Improving Co-benefits and 'Triple Win' Impacts from Climate Action: The Role of Guidance Tools

This CDI Practice Paper by L.O. Naess, M. Hagemann, B. Harvey, F. Urban, S. Hendel-Blackford and N. Höhne addresses the role of tools in supporting interventions to achieve the ‘triple wins’ of adaptation, mitigation and development. Over recent years there has been a proliferation of guidance tools to support adaptation or mitigation, increasingly in a development context, but little work on the role tools play in helping to bridge the gap between these three areas in practice. Based on a review of tools in view of ‘climate compatible development’, the paper suggests key considerations for how tools could help achieve ‘triple wins’. They include (1) the importance of understanding how tools are a way of defining and shaping a goal, not merely helping to implement actions to achieve it; (2) the value of acknowledging different starting points, and that a lot of the integration is happening – and will continue to happen – on the side of users; and (3) because tools cannot provide all the answers to complex problems they need to be complemented by analysis of actors, goals and outcomes.UK Department for International Developmen

Захист біомедичних прав людини в практиці Європейського суду з прав людини

Хендель Н. В. Захист біомедичних прав людини в практиці Європейського суду з прав людини / Н. В. Хендель // Правове забезпечення ефективного виконання рішень і застосування практики Європейського суду з прав людини : матер. 2-­ї Міжнар. наук.-­практ. конф. (Одеса, 20-­21 вересня 2013 р.) / за ред. С. В. Ківалова ; НУ «ОЮА». – Одеса : Фенікс, 2013. – С. 414-421.В статті проаналізований зміст та структура біомедичних прав лю­дини. розглянута практика Європейського суду з прав людини щодо захисту біомедичних прав людини. виявлені тенденції в розвитку міжнародно-­правових механізмів захисту біомедичних прав людини.В статье проанализировано содержание и структура биомедицин­ских прав человека. Рассмотрена практика европейского суда по пра­вам человека по защите биомедицинских прав человека. Выявлены тенденции в развитии международно­правовых механизмов защиты биомедицинских прав человека.In the article analyzed the content and structure of biomedical rights. The practice of the European Court of human Rights on the protection of biomedical human rights is considered. The tendency in the development of international legal mechanisms for the protection biomedical human rights is discovered

Nonlinear pricing of storable goods

This paper develops a model of nonlinear pricing of storable goods. We show that storability imposes novel constraints on a monopolist’s ability to extract surplus. We then show that the attempt to relax these constraints can generate cyclical patterns in pricing and sales, even when consumers are homogeneous. Thus, the model provides a novel explanation for sales that does not rely on discrimination motives. Enriching the model to allow for buyer heterogeneity in storage technology, delivers the prediction that larger containers are more likely to be on sale. This prediction is consistent with observed patterns in scanner data

Diffusion as a ruler: Modeling kinesin diffusion as a length sensor for intraflagellar transport

An important question in cell biology is whether cells are able to measure size, either whole cell size or organelle size. Perhaps cells have an internal chemical representation of size that can be used to precisely regulate growth, or perhaps size is just an accident that emerges due to constraint of nutrients. The eukaryotic flagellum is an ideal model for studying size sensing and control because its linear geometry makes it essentially one‐dimensional, greatly simplifying mathematical modeling. The assembly of flagella is regulated by intraflagellar transport (IFT), in which kinesin motors carry cargo adaptors for flagellar proteins along the flagellum and then deposit them at the tip, lengthening the flagellum. The rate at which IFT motors are recruited to begin transport into the flagellum is anticorrelated with the flagellar length, implying some kind of communication between the base and the tip and possibly indicating that cells contain some mechanism for measuring flagellar length. Although it is possible to imagine many complex scenarios in which additional signaling molecules sense length and carry feedback signals to the cell body to control IFT, might the already‐known components of the IFT system be sufficient to allow length dependence of IFT? Here, we investigate a model in which the anterograde kinesin motors unbind after cargo delivery, diffuse back to the base, and are subsequently reused to power entry of new IFT trains into the flagellum. By modeling such a system at three different levels of abstraction we are able to show that the diffusion time of the motors can in principle be sufficient to serve as a proxy for length measurement. In all three implementations, we found that the diffusion model can not only achieve a stable steady‐state length without the addition of any other signaling molecules or pathways, but also is able to produce the anticorrelation between length and IFT recruitment rate that has been observed in quantitative imaging studies

Repair of gaps opposite lesions by homologous recombination in mammalian cells

Damages in the DNA template inhibit the progression of replication, which may cause single-stranded gaps. Such situations can be tolerated by translesion DNA synthesis (TLS), or by homology-dependent repair (HDR), which is based on transfer or copying of the missing information from the replicated sister chromatid. Whereas it is well established that TLS plays an important role in DNA damage tolerance in mammalian cells, it is unknown whether HDR operates in this process. Using a newly developed plasmid-based assay that distinguishes between the three mechanisms of DNA damage tolerance, we found that mammalian cells can efficiently utilize HDR to repair DNA gaps opposite an abasic site or benzo[a]pyrene adduct. The majority of these events occurred by a physical strand transfer (homologous recombination repair; HRR), rather than a template switch mechanism. Furthermore, cells deficient in either the human RAD51 recombination protein or NBS1, but not Rad18, exhibited decreased gap repair through HDR, indicating a role for these proteins in DNA damage tolerance. To our knowledge, this is the first direct evidence of gap-lesion repair via HDR in mammalian cells, providing further molecular insight into the potential activity of HDR in overcoming replication obstacles and maintaining genome stability

Soft Tissue Attenuation Patterns Associated with Upright Acquisition SPECT Myocardial Perfusion Imaging: A Descriptive Study

Abstract: Purpose: Soft-tissue attenuation patterns in SPECT-myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) of supine acquisition systems are well recognized. Their prevalence and interaction with body-habitus and gender are ill-defined, which we sought to describe in this study. Methods: In a cross-sectional study, we described the prevalence of soft-tissue attenuation patterns in normal SPECT-MPI studies acquired with a supine patient-position SPECT system. Results: In 263 normal, clinically-indicated, supine-acquisition SPECT-MPIs the attenuation patterns observed were: anterior (35.4%), inferior (41.8%) and lateral (13.3%). Anterior attenuation was more prevalent among women (50.7 % vs. 15.7%, P<0.001) and was associated with chest circumference among men. Conversely, inferior attenuation was more prevalent among men (78.3 % vs. 13.5%, P<0.001) and was not affected by body-habitus. Lateral attenuation was more common among women (19.6 % vs. 5.2%, p=0.001) and was associated with obesity (p=0.015). Conclusions: Soft-tissue attenuation artifacts are common in supine-acquisition SPECT-MPI. The recognition of their prevalence and association with body-habitus and gender is critical for the accurate interpretation of SPECT-MPI

The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream

In a companion paper by Koposov et al., RR Lyrae from \textit{Gaia} Data Release 2 are used to demonstrate that stars in the Orphan stream have velocity vectors significantly misaligned with the stream track, suggesting that it has received a large gravitational perturbation from a satellite of the Milky Way. We argue that such a mismatch cannot arise due to any realistic static Milky Way potential and then explore the perturbative effects of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We find that the LMC can produce precisely the observed motion-track mismatch and we therefore use the Orphan stream to measure the mass of the Cloud. We simultaneously fit the Milky Way and LMC potentials and infer that a total LMC mass of $1.38^{+0.27}_{-0.24} \times10^{11}\,\rm{M_\odot}$ is required to bend the Orphan Stream, showing for the first time that the LMC has a large and measurable effect on structures orbiting the Milky Way. This has far-reaching consequences for any technique which assumes that tracers are orbiting a static Milky Way. Furthermore, we measure the Milky Way mass within 50 kpc to be $3.80^{+0.14}_{-0.11}\times10^{11} M_\odot$. Finally, we use these results to predict that, due to the reflex motion of the Milky Way in response to the LMC, the outskirts of the Milky Way's stellar halo should exhibit a bulk, upwards motion.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures. Updated to version accepted to MNRAS after minor revisio

Nuclear genome stability in long-term cultivated callus lines of Fagopyrum tataricum (L.) Gaertn

© 2017 Betekhtin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Long-term cultivated Fagopyrum tataricum (L.) Gaertn. (Tartary buckwheat) morphogenic and non-morphogenic callus lines are interesting systems for gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms that are responsible for the genetic stability and instability of a plant tissue culture. In this work, we used histological sections and transmission electron microscopy to identify and describe the morphology of the nuclei of all of the analysed callus lines. We demonstrated that the embryogenic callus cells had prominent round nuclei that did not contain heterochromatin clumps in contrast to the non-morphogenic callus lines, in which we found nuclei that had multiple lobes. Flow cytometry analysis revealed significant differences in the relative DNA content between the analysed calli. All of the analysed morphogenic callus lines had peaks from 2C to 8C as compared to the nonmorphogenic callus lines, whose peaks did not reflect any regular DNA content and exceeded 8C and 16C for the line 6p1 and 16C and 32C for the callus line 10p2A. The results showed that non-morphogenic calli are of an aneuploid nature. The TUNEL test enabled us to visualise the nuclei that had DNA fragmentation in both the morphogenic and non-morphogenic lines. We revealed significantly higher frequencies of positively labelled nuclei in the non-morphogenic lines than in the morphogenic lines. In the case of the morphogenic lines, the highest observed frequency of TUNEL-positive nuclei was 7.7% for lines 2-3. In the non-morphogenic calli, the highest level of DNA damage (68.5%) was revealed in line 6p1. These results clearly indicate greater genome stability in the morphogenic lines

The determinants of election to the United Nations Security Council

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0096-4.The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the foremost international body responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security. Members vote on issues of global importance and consequently receive perks—election to the UNSC predicts, for instance, World Bank and IMF loans. But who gets elected to the UNSC? Addressing this question empirically is not straightforward as it requires a model that allows for discrete choices at the regional and international levels; the former nominates candidates while the latter ratifies them. Using an original multiple discrete choice model to analyze a dataset of 180 elections from 1970 to 2005, we find that UNSC election appears to derive from a compromise between the demands of populous countries to win election more frequently and a norm of giving each country its turn. We also find evidence that richer countries from the developing world win election more often, while involvement in warfare lowers election probability. By contrast, development aid does not predict election