Feasibility study on manganese nodules recovery in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone

The sea occupies three quarters of the area on the earth and provides various kinds of resources to mankind in the form of minerals, food, medicines and even energy. “Seabed exploitation” specifically deals with recovery of the resources that are found on the seabed, in the form of solids, liquids and gasses (methane hydrates, oil and natural gas). The resources are abundant; nevertheless the recovery process from the seabed, poses various challenges to mankind. This study starts with a review on three types of resources: polymetallic manganese nodules, polymetallic manganese crusts and massive sulphides deposits. Each of them are rich in minerals, such as manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper and some rare earth elements. They are found at many locations in the deep seas and are potentially a big source of minerals. No commercial seabed mining activity has been accomplished to date due to the great complexities in recovery. This book describes the various challenges associated with a potential underwater mineral recovery operation, reviews and analyses the existing recovery techniques, and provides an innovative engineering system. It further identifies the associated risks and a suitable business model.Chapter 1 presents a brief background about the past and present industrial trends of seabed mining. A description of the sea, seabed and the three types of seabed mineral resources are also included. A section on motivations for deep sea mining follows which also compares the latter with terrestrial mining.Chapter 2 deals with the decision making process, including a market analysis, for selecting manganese nodules as the resource of interest. This is followed by a case study specific to the location of interest: West COMRA in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Specific site location is determined in order to estimate commercial risk, environmental impact assessment and logistic challenge.Chapter 3 lists the existing techniques for nodule recovery operation. The study identifies the main components of a nodules recovery system, and organizes them into: collector, propulsion and vertical transport systems.Chapter 4 discusses various challenges posed by manganese nodules recovery, in terms of the engineering and environment. The geo-political and legal-social issues have also been considered. This chapter plays an important role in defining the proposed engineering system, as addressing the identified challenges will better shape the proposed solution.Chapter 5 proposes an engineering system, by considering the key components in greater details. An innovative component, the black box is introduced, which is intended to be an environmentally-friendly solution for manganese nodules recovery. Other auxiliary components, such as the mother ship and metallurgical processing, are briefly included. A brief power supply analysis is also provided.Chapter 6 assesses the associated risks, which are divided into sections namely commercial viability, logistic challenges, environmental impact assessment and safety assessment. The feasibility of the proposed solution is also dealt with.Chapter 7 provides a business model for the proposed engineering system. Potential customers are identified, value proposition is determined, costumer relation is also suggested. Public awareness is then discussed and finally a SWOT analysis is presented. This business model serves as an important bridge to reach both industry and research institutes.Finally, Chapter 8 provides some conclusions and recommendation for future work

Inhalable neutralizing antibodies – promising approach to combating respiratory viral infections

Monoclonal antibodies represent an exciting class of therapeutics against respiratory viral infections. Notwithstanding their specificity and affinity, the conventional parenteral administration is suboptimal in delivering antibodies for neutralizing activity in the airways due to the poor distribution of macromolecules to the respiratory tract. Inhaled therapy is a promising approach to overcome this hurdle in a noninvasive manner, while advances in antibody engineering have led to the development of unique antibody formats which exhibit properties desirable for inhalation. In this Opinion, we examine the major challenges surrounding the development of inhaled antibodies, identify knowledge gaps that need to be addressed and provide strategies from a drug delivery perspective to enhance the efficacy and safety of neutralizing antibodies against respiratory viral infections

Monarch-1/PYPAF7 and other CATERPILLER (CLR, NOD, NLR) proteins with negative regulatory functions

CATERPILLER is a mammalian gene family with signature NBD and LRR domains. Several members of this family are positive regulators of inflammatory responses. Others, however, exert negative effects on proinflammatory responses. These data are particularly convincing when shRNA/siRNA are used. This review focuses on the Monarch-1/PYPAF7 gene with brief discussions of CLR16.2/NOD3, PYPAF2/PAN1/NALP2, and PYPAF3

Dissipative preparation of W states in trapped ion systems

We present protocols for dissipative entanglement of three trapped-ion qubits and discuss a scheme that uses sympathetic cooling as the dissipation mechanism. This scheme relies on tailored destructive interference to generate any one of six entangled W states in a three-ion qubit space. Using a beryllium-magnesium ion crystal as an example system, we theoretically investigate the protocol's performance and the effects of likely error sources, including thermal secular motion of the ion crystal, calibration imperfections, and spontaneous photon scattering. We estimate that a fidelity of $\sim$ 98 % may be achieved in typical trapped ion experiments with $\sim$ 1 ms interaction time. These protocols avoid timescale hierarchies for faster preparation of entangled states

Mineral and Bone Disorders After Kidney Transplantation

The risk of mineral and bone disorders among patients with chronic kidney disease is substantially elevated, owing largely to alterations in calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, parathyroid hormone, and fibroblast growth factor 23. The interwoven relationship among these minerals and hormones results in maladaptive responses that are differentially affected by the process of kidney transplantation. Interpretation of conventional labs, imaging, and other fracture risk assessment tools are not standardized in the post-transplant setting. Post-transplant bone disease is not uniformly improved and considerable variation exists in monitoring and treatment practices. A spectrum of abnormalities such as hypophosphatemia, hypercalcemia, hyperparathyroidism, osteomalacia, osteopenia, and osteoporosis are commonly encountered in the post-transplant period. Thus, reducing fracture risk and other bone-related complications requires recognition of these abnormalities along with the risk incurred by concomitant immunosuppression use. As kidney transplant recipients continue to age, the drivers of bone disease vary throughout the post-transplant period among persistent hyperparathyroidism, de novo hyperparathyroidism, and osteoporosis. The use of anti-resorptive therapies require understanding of different options and the clinical scenarios that warrant their use. With limited studies underscoring clinical events such as fractures, expert understanding of MBD physiology, and surrogate marker interpretation is needed to determine ideal and individualized therapy

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping Project: No Evidence for Evolution in the M-sigma Relation to z~1

We present host stellar velocity dispersion measurements for a sample of 88 broad-line quasars at 0.10.6) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. High signal-to-noise ratio coadded spectra (average S/N~30 per 69 km/s pixel) from SDSS-RM allowed decomposition of the host and quasar spectra, and measurement of the host stellar velocity dispersions and black hole (BH) masses using the single-epoch (SE) virial method. The large sample size and dynamic range in luminosity (L5100=10^(43.2-44.7) erg/s) lead to the first clear detection of a correlation between SE virial BH mass and host stellar velocity dispersion far beyond the local universe. However, the observed correlation is significantly flatter than the local relation, suggesting that there are selection biases in high-z luminosity-threshold quasar samples for such studies. Our uniform sample and analysis enable an investigation of the redshift evolution of the M-sigma relation free of caveats by comparing different samples/analyses at disjoint redshifts. We do not observe evolution of the M-sigma relation in our sample, up to z~1, but there is an indication that the relation flattens towards higher redshifts. Coupled with the increasing threshold luminosity with redshift in our sample, this again suggests certain selection biases are at work, and simple simulations demonstrate that a constant M-sigma relation is favored to z~1. Our results highlight the scientific potential of deep coadded spectroscopy from quasar monitoring programs, and offer a new path to probe the co-evolution of BHs and galaxies at earlier times.Comment: replaced with the accepted version (minor changes and updated references); ApJ in press; changed title to highlight the main resul

Global Tuna Demand, Price Response and Management: A Summary of Global Tuna Demand Workshop in La Jolla, Ca on May 13-14, 2010

Abstract only.Keywords: Fisheries Economics, Fish and Aquaculture Sectors Development, Contributions of Fisheries to Socioeconomic Wellbein

Indirect Cooling of Weakly Coupled Trapped-Ion Mechanical Oscillators

Cooling the motion of trapped ions to near the quantum ground state is crucial for many applications in quantum information processing and quantum metrology. However, certain motional modes of trapped-ion crystals can be difficult to cool due to weak or zero interaction between the modes and the cooling radiation, typically laser beams. We overcome this challenge by coupling a mode with weak cooling radiation interaction to one with strong cooling radiation interaction using parametric modulation of the trapping potential, thereby enabling indirect cooling of the former. In this way, we demonstrate near-ground-state cooling of motional modes with weak or zero cooling radiation interaction in multi-ion crystals of the same and mixed ion species, specifically $^9$Be$^+$-$^9$Be$^+$, $^9$Be$^+$-$^{25}$Mg$^+$, and $^9$Be$^+$-$^{25}$Mg$^+$-$^9$Be$^+$ crystals. This approach can be generally applied to any Coulomb crystal where certain motional modes cannot be directly cooled efficiently, including crystals containing molecular ions, highly-charged ions, charged fundamental particles, or charged macroscopic objects.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Equilibrium responses of global net primary production and carbon storage to doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide: sensitivity to changes in vegetation nitrogen concentration

We ran the terrestrial ecosystem model (TEM) for the globe at 0.5° resolution for atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 340 and 680 parts per million by volume (ppmv) to evaluate global and regional responses of net primary production (NPP) and carbon storage to elevated CO2 for their sensitivity to changes in vegetation nitrogen concentration. At 340 ppmv, TEM estimated global NPP of 49.0 1015 g (Pg) C yr−1 and global total carbon storage of 1701.8 Pg C; the estimate of total carbon storage does not include the carbon content of inert soil organic matter. For the reference simulation in which doubled atmospheric CO2 was accompanied with no change in vegetation nitrogen concentration, global NPP increased 4.1 Pg C yr−1 (8.3%), and global total carbon storage increased 114.2 Pg C. To examine sensitivity in the global responses of NPP and carbon storage to decreases in the nitrogen concentration of vegetation, we compared doubled CO2 responses of the reference TEM to simulations in which the vegetation nitrogen concentration was reduced without influencing decomposition dynamics (“lower N” simulations) and to simulations in which reductions in vegetation nitrogen concentration influence decomposition dynamics (“lower N+D” simulations). We conducted three lower N simulations and three lower N+D simulations in which we reduced the nitrogen concentration of vegetation by 7.5, 15.0, and 22.5%. In the lower N simulations, the response of global NPP to doubled atmospheric CO2 increased approximately 2 Pg C yr−1 for each incremental 7.5% reduction in vegetation nitrogen concentration, and vegetation carbon increased approximately an additional 40 Pg C, and soil carbon increased an additional 30 Pg C, for a total carbon storage increase of approximately 70 Pg C. In the lower N+D simulations, the responses of NPP and vegetation carbon storage were relatively insensitive to differences in the reduction of nitrogen concentration, but soil carbon storage showed a large change. The insensitivity of NPP in the N+D simulations occurred because potential enhancements in NPP associated with reduced vegetation nitrogen concentration were approximately offset by lower nitrogen availability associated with the decomposition dynamics of reduced litter nitrogen concentration. For each 7.5% reduction in vegetation nitrogen concentration, soil carbon increased approximately an additional 60 Pg C, while vegetation carbon storage increased by only approximately 5 Pg C. As the reduction in vegetation nitrogen concentration gets greater in the lower N+D simulations, more of the additional carbon storage tends to become concentrated in the north temperate-boreal region in comparison to the tropics. Other studies with TEM show that elevated CO2 more than offsets the effects of climate change to cause increased carbon storage. The results of this study indicate that carbon storage would be enhanced by the influence of changes in plant nitrogen concentration on carbon assimilation and decomposition rates. Thus changes in vegetation nitrogen concentration may have important implications for the ability of the terrestrial biosphere to mitigate increases in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and climate changes associated with the increases