Characterising the biophysical, economic and social impacts of soil carbon sequestration as a greenhouse gas removal technology

To limit warming to well below 2°C, most scenario projections rely on greenhouse gas removal technologies (GGRTs); one such GGRT uses soil carbon sequestration (SCS) in agricultural land. In addition to their role in mitigating climate change, SCS practices play a role in delivering agroecosystem resilience, climate change adaptability, and food security. Environmental heterogeneity and differences in agricultural practices challenge the practical implementation of SCS, and our analysis addresses the associated knowledge gap. Previous assessments have focused on global potentials, but there is a need among policy makers to operationalise SCS. Here, we assess a range of practices already proposed to deliver SCS, and distil these into a subset of specific measures. We provide a multi‐disciplinary summary of the barriers and potential incentives toward practical implementation of these measures. First, we identify specific practices with potential for both a positive impact on SCS at farm level, and an uptake rate compatible with global impact. These focus on: a. optimising crop primary productivity (e.g. nutrient optimisation, pH management, irrigation) b. reducing soil disturbance and managing soil physical properties (e.g. improved rotations, minimum till) c. minimising deliberate removal of C or lateral transport via erosion processes (e.g. support measures, bare fallow reduction) d. addition of C produced outside the system (e.g. organic manure amendments, biochar addition) e. provision of additional C inputs within the cropping system (e.g. agroforestry, cover cropping) We then consider economic and non‐cost barriers and incentives for land managers implementing these measures, along with the potential externalised impacts of implementation. This offers a framework and reference point for holistic assessment of the impacts of SCS. Finally, we summarise and discuss the ability of extant scientific approaches to quantify the technical potential and externalities of SCS measures, and the barriers and incentives to their implementation in global agricultural systems

Demystifying academics to enhance university-business collaborations in environmental science

In countries globally there is intense political interest in fostering effective university-business collaborations, but there has been scant attention devoted to exactly how an individual scientist's workload (i.e. specified tasks) and incentive structures (i.e. assessment criteria) may act as a key barrier to this. To investigate this an original, empirical dataset is derived from UK job specifications and promotion criteria, which distil universities' varied drivers into requirements upon academics. This work reveals the nature of the severe challenge posed by a heavily time-constrained culture; specifically, tension exists between opportunities presented by working with business and non-optional duties (e.g. administration and teaching). Thus, to justify the time to work with business, such work must inspire curiosity and facilitate future novel science in order to mitigate its conflict with the overriding imperative for academics to publish. It must also provide evidence of real-world changes (i.e. impact), and ideally other reportable outcomes (e.g. official status as a business' advisor), to feed back into the scientist's performance appraisals. Indicatively, amid 20-50 key duties, typical full-time scientists may be able to free up to 0.5 day per week for work with business. Thus specific, pragmatic actions, including short-term and time-efficient steps, are proposed in a "user guide"to help initiate and nurture a long-term collaboration between an early- to mid-career environmental scientist and a practitioner in the insurance sector. These actions are mapped back to a tailored typology of impact and a newly created representative set of appraisal criteria to explain how they may be effective, mutually beneficial and overcome barriers. Throughout, the focus is on environmental science, with illustrative detail provided through the example of natural hazard risk modelling in the insurance sector. However, a new conceptual model of academics' behaviour is developed, fusing perspectives from literature on academics' motivations and performance assessment, which we propose is internationally applicable and transferable between sectors. Sector-specific details (e.g. list of relevant impacts and user guide) may serve as templates for how people may act differently to work more effectively together

A genetic variation map for chicken with 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms

We describe a genetic variation map for the chicken genome containing 2.8 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms ( SNPs). This map is based on a comparison of the sequences of three domestic chicken breeds ( a broiler, a layer and a Chinese silkie) with that of their wild ancestor, red jungle fowl. Subsequent experiments indicate that at least 90% of the variant sites are true SNPs, and at least 70% are common SNPs that segregate in many domestic breeds. Mean nucleotide diversity is about five SNPs per kilobase for almost every possible comparison between red jungle fowl and domestic lines, between two different domestic lines, and within domestic lines - in contrast to the notion that domestic animals are highly inbred relative to their wild ancestors. In fact, most of the SNPs originated before domestication, and there is little evidence of selective sweeps for adaptive alleles on length scales greater than 100 kilobases

A newly-discovered young massive star cluster at the end of the Galactic Bar

We present a near-infrared study of the candidate star cluster Mercer 81, located at the centre of the G338.4+0.1 HII region, and close to the TeV gamma-ray source HESS 1640-465. Using HST/NICMOS imaging and VLT/ISAAC spectroscopy we have detected a compact and highly extincted cluster of stars, though the bright stars in the centre of the field are in fact foreground objects. The cluster contains nine stars with strong Paschen-alpha emission, one of which we identify as a Wolf-Rayet (WR) star, as well as an A-type supergiant. The line-of-sight extinction is very large, $A_{V}\sim 45$, illustrating the challenges of locating young star clusters in the Galactic Plane. From a quantitative analysis of the WR star we argue for a cluster age of 3.7$^{+0.4}_{-0.5}$\,Myr, and, assuming that all emission-line stars are WRs, a cluster mass of \ga 10^4\msun. A kinematic analysis of the cluster's surrounding HII-region shows that the cluster is located in the Galactic disk at a distance of 11$\pm$2\,kpc. This places the cluster close to where the far end of the Bar intersects the Norma spiral arm. This cluster, as well as the nearby cluster [DBS2003]179, represent the first detections of active star cluster formation at this side of the Bar, in contrast to the near side which is well known to have recently undergone a $\sim 10^6$\msun\ starburst episode.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Characterisation of the transcriptome of a wild great tit Parus major population by next generation sequencing

Background: The recent development of next generation sequencing technologies has made it possible to generate very large amounts of sequence data in species with little or no genome information. Combined with the large phenotypic databases available for wild and non-model species, these data will provide an unprecedented opportunity to "genomicise" ecological model organisms and establish the genetic basis of quantitative traits in natural populations

Emergence of Xin Demarcates a Key Innovation in Heart Evolution

The mouse Xin repeat-containing proteins (mXinα and mXinβ) localize to the intercalated disc in the heart. mXinα is able to bundle actin filaments and to interact with β-catenin, suggesting a role in linking the actin cytoskeleton to N-cadherin/β-catenin adhesion. mXinα-null mouse hearts display progressively ultrastructural alterations at the intercalated discs, and develop cardiac hypertrophy and cardiomyopathy with conduction defects. The up-regulation of mXinβ in mXinα-deficient mice suggests a partial compensation for the loss of mXinα. To elucidate the evolutionary relationship between these proteins and to identify the origin of Xin, a phylogenetic analysis was done with 40 vertebrate Xins. Our results show that the ancestral Xin originated prior to the emergence of lamprey and subsequently underwent gene duplication early in the vertebrate lineage. A subsequent teleost-specific genome duplication resulted in most teleosts encoding at least three genes. All Xins contain a highly conserved β-catenin-binding domain within the Xin repeat region. Similar to mouse Xins, chicken, frog and zebrafish Xins also co-localized with β-catenin to structures that appear to be the intercalated disc. A putative DNA-binding domain in the N-terminus of all Xins is strongly conserved, whereas the previously characterized Mena/VASP-binding domain is a derived trait found only in Xinαs from placental mammals. In the C-terminus, Xinαs and Xinβs are more divergent relative to each other but each isoform from mammals shows a high degree of within-isoform sequence identity. This suggests different but conserved functions for mammalian Xinα and Xinβ. Interestingly, the origin of Xin ca. 550 million years ago coincides with the genesis of heart chambers with complete endothelial and myocardial layers. We postulate that the emergence of the Xin paralogs and their functional differentiation may have played a key role in the evolutionary development of the heart

Identification and Classification of Conserved RNA Secondary Structures in the Human Genome

The discoveries of microRNAs and riboswitches, among others, have shown functional RNAs to be biologically more important and genomically more prevalent than previously anticipated. We have developed a general comparative genomics method based on phylogenetic stochastic context-free grammars for identifying functional RNAs encoded in the human genome and used it to survey an eight-way genome-wide alignment of the human, chimpanzee, mouse, rat, dog, chicken, zebra-fish, and puffer-fish genomes for deeply conserved functional RNAs. At a loose threshold for acceptance, this search resulted in a set of 48,479 candidate RNA structures. This screen finds a large number of known functional RNAs, including 195 miRNAs, 62 histone 3′UTR stem loops, and various types of known genetic recoding elements. Among the highest-scoring new predictions are 169 new miRNA candidates, as well as new candidate selenocysteine insertion sites, RNA editing hairpins, RNAs involved in transcript auto regulation, and many folds that form singletons or small functional RNA families of completely unknown function. While the rate of false positives in the overall set is difficult to estimate and is likely to be substantial, the results nevertheless provide evidence for many new human functional RNAs and present specific predictions to facilitate their further characterization

From Sacred to Scientific: Epic Religion, Spectacular Science, and Charlton Heston’s Science Fiction Cinema

This paper analyses how long-1960s cinema responded to and framed public discourses surrounding religion and science. This approach allows for a discussion that extends beyond a critical study of the scholarly debates that surround the place of religion in science during a transitional period. Charlton Heston was an epic actor who went from literally playing God in The Ten Commandments (1956) to playing “god” as a messianic scientist in The Omega Man (1971). Best known for playing Moses, Heston became an unlikely science-based cinema star during the early 1970s. He was re-imagined as a scientist, but the religiosity of his established persona was inescapable. Heston and the science-based films he starred in capitalized upon the utopian promises of real science, and also the fears of the vocal activist counterculture. Planet of the Apes (1968), Omega Man (1971), Soylent Green (1973), and other science-based films made between 1968-1977 were bleak countercultural warnings about excessive consumerism, uncontrolled science, nuclear armament, irreversible environmental damage, and eventual human extinction. In this paper I argue that Heston’s transition from biblical epic star to science-fiction anti-hero represents the way in which the role and interpretation of science changed in post-classical cinema. Despite the shift from religious epic to science-based spectacle, religion remained a faithful component of Hollywood output indicating the ongoing connection between science and religion in US culture. I will consider the transition from sacred to science-based narratives and how religion was utilised across the production process of films that commented upon scientific advances