Environmental performance rating and disclosure - China's green-watch program

This paper describes a new incentive-based pollution control program in China in which the environmental performance of firms is rated and reported to the public. Firms are rated from best to worst using five colors-green, blue, yellow, red, and black-and the ratings are disseminated to the public through the media. The impact has been substantial, suggesting that public disclosure provides a significant incentive for firms to improve their environmental performance. The paper focuses on the experience of the first two disclosure programs, in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province and Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. Successful implementation of these programs at two very different levels of economic and institutional development suggests that public disclosure should be feasible in most of China. The Zhenjiang and Hohhot experiences have also shown that performance disclosure can significantly reduce pollution, even in settings where environmental nongovernmental organizations are not very active and there is no formal channel for public participation in environmental regulation.Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Decentralization,Water and Industry,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,National Governance,Health Economics&Finance

Supernova Light Curves Powered by Young Magnetars

We show that energy deposited into an expanding supernova remnant by a highly magnetic (B ~ 5 x 10^14 G) neutron star spinning at an initial period of P ~ 2-20 ms can substantially brighten the light curve. For magnetars with parameters in this range, the rotational energy is released on a timescale of days to weeks, which is comparable to the effective diffusion time through the supernova remnant. The late time energy injection can then be radiated without suffering overwhelming adiabatic expansion losses. The magnetar input also produces a central bubble which sweeps ejecta into an internal dense shell, resulting in a prolonged period of nearly constant photospheric velocity in the observed spectra. We derive analytic expressions for the light curve rise time and peak luminosity as a function of B, P and the properties of the supernova ejecta that allow for direct inferences about the underlying magnetar in bright supernovae. We perform numerical radiation hydrodynamical calculations of a few specific instances and compare the resulting light curves to observed events. Magnetar activity is likely to impact more than a few percent of all core collapse supernovae, and may naturally explain some of the brightest events ever seen (e.g., SN 2005ap and SN 2008es) at L > 10^44 ergs/s.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to Ap

Cortical AAV-CNTF gene therapy combined with intraspinal mesenchymal precursor cell transplantation promotes functional and morphological outcomes after spinal cord injury in adult rats

Ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) promotes survival and enhances long-distance regeneration of injured axons in parts of the adult CNS. Here we tested whether CNTF gene therapy targeting corticospinal neurons (CSN) in motor-related regions of the cerebral cortex promotes plasticity and regrowth of axons projecting into the female adult F344 rat spinal cord after moderate thoracic (T10) contusion injury (SCI). Cortical neurons were transduced with a bicistronic adeno-associated viral vector (AAV1) expressing a secretory form of CNTF coupled to mCHERRY (AAV-CNTFmCherry) or with control AAV only (AAV-GFP) two weeks prior to SCI. In some animals, viable or nonviable F344 rat mesenchymal precursor cells (rMPCs) were injected into the lesion site two weeks after SCI to modulate the inhibitory environment. Treatment with AAV-CNTFmCherry, as well as with AAV-CNTFmCherry combined with rMPCs, yielded functional improvements over AAV-GFP alone, as assessed by open-field and Ladderwalk analyses. Cyst size was significantly reduced in the AAV-CNTFmCherry plus viable rMPC treatment group. Cortical injections of biotinylated dextran amine (BDA) revealed more BDA-stained axons rostral and alongside cysts in the AAV-CNTFmCherry versus AAV-GFP groups. After AAV-CNTFmCherry treatments, many sprouting mCherry-immunopositive axons were seen rostral to the SCI, and axons were also occasionally found caudal to the injury site. These data suggest that CNTF has the potential to enhance corticospinal repair by transducing parent CNS populations

Observations of SN 2017ein Reveal Shock Breakout Emission and A Massive Progenitor Star for a Type Ic Supernova

We present optical and ultraviolet observations of nearby type Ic supernova SN 2017ein as well as detailed analysis of its progenitor properties from both the early-time observations and the prediscovery Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images. The optical light curves started from within one day to $\sim$275 days after explosion, and optical spectra range from $\sim$2 days to $\sim$90 days after explosion. Compared to other normal SNe Ic like SN 2007gr and SN 2013ge, \mbox{SN 2017ein} seems to have more prominent C{\footnotesize II} absorption and higher expansion velocities in early phases, suggestive of relatively lower ejecta mass. The earliest photometry obtained for \mbox{SN 2017ein} show indications of shock cooling. The best-fit obtained by including a shock cooling component gives an estimate of the envelope mass as $\sim$0.02 M$_{\odot}$ and stellar radius as 8$\pm$4 R$_{\odot}$. Examining the pre-explosion images taken with the HST WFPC2, we find that the SN position coincides with a luminous and blue point-like source, with an extinction-corrected absolute magnitude of M$_V$$\sim$$-$8.2 mag and M$_I$$\sim$$-$7.7 mag.Comparisons of the observations to the theoretical models indicate that the counterpart source was either a single WR star or a binary with whose members had high initial masses, or a young compact star cluster. To further distinguish between different scenarios requires revisiting the site of the progenitor with HST after the SN fades away.Comment: 28 pages, 19 figures; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Phase Field Model for Three-Dimensional Dendritic Growth with Fluid Flow

We study the effect of fluid flow on three-dimensional (3D) dendrite growth using a phase-field model on an adaptive finite element grid. In order to simulate 3D fluid flow, we use an averaging method for the flow problem coupled to the phase-field method and the Semi-Implicit Approximated Projection Method (SIAPM). We describe a parallel implementation for the algorithm, using Charm++ FEM framework, and demonstrate its efficiency. We introduce an improved method for extracting dendrite tip position and tip radius, facilitating accurate comparison to theory. We benchmark our results for two-dimensional (2D) dendrite growth with solvability theory and previous results, finding them to be in good agreement. The physics of dendritic growth with fluid flow in three dimensions is very different from that in two dimensions, and we discuss the origin of this behavior

Radio emission and nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration of cosmic rays in the supernova SN 1993J

The extensive observations of the supernova SN 1993J at radio wavelengths make this object a unique target for the study of particle acceleration in a supernova shock. To describe the radio synchrotron emission we use a model that couples a semianalytic description of nonlinear diffusive shock acceleration with self-similar solutions for the hydrodynamics of the supernova expansion. The synchrotron emission, which is assumed to be produced by relativistic electrons propagating in the postshock plasma, is worked out from radiative transfer calculations that include the process of synchrotron self-absorption. The model is applied to explain the morphology of the radio emission deduced from high-resolution VLBI imaging observations and the measured time evolution of the total flux density at six frequencies. Both the light curves and the morphology of the radio emission indicate that the magnetic field was strongly amplified in the blast wave region shortly after the explosion, possibly via the nonresonant regime of the cosmic-ray streaming instability operating in the shock precursor. The turbulent magnetic field was not damped behind the shock but carried along by the plasma flow in the downstream region. Cosmic-ray protons were efficiently produced by diffusive shock acceleration at the blast wave. We find that during the first ~8.5 years after the explosion, about 19% of the total energy processed by the forward shock was converted to cosmic-ray energy. However, the shock remained weakly modified by the cosmic-ray pressure. The high magnetic field amplification implies that protons were rapidly accelerated to energies well above 1 PeV. The results obtained for this supernova support the scenario that massive stars exploding into their former stellar wind are a major source of high-energy Galactic cosmic rays.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Multicomponent and Variable Velocity Galactic Outflow in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations

We develop a new ``Multicomponent and Variable Velocity'' (MVV) galactic outflow model for cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations. The MVV wind model reflects the fact that the wind material can arise from different phases in the interstellar medium (ISM), and the mass-loading factor in the MVV model is a function of galaxy stellar mass. We find that the simulation with the MVV outflow has the following characteristics: (i) the intergalactic medium (IGM) is hardly heated up, and the mean IGM temperature is almost the same as in the no-wind run; (ii) it has lower cosmic star formation rates (SFRs) compared to the no-wind run, but higher SFRs than the constant velocity wind run; (iii) it roughly agrees with the observed IGM metallicity, and roughly follows the observed evolution of Omega(Civ); (iv) the lower mass galaxies have larger mass-loading factors, and the low-mass end of galaxy stellar mass function is flatter than in the previous simulations. Therefore, the MVV outflow model mildly alleviates the problem of too steep galaxy stellar mass function seen in the previous SPH simulations. In summary, the new MVV outflow model shows reasonable agreement with observations, and gives better results than the constant velocity wind model.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, and 1 table, accepted for publication in MNRAS. A full resolution version is available at http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~jhchoi/astro-ph/vwind.pd

Corrected and Republished from: "A Novel, Multiple-Antigen Pneumococcal Vaccine Protects against Lethal Streptococcus pneumoniae Challenge"

Current vaccination against Streptococcus pneumoniae uses vaccines based on capsular polysaccharides from selected serotypes and has led to nonvaccine serotype replacement disease. We have investigated an alternative serotype-independent approach, using multiple-antigen vaccines (MAV) prepared from S. pneumoniae TIGR4 lysates enriched for surface proteins by a chromatography step after culture under conditions that induce expression of heat shock proteins (Hsp; thought to be immune adjuvants). Proteomics and immunoblot analyses demonstrated that, compared to standard bacterial lysates, MAV was enriched with Hsps and contained several recognized protective protein antigens, including pneumococcal surface protein A (PspA) and pneumolysin (Ply). Vaccination of rodents with MAV induced robust antibody responses to multiple serotypes, including nonpneumococcal conjugate vaccine serotypes. Homologous and heterologous strains of S. pneumoniae were opsonized after incubation in sera from vaccinated rodents. In mouse models, active vaccination with MAV significantly protected against pneumonia, while passive transfer of rabbit serum from MAV-vaccinated rabbits significantly protected against sepsis caused by both homologous and heterologous S. pneumoniae strains. Direct comparison of MAV preparations made with or without the heat shock step showed no clear differences in protein antigen content and antigenicity, suggesting that the chromatography step rather than Hsp induction improved MAV antigenicity. Overall, these data suggest that the MAV approach may provide serotype-independent protection against S. pneumoniae

Differential regulation of Purkinje cell dendritic spines in rolling mouse Nagoya (tgrol/tgrol), P/Q type calcium channel (α1A/Cav2.1) mutant

Voltage dependent calcium channels (VDCC) participate in regulation of neuronal Ca2+. The Rolling mouse Nagoya (Cacna1atg-rol) is a spontaneous P/Q type VDCC mutant, which has been suggested as an animal model for some human neurological diseases such as autosomal dominant cerebellar ataxia (SCA6), familial hemiplegic migraine and episodic ataxia type-2. Morphology of Purkinje cell (PC) dendritic spine is suggested to be regulated by signal molecules such as Ca2+ and by interactions with afferent inputs. The amplitude of excitatory postsynaptic current was decreased in parallel fiber (PF) to PC synapses, whereas apparently increased in climbing fiber (CF) to PC synapses in rolling mice Nagoya. We have studied synaptic morphology changes in cerebella of this mutant strain. We previously found altered synapses between PF varicosity and PC dendritic spines. To study dendritic spine plasticity of PC in the condition of insufficient P/Q type VDCC function, we used high voltage electron microscopy (HVEM). We measured the density and length of PC dendritic spines at tertiary braches. We observed statistically a significant decrease in spine density as well as shorter spine length in rolling mice compared to wild type mice at tertiary dendritic braches. In proximal PC dendrites, however, there were more numerous dendritic spines in rolling mice Nagoya. The differential regulation of rolling PC spines at tertiary and proximal dendrites in rolling mice Nagoya suggests that two major excitatory afferent systems may be regulated reciprocally in the cerebellum of rolling mouse Nagoya