), a test target visually similar to a small hatchback. This work was performed by Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI) and the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) on August 5, 2012 and October 11, 2012 under US DOT/NHTSA contracts DTNH22-12-P-0158 and DTNH22-12-P-01638, respectively. The tests performed indicate the SS_V is a viable surrogate for automotive safety tests where the SV approaches a POV from the tail-aspect

Physical and energy demand of soccer: A brief review

Soccer is a complex and exhaustive team-sport requiring a high level of tactical, technical, and physical ability to succeed. During a competitive match, a random combination of explosive and powerful activities, together with technical and tactical gestures, is performed in an intermittent manner over a 90-minute game. This review presents a detailed analysis and up-to-date synthesis of the literature describing activities and energy system contribution during soccer to provide to strength and conditioning coaches a clear understanding of soccer players’ physical needs during competition

A mathematical and computational framework for quantitative comparison and integration of large-scale gene expression data

Analysis of large-scale gene expression studies usually begins with gene clustering. A ubiquitous problem is that different algorithms applied to the same data inevitably give different results, and the differences are often substantial, involving a quarter or more of the genes analyzed. This raises a series of important but nettlesome questions: How are different clustering results related to each other and to the underlying data structure? Is one clustering objectively superior to another? Which differences, if any, are likely candidates to be biologically important? A systematic and quantitative way to address these questions is needed, together with an effective way to integrate and leverage expression results with other kinds of large-scale data and annotations. We developed a mathematical and computational framework to help quantify, compare, visualize and interactively mine clusterings. We show that by coupling confusion matrices with appropriate metrics (linear assignment and normalized mutual information scores), one can quantify and map differences between clusterings. A version of receiver operator characteristic analysis proved effective for quantifying and visualizing cluster quality and overlap. These methods, plus a flexible library of clustering algorithms, can be called from a new expandable set of software tools called CompClust 1.0 (). CompClust also makes it possible to relate expression clustering patterns to DNA sequence motif occurrences, protein–DNA interaction measurements and various kinds of functional annotations. Test analyses used yeast cell cycle data and revealed data structure not obvious under all algorithms. These results were then integrated with transcription motif and global protein–DNA interaction data to identify G(1) regulatory modules

Recovery of ectomycorrhizal fungus communities fifteen years after fuels reduction treatments in ponderosa pine forests of the Blue Mountains, Oregon

Managers use restorative fire and thinning for ecological benefits and to convert fuel-heavy forests to fuel-lean landscapes that lessen the threat of stand-replacing wildfire. In this study, we evaluated the long-term impact of thinning and prescribed fire on soil biochemistry and the mycorrhizal fungi associated with ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa). Study sites were located in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon where prescribed fire treatments implemented in 1998 and thinning treatments in 2000 included prescribed fire, mechanical thinning of forested areas, a combination of thinning followed by fire, and an untreated control. Soil sampling for this study occurred in 2014 and included four replications of each treatment for a total of 16 experimental units. Differences among treatments in Bray-P, total C and N, and pH were likely driven by the thinning treatments and the resultant deposition of residual slash following harvesting or the consumption of slash by prescribed fire. Similar litter depths across treatments suggest that litter depth stabilizes over time in these forests. After more than a decade of recovery, mycorrhizal fungi in dry inland forests dominated by ponderosa pine that were subjected to fire returned to levels similar to the untreated controls. The results of this study demonstrate the resiliency of these forests to disturbances associated with restoration treatments, providing managers increased flexibility if maintaining abundant and persistent fungal communities for healthy soils is an objective

Gene expression network analyses in response to air pollution exposures in the trucking industry

Background: Exposure to air pollution, including traffic-related pollutants, has been associated with a variety of adverse health outcomes, including increased cardiopulmonary morbidity and mortality, and increased lung cancer risk. Methods: To better understand the cellular responses induced by air pollution exposures, we performed genome-wide gene expression microarray analysis using whole blood RNA sampled at three time-points across the work weeks of 63 non-smoking employees at 10 trucking terminals in the northeastern US. We defined genes and gene networks that were differentially activated in response to PM2.5 (particulate matter ≤ 2.5 microns in diameter) and elemental carbon (EC) and organic carbon (OC). Results: Multiple transcripts were strongly associated (padj < 0.001) with pollutant levels (48, 260, and 49 transcripts for EC, OC, and PM2.5, respectively), including 63 that were statistically significantly correlated with at least two out of the three exposures. These genes included many that have been implicated in ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), lung cancer, and other pollution-related illnesses. Through the combination of Gene Set Enrichment Analysis and network analysis (using GeneMANIA), we identified a core set of 25 interrelated genes that were common to all three exposure measures and were differentially expressed in two previous studies assessing gene expression attributable to air pollution. Many of these are members of fundamental cancer-related pathways, including those related to DNA and metal binding, and regulation of apoptosis and also but include genes implicated in chronic heart and lung diseases. Conclusions: These data provide a molecular link between the associations of air pollution exposures with health effects. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0187-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Global ecological predictors of the soil priming effect.

Identifying the global drivers of soil priming is essential to understanding C cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. We conducted a survey of soils across 86 globally-distributed locations, spanning a wide range of climates, biotic communities, and soil conditions, and evaluated the apparent soil priming effect using 13C-glucose labeling. Here we show that the magnitude of the positive apparent priming effect (increase in CO2 release through accelerated microbial biomass turnover) was negatively associated with SOC content and microbial respiration rates. Our statistical modeling suggests that apparent priming effects tend to be negative in more mesic sites associated with higher SOC contents. In contrast, a single-input of labile C causes positive apparent priming effects in more arid locations with low SOC contents. Our results provide solid evidence that SOC content plays a critical role in regulating apparent priming effects, with important implications for the improvement of C cycling models under global change scenarios