852 research outputs found
Consequences of agro-biofuel production for greenhouse gas emissions
The objective of the study was to examine the effect on N2O and CH4 emissions when residues from bio-energy production are recycling as organic fertilizer for a maize energy crop. The study showed that the N2O emission associated with the cultivation of the maize crop offset a considerable faction of the fossil CO2, which was avoided by producing the biofuels
Recycling of bioenergy waste-stream materials to soil in organic farming systems
The poster present data on how de-gassted waste-stream material affect soil quality parameters in comparence to raw manure and clover-grass application. The results showed that residues after bio-gasification seems suited for fertilizer usage and not much different from application of raw cattle manure. However, the long-term effects on soil organic matter content needs to be further clarified. Application of clover-grass to the soil caused a significant loss of C and N due to gaseous emissions
Restmaterialer fra bio-energiproduktion - kan de tilbageføres til marken?
Efluents from biogas production may be recycled to soil as plant nutrition. However, the proportion of plant-available nitrogen is high and may cause loss due to leaching or gaseous emissions. Hence, such waste stream materials must be applied with care to ensure maximum plant uptake to minimize loss. Spread of weed seeds via application of biogas effluents is only a problem when the digestion is performed at mesophilic conditions and when the seeds are staying less than a week in the plant. At thermophilic conditions, seeds from a range of weed plant were unable to germinate efter just a few days
Dust sedimentation and self-sustained Kelvin-Helmholtz turbulence in protoplanetary disk mid-planes. I. Radially symmetric simulations
We perform numerical simulations of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in the
mid-plane of a protoplanetary disk. A two-dimensional corotating slice in the
azimuthal--vertical plane of the disk is considered where we include the
Coriolis force and the radial advection of the Keplerian rotation flow. Dust
grains, treated as individual particles, move under the influence of friction
with the gas, while the gas is treated as a compressible fluid. The friction
force from the dust grains on the gas leads to a vertical shear in the gas
rotation velocity. As the particles settle around the mid-plane due to gravity,
the shear increases, and eventually the flow becomes unstable to the
Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. The Kelvin-Helmholtz turbulence saturates when
the vertical settling of the dust is balanced by the turbulent diffusion away
from the mid-plane. The azimuthally averaged state of the self-sustained
Kelvin-Helmholtz turbulence is found to have a constant Richardson number in
the region around the mid-plane where the dust-to-gas ratio is significant.
Nevertheless the dust density has a strong non-axisymmetric component. We
identify a powerful clumping mechanism, caused by the dependence of the
rotation velocity of the dust grains on the dust-to-gas ratio, as the source of
the non-axisymmetry. Our simulations confirm recent findings that the critical
Richardson number for Kelvin-Helmholtz instability is around unity or larger,
rather than the classical value of 1/4Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. Some minor changes due to referee
report, most notably that the clumping mechanism has been identified as the
streaming instability of Youdin & Goodman (2005). Movies of the simulations
are still available at http://www.mpia.de/homes/johansen/research_en.ph
Field emissions of N2O during biomass production may affect the sustainability of agro-biofuels
Field emissions of N2O during cultivation of bioenergy crops may counterbalance a considerable part of the avoided fossil CO2 emissions that are achieved by fossil fuel displacemen
Waste materials from biogas production - effects on soil fertility and climate
Future agricultureal systems will produce bioenergy on basis of on- and off-farm crops and residues, implying beneficial recycling of plant nutrients back to soil and plants. This will reduce emission of climate gases and may also reduce spread of weed seeds, parasites and pathogens. However, it may also induce long-term reduction in soil organic pools
Video Transformers: A Survey
Transformer models have shown great success handling long-range interactions,
making them a promising tool for modeling video. However they lack inductive
biases and scale quadratically with input length. These limitations are further
exacerbated when dealing with the high dimensionality introduced with the
temporal dimension. While there are surveys analyzing the advances of
Transformers for vision, none focus on an in-depth analysis of video-specific
designs. In this survey we analyze main contributions and trends of works
leveraging Transformers to model video. Specifically, we delve into how videos
are handled as input-level first. Then, we study the architectural changes made
to deal with video more efficiently, reduce redundancy, re-introduce useful
inductive biases, and capture long-term temporal dynamics. In addition we
provide an overview of different training regimes and explore effective
self-supervised learning strategies for video. Finally, we conduct a
performance comparison on the most common benchmark for Video Transformers
(i.e., action classification), finding them to outperform 3D ConvNets even with
less computational complexity
Rapid planetesimal formation in turbulent circumstellar discs
The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via
dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969).
How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale
planetesimals is a major unsolved problem (Dominik et al. 2007): boulders stick
together poorly (Benz 2000), and spiral into the protostar in a few hundred
orbits due to a head wind from the slower rotating gas (Weidenschilling 1977).
Gravitational collapse of the solid component has been suggested to overcome
this barrier (Safronov 1969, Goldreich & Ward 1973, Youdin & Shu 2002). Even
low levels of turbulence, however, inhibit sedimentation of solids to a
sufficiently dense midplane layer (Weidenschilling & Cuzzi 1993, Dominik et al.
2007), but turbulence must be present to explain observed gas accretion in
protostellar discs (Hartmann 1998). Here we report the discovery of efficient
gravitational collapse of boulders in locally overdense regions in the
midplane. The boulders concentrate initially in transient high pressures in the
turbulent gas (Johansen, Klahr, & Henning 2006), and these concentrations are
augmented a further order of magnitude by a streaming instability (Youdin &
Goodman 2005, Johansen, Henning, & Klahr 2006, Johansen & Youdin 2007) driven
by the relative flow of gas and solids. We find that gravitationally bound
clusters form with masses comparable to dwarf planets and containing a
distribution of boulder sizes. Gravitational collapse happens much faster than
radial drift, offering a possible path to planetesimal formation in accreting
circumstellar discs.Comment: To appear in Nature (30 August 2007 issue). 18 pages (in referee
mode), 3 figures. Supplementary Information can be found at 0708.389
Pubertal development in healthy children is mirrored by DNA methylation patterns in peripheral blood
Puberty marks numerous physiological processes which are initiated by central activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal axis, followed by development of secondary sexual characteristics. To a large extent, pubertal timing is heritable, but current knowledge of genetic polymorphisms only explains few months in the large inter-individual variation in the timing of puberty. We have analysed longitudinal genome-wide changes in DNA methylation in peripheral blood samples (n = 102) obtained from 51 healthy children before and after pubertal onset. We show that changes in single methylation sites are tightly associated with physiological pubertal transition and altered reproductive hormone levels. These methylation sites cluster in and around genes enriched for biological functions related to pubertal development. Importantly, we identified that methylation of the genomic region containing the promoter of TRIP6 was co-ordinately regulated as a function of pubertal development. In accordance, immunohistochemistry identified TRIP6 in adult, but not pre-pubertal, testicular Leydig cells and circulating TRIP6 levels doubled during puberty. Using elastic net prediction models, methylation patterns predicted pubertal development more accurately than chronological age. We demonstrate for the first time that pubertal attainment of secondary sexual characteristics is mirrored by changes in DNA methylation patterns in peripheral blood. Thus, modulations of the epigenome seem involved in regulation of the individual pubertal timing
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