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Citiesâ role in mitigating United States food system greenhouse gas emissions
Current trends of urbanization, population growth, and economic development have made cities a focal point for mitigating global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The substantial contribution of food consumption to climate change necessitates urban action to reduce the carbon intensity of the food system. While food system GHG mitigation strategies often focus on production, we argue that urban influence dominates this sectorâs emissions and that consumers in cities must be the primary drivers of mitigation. We quantify life cycle GHG emissions of the United States food system through data collected from literature and government sources producing an estimated total of 3800 kg CO2e/capita in 2010, with cities directly influencing approximately two-thirds of food sector GHG emissions. We then assess the potential for cities to reduce emissions through selected measures; examples include up-scaling urban agriculture and home delivery of grocery options, which each may achieve emissions reductions on the order of 0.4 and âŒ1% of this total, respectively. Meanwhile, changes in waste management practices and reduction of postdistribution food waste by 50% reduce total food sector emissions by 5 and 11%, respectively. Consideration of the scale of benefits achievable through policy goals can enable cities to formulate strategies that will assist in achieving deep long-term GHG emissions targets
National innovation and knowledge performance: The role of higher education teaching and training
This paper acknowledges the role of the higher education system (HES) in the production of knowledge and human capital. However, most of the literature attributes this production to the second (research activities) and third (exploitation of teaching and research activities) mission. This paper proposes to investigate the under explored role of the first mission (teaching) of HES in the production of national innovation
Low Energy Pion-Hyperon Interaction
We study the low energy pion-hyperon interaction considering effective
non-linear chiral invariant Lagrangians including pions, rho mesons, hyperons
and corresponding resonances. Then we calculate the S- and P-wave phase-shifts,
total cross sections, angular distributions and polarizations for the momentum
in the center-of-mass frame up to k=400 MeV. With these results we discuss the
CP violation in the csi-> pi-lambda and omega-> pi-csi weak decays.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure
Climate change mitigation beyond agriculture: A review of food system opportunities and implications
A large body of research has explored opportunities to mitigate climate change in agricultural systems; however, less research has explored opportunities across the food system. Here we expand the existing research with a review of potential mitigation opportunities across the entire food system, including in pre-production, production, processing, transport, consumption and loss and waste. We detail and synthesize recent research on the topic, and explore the applicability of different climate mitigation strategies in varying country contexts with different economic and agricultural systems. Further, we highlight some potential adaptation co-benefits of food system mitigation strategies and explore the potential implications of such strategies on food systems as a whole. We suggest that a food systems research approach is greatly needed to capture such potential synergies, and highlight key areas of additional research including a greater focus on low- and middle-income countries in particular. We conclude by discussing the policy and finance opportunities needed to advance mitigation strategies in food systems
First Order Phase Transition in Intermediate Energy Heavy Ion Collisions
We model the disassembly of an excited nuclear system formed as a result of a
heavy ion collision. We find that, as the beam energy in central collisions in
varied, the dissociating system crosses a liquid-gas coexistence curve,
resulting in a first-order phase transition. Accessible experimental signatures
are identified: a peak in specific heat, a power-law yield for composites, and
a maximum in the second moment of the yield distribution
Establishing a Large-Scale Field Experiment to Assess the Effects of Artificial Light at Night on Species and Food Webs
Artificial light at night (ALAN) is one of the most obvious hallmarks of human
presence in an ecosystem. The rapidly increasing use of artificial light has
fundamentally transformed nightscapes throughout most of the globe, although
little is known about how ALAN impacts the biodiversity and food webs of
illuminated ecosystems. We developed a large-scale experimental infrastructure
to study the effects of ALAN on a light-naĂŻve, natural riparian (i.e.,
terrestrial-aquatic) ecosystem. Twelve street lights (20 m apart) arranged in
three rows parallel to an agricultural drainage ditch were installed on each
of two sites located in a grassland ecosystem in northern Germany. A range of
biotic, abiotic, and photometric data are collected regularly to study the
short- and long-term effects of ALAN on behavior, species interactions,
physiology, and species composition of communities. Here we describe the
infrastructure setup and data collection methods, and characterize the study
area including photometric measurements. None of the measured parameters
differed significantly between sites in the period before illumination.
Results of one short-term experiment, carried out with one site illuminated
and the other acting as a control, demonstrate the attraction of ALAN by the
immense and immediate increase of insect catches at the lit street lights. The
experimental setup provides a unique platform for carrying out
interdisciplinary research on sustainable lighting
Heavy Quark Potentials in Quenched QCD at High Temperature
Heavy quark potentials are investigated at high temperatures. The temperature
range covered by the analysis extends from values just below the
deconfinement temperature up to about in the deconfined phase. We
simulated the pure gauge sector of QCD on lattices with temporal extents of 4,
6 and 8 with spatial volumes of . On the smallest lattice a tree level
improved action was employed while in the other two cases the standard Wilson
action was used. Below we find a temperature dependent logarithmic term
contributing to the confinement potential and observe a string tension which
decreases with rising temperature but retains a finite value at the
deconfinement transition. Above the potential is Debye-screened, however
simple perturbative predictions do not apply.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure
Quantum-classical correspondence on compact phase space
We propose to study the -norm distance between classical and quantum
phase space distributions, where for the latter we choose the Wigner function,
as a global phase space indicator of quantum-classical correspondence. For
example, this quantity should provide a key to understand the correspondence
between quantum and classical Loschmidt echoes. We concentrate on fully chaotic
systems with compact (finite) classical phase space. By means of numerical
simulations and heuristic arguments we find that the quantum-classical fidelity
stays at one up to Ehrenfest-type time scale, which is proportional to the
logarithm of effective Planck constant, and decays exponentially with a maximal
classical Lyapunov exponent, after that time.Comment: 26 pages. 9 figures (31 .epz files), submitted to Nonlinearit
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