Toronto's Plan for 100% Renewable Energy by 2067

The purpose of this major paper is to help the City of Toronto transition to 100% renewable energy. Some of the most salient barriers to achieve that climate security goal are: the limited experience with renewables in the current electrical grid; the aging and crumbling energy infrastructure; and the limited energy conservation ethos amongst local residents, businesses, and industries. Understanding the current state of renewables in the world and Canada makes setting goals and a realistic timeline easier. By summarizing what other cities from around the world did to help their quest towards only renewable energy, lessons and policies were discovered that would benefit Toronto. Three major areas, city policies, buildings, and transportation, were identified to be areas of concentration to help the goal become a reality. The proposed timeline incorporates these areas with realistic dates in which each task should be completed by. The conclusion is that Toronto can reach the goal of becoming 100% renewable energy if the steps are taken and acted upon accordingly. My research indicates that to achieve its climate security targets Toronto needs to start planning immediately a strategy for 100% renewable energy to ensure maximum benefits at the lowest cost to all stakeholders

Monitoring urban growth in greater Lagos : a case study using GIS to monitor the urban growth of Lagos 1990 - 2008 and produce future growth prospects for the city

The aim of this thesis is to show how the city of Lagos has grown in size and population between the years 1990-2008. Comparisons over the city for the years 1990, 1999 and 2008 have been made so that the main characteristics of the city’s growth can be shown and analyzed. Based on this expansion future prospects for the city has been provided through producing three different scenarios on how Lagos might look in the year 2020. The study has been conducted through remote sensing where satellite images over the city have been acquired; these images have been edited and combined with population data so that demographical comparisons can be done. The results indicate that the city has experienced an extreme growth, both in area and in population. The growth has however been more characterized by an expansion in area than population increase. Over the total study time the population in the city more than doubled from around five million inhabitants in 1990 to over ten million in 2008, during the same time period the city expanded almost three times in size. The lack of high resolution satellite data and the fact that the population figures used is based on estimates however create some unreliability in the results. That the city has experienced growth over the study time was not surprising since it is the type of region that has grown the fastest in the world during the last decades, an urban area in a developing country.Syftet med denna uppsats är att visa hur staden Lagos har vuxit i storlek och ökat i befolkning mellan åren 1990-2008. Jämförelser över staden för åren 1990, 1999 och 2008 har gjorts så att huvudragen i stadens tillväxt har kunnat visas och analyseras. Baserat på hur staden har vuxit och förändrats under dessa år så har även tre stycken framtidsmodeller för hur Lagos kan tänkas se ut år 2020 producerats. Studien har genomförts genom en fjärranalys där satellitbilder över Lagos har använts och redigerats på olika sätt för att visa stadens tillväxt. Befolkningsstatistik har även använts så att demografiska jämförelser har kunnat genomföras över tid. Resultaten visar att staden har vuxit kraftigt över studietiden. Ökningen har framförallt kännetecknats av att staden expanderat i yta. Över studietiden fördubblades befolkningen i Lagos från runt fem miljoner invånare 1990 till över tio miljoner invånare 2008 samtidigt som den expanderade runt tre gånger i yta. Bristen på satellitbilder i hög upplösning och att befolkningssiffrorna är baserade på uppskattningar gör dock att det finns en viss felmarginal i resultaten. Att staden vuxit över studietiden är inte särskilt förvånande eftersom området utgör den typ av region som vuxit mest under senare årtionden; en urban region i ett utvecklingsland

The live cell DNA stain SiR-Hoechst induces DNA damage responses and impairs cell cycle progression

AbstractSiR-Hoechst (SiR-DNA) is a far-red fluorescent DNA probe being used widely for time-lapse imaging of living cells that is reported to be minimally toxic at concentrations as high as 10–25 µM. However, measuring nuclear import of Cyclin B1, inhibition of mitotic entry, and the induction of γH2AX foci in cultured human cells reveals that SiR-Hoechst induces DNA damage responses and G2 arrest at concentrations well below 1 µM. SiR-Hoechst is useful for live cell imaging, but it should be used with caution and at the lowest practicable concentration.</jats:p

A4_7 Supermassive (Interstellar) Black Hole

This paper considers the plausibility of an event from the 2014 film Interstellar. It states that an hour on a planet orbiting a supermassive back hole is equivalent to 7 years passing on Earth. Calculations made state that the planet is inside the minimum orbit for a planet around a black hole and would thus fall with a ballistic trajectory into the centre.However, a static system was assumed, so with an optically spinning black hole the planet may be in a stable orbit. A spacecraft orbiting at a distance unaffected by time dilation is also considered and found to be largely implausible

Investigating the Lay and Scientific Norms for Using ‘Explanation’

In the mid-twentieth century, Hempel (1962, 1965) bucked posit ivist ort hodoxy and proposed that explanations have a legitimate role to play in science. Yet, when it came time to offer up a model of explanation, Hempel held fast to the positivist tendency of abstracting both from facts about human psychology and from the specific contents of claims (i.e., in favor of bare logical form). At the broadest level, he proposed that explanations are sets of true statements arranged into formally acceptable arguments. That such arguments count as explanations has, Hempel thought, nothing to do with what anyone thinks or feels; explanations are dissociable, even doubly so, from psychology

A4_4 Deeper Than Any Elephant Has Gone Before

 In this paper, the depth of an Olympic size swimming pool required to crush an elephant is calculated. The depth of the swimming pool required to half the volume of an elephant was calculated to be 1.02 x 106 m (1020km) equivalent to a pressure of 1.004 x 1010 Pa (approximately 100000 times that of atmospheric pressure). Although this is an overestimate, it shows the strength of bone