Assessing the climate impacts of Chinese dietary choices using a telecoupled global food trade and local land use framework

Global emissions trajectories developed to meet the 2⁰C temperature target are likely to rely on the widespread deployment of negative emissions technologies and/or the implementation of substantial terrestrial carbon sinks. Such technologies include afforestation, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), but mitigation options for agriculture appear limited. For example, using the Global Calculator tool (http://www.globalcalculator.org/), under a 2⁰C pathway, the ‘forests and other land use’ sector is projected to become a major carbon sink, reaching -15 GtCO2e yr-1 by 2050, compared to fossil emissions of 21 GtCO2e yr-1. At the same time, rates of agricultural emissions remain static at about 6 GtCO2e yr-1, despite increasing demands for crop and livestock production to meet the forecast dietary demands of the growing and increasingly wealthy global population. Emissions in the Global Calculator are sensitive to the assumed global diet, and particularly to the level and type of meat consumption, which in turn drive global land use patterns and agricultural emissions. Here we assess the potential to use a modified down-scaled Global Calculator methodology embedded within the telecoupled global food trade framework, to estimate the agricultural emissions and terrestrial carbon stock impacts in China and Brazil, arising from a plausible range of dietary choices in China. These dietary choices are linked via telecoupling mechanisms to Brazilian crop production (e.g. Brazilian soy for Chinese animal feed provision) and drive land and global market dynamics. ‘Spill-over’ impacts will also be assessed using the EU and Malawi as case studies

Recovery of Viable Microorganisms from Solids. I - Model Systems

Solidification process for recovering viable microorganisms to aid spacecraft sterilization procedure

Lateral-directional control of the x-15 airplane

Lateral directional control and stability characteristics of X-15 aircraf

Diazo Printing of ERTS Color Composites

The author has identified the following significant results. ERTS-1 color composites were made with the help of a Diazo developer and printer. Five single channel, density standards were established, using typical ERTS images, in order to determine exposure time. These standards were used to develop a graph from which the exposure time for any transparency can be estimated. Exposure times varied from 3 to 30 minutes, and clear colored polyester sheets from two manufactures were used with slightly different, but equally successful, results

Interpretation and mapping of gypsy moth defoilation from ERTS (LANDSAT)-1 temporal composites

The author has identified the following significant results. Photointerpretation of temporally composited color Diazo transparencies of ERTS(LANDSAT) images is a practical method for detecting and locating levels of widespread defoliation. ERTS 9 x 9 inch images are essentially orthographic and are produced at a nearly constant 1:1,000,000 scale. This allows direct superposition of scenes for temporal composites. ERTS coverage provides a sweeping 180 km (110 mile) wide view, permitting one interpreter to rapidly delineate defoliation in an area requiring days and weeks of work by aerial surveys or computerized processing. Defoliation boundaries can be located on the images within maximum errors on the order of hundreds of meters. The enhancement process is much less expensive than aerial surveys or computerized processing. Maps produced directly from interpretation are manageable working products. The 18 day periodic coverage of ERTS is not frequent enough to replace aerial survey mapping because defoliation and refoliation move as waves

Comparison of Skylab and Landsat Lineaments with Joint Orientations in Northcentral Pennsylvania

The author has identified the following significant results. The histogram peaks of lineaments mapped from Skylab photograph at a scale of 1:517,000 lie subparallel, within 20 deg, to major shale joints and coal cleats on part of the Allegheny Plateau. The Landsat lineament, mapped at 1:989,000 are biased by illumination and scan line directions. While there is an illumination bias in the Skylab photograph, its direction does not coincide with the main transverse lineament trend, thus providing an independent assessment of the illumination direction bias. The coincidence in direction regardless of scale of the linear features suggests a mechanical relationship between joints, fracture traces, and lineaments which is more consistent with a tensional model than a shear model of origin

On the distribution of career longevity and the evolution of home run prowess in professional baseball

Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and benchmarks assumes that the level of competition in baseball is stationary in time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in baseball. We also find similar power laws in the density functions of all major performance metrics for pitchers and batters. The use of performance-enhancing drugs has a dark history, emerging as a problem for both amateur and professional sports. We find statistical evidence consistent with performance-enhancing drugs in the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years. This is corroborated by the findings of the Mitchell Report [1], a two-year investigation into the use of illegal steroids in major league baseball, which recently revealed that over 5 percent of major league baseball players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in an anonymous 2003 survey.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 2-column revtex4 format. Revision has change of title, a figure added, and minor changes in response to referee comment

Anomalous Chiral Action from the Path-Integral

By generalizing the Fujikawa approach, we show in the path-integral formalism: (1) how the infinitesimal variation of the fermion measure can be integrated to obtain the full anomalous chiral action; (2) how the action derived in this way can be identified as the Chern-Simons term in five dimensions, if the anomaly is consistent; (3) how the regularization can be carried out, so as to lead to the consistent anomaly and not to the covariant anomaly. Our method uses Schwinger's ``proper-time'' representation of the Green's function and the gauge invariant point-splitting technique. We find that the consistency requirement and the point-splitting technique allow both an anomalous and a non-anomalous action. In the end, the nature of the vacuum determines whether we have an anomalous theory, or, a non-anomalous theoryComment: 28 page

How Sensitive are Di-Leptons from Rho Mesons to the High Baryon Density Region?

We show that the measurement of di-leptons might provide only a restricted view into the most dense stages of heavy ion reactions. Thus, possible studies of meson and baryon properties at high baryon densities, as e.g. done at GSI-HADES and envisioned for FAIR-CBM, might observe weaker effects than currently expected in certain approaches. We argue that the strong absorption of resonances in the high baryon density region of the heavy ion collision masks information from the early hot and dense phase due to a strong increase of the total decay width because of collisional broadening. To obtain additional information, we also compare the currently used approaches to extract di-leptons from transport simulations - i.e. shining, only vector mesons from final baryon resonance decays and instant emission of di-leptons and find a strong sensitivity on the method employed in particular at FAIR and SPS energies. It is shown explicitly that a restriction to rho meson (and therefore di-lepton) production only in final state baryon resonance decays provide a strong bias towards rather low baryon densities. The results presented are obtained from UrQMD v2.3 calculations using the standard set-up.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, expanded versio