1,069 research outputs found
Objectives of public participation: Which actors should be involved in the decision making for river restorations?
River restoration as a measure to improve both flood protection and ecological quality has become a common practice in river management. This new practice, however, has also become a source of conflicts arising from a neglect of the social aspects in river restoration projects. Therefore appropriate public involvement strategies have been recommended in recent years as a way of coping with these conflicts. However, an open question remains: Which stakeholders should be involved in the decision-making process? This, in turn, raises the question of the appropriate objectives of public participation. This study aims to answer these questions drawing on two case studies of Swiss river restoration projects and a related representative nationwide survey. Our findings suggest that public involvement should not be restricted to a small circle of influential stakeholder groups. As restoration projects have been found to have a substantial impact on the quality of life of the local population, avoiding conflicts is only one of several objectives of the involvement process. Including the wider public provides a special opportunity to promote social objectives, such as trust building and identification of people with their local environment
MetaCrop 2.0: managing and exploring information about crop plant metabolism
MetaCrop is a manually curated repository of high-quality data about plant metabolism, providing different levels of detail from overview maps of primary metabolism to kinetic data of enzymes. It contains information about seven major crop plants with high agronomical importance and two model plants. MetaCrop is intended to support research aimed at the improvement of crops for both nutrition and industrial use. It can be accessed via web, web services and an add-on to the Vanted software. Here, we present several novel developments of the MetaCrop system and the extended database content. MetaCrop is now available in version 2.0 at http://metacrop.ipk-gatersleben.de
Influence of tunneling on electron screening in low energy nuclear reactions in laboratories
Using a semiclassical mean field theory, we show that the screening potential
exhibits a characteristic radial variation in the tunneling region in sharp
contrast to the assumption of the constant shift in all previous works. Also,
we show that the explicit treatment of the tunneling region gives a larger
screening energy than that in the conventional approach, which studies the time
evolution only in the classical region and estimates the screening energy from
the screening potential at the external classical turning point. This
modification becomes important if the electronic state is not a single
adiabatic state at the external turning point either by pre-tunneling
transitions of the electronic state or by the symmetry of the system even if
there is no essential change with the electronic state in the tunneling region.Comment: 3 figure
Meta-All: a system for managing metabolic pathway information
BACKGROUND: Many attempts are being made to understand biological subjects at a systems level. A major resource for these approaches are biological databases, storing manifold information about DNA, RNA and protein sequences including their functional and structural motifs, molecular markers, mRNA expression levels, metabolite concentrations, protein-protein interactions, phenotypic traits or taxonomic relationships. The use of these databases is often hampered by the fact that they are designed for special application areas and thus lack universality. Databases on metabolic pathways, which provide an increasingly important foundation for many analyses of biochemical processes at a systems level, are no exception from the rule. Data stored in central databases such as KEGG, BRENDA or SABIO-RK is often limited to read-only access. If experimentalists want to store their own data, possibly still under investigation, there are two possibilities. They can either develop their own information system for managing that own data, which is very time-consuming and costly, or they can try to store their data in existing systems, which is often restricted. Hence, an out-of-the-box information system for managing metabolic pathway data is needed. RESULTS: We have designed META-ALL, an information system that allows the management of metabolic pathways, including reaction kinetics, detailed locations, environmental factors and taxonomic information. Data can be stored together with quality tags and in different parallel versions. META-ALL uses Oracle DBMS and Oracle Application Express. We provide the META-ALL information system for download and use. In this paper, we describe the database structure and give information about the tools for submitting and accessing the data. As a first application of META-ALL, we show how the information contained in a detailed kinetic model can be stored and accessed. CONCLUSION: META-ALL is a system for managing information about metabolic pathways. It facilitates the handling of pathway-related data and is designed to help biochemists and molecular biologists in their daily research. It is available on the Web at and can be downloaded free of charge and installed locally
Upside-Down Preference Reversal: How to Override Ceteris-Paribus Preferences?
Specific preference statements may reverse general prefer-ence statements, thus constituting a change of attitude in par-ticular situations. We define a semantics of preference rever-sal by relaxing the popular ceteris-paribus principle. We char-acterize preference reversal as default reasoning and we link it to prioritized Pareto-optimization, which permits a natu-ral computation of preferred solutions. The resulting method simplifies elicitation, representation, and utilization of com-plex preference relations and may thus enable a more realistic preference handling in personalized decision support systems and in preference-based intelligent systems
Microfluidically synthesized Au, Pd and AuPd nanoparticles supported on SnO 2 for gas sensing applications
Atomic effects in astrophysical nuclear reactions
Two models are presented for the description of the electron screening
effects that appear in laboratory nuclear reactions at astrophysical energies.
The two-electron screening energy of the first model agrees very well with the
recent LUNA experimental result for the break-up reaction , which so far defies all available theoretical models.
Moreover, multi-electron effects that enhance laboratory reactions of the CNO
cycle and other advanced nuclear burning stages, are also studied by means of
the Thomas-Fermi model, deriving analytical formulae that establish a lower and
upper limit for the associated screening energy. The results of the second
model, which show a very satisfactory compatibility with the adiabatic
approximation ones, are expected to be particularly useful in future
experiments for a more accurate determination of the CNO astrophysical factors.Comment: 14 RevTex pages + 2 ps (revised) figures. Phys.Rev.C (in production
Fusion rate enhancement due to energy spread of colliding nuclei
Experimental results for sub-barrier nuclear fusion reactions show cross
section enhancements with respect to bare nuclei which are generally larger
than those expected according to electron screening calculations. We point out
that energy spread of target or projectile nuclei is a mechanism which
generally provides fusion enhancement. We present a general formula for
calculating the enhancement factor and we provide quantitative estimate for
effects due to thermal motion, vibrations inside atomic, molecular or crystal
system, and due to finite beam energy width. All these effects are marginal at
the energies which are presently measurable, however they have to be considered
in future experiments at still lower energies. This study allows to exclude
several effects as possible explanation of the observed anomalous fusion
enhancements, which remain a mistery.Comment: 17 pages with 3 ps figure included. Revtex styl
Spin-orbit coupling and intrinsic spin mixing in quantum dots
Spin-orbit coupling effects are studied in quantum dots in InSb, a narrow-gap
material. Competition between different Rashba and Dresselhaus terms is shown
to produce wholesale changes in the spectrum. The large (and negative)
-factor and the Rashba field produce states where spin is no longer a good
quantum number and intrinsic flips occur at moderate magnetic fields. For dots
with two electrons, a singlet-triplet mixing occurs in the ground state, with
observable signatures in intraband FIR absorption, and possible importance in
quantum computation.Comment: REVTEX4 text with 3 figures (high resolution figs available by
request). Submitted to PR
The North Atlantic Oscillation controls air pollution transport to the Arctic
This paper studies the interannual variability of pollution pathways from northern hemisphere (NH) continents into the Arctic. Using a 15-year model simulation of the dispersion of passive tracers representative of anthropogenic emissions from NH continents, we show that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) exerts a strong control on the pollution transport into the Arctic, particularly in winter and spring. For tracer lifetimes of 5 (30) days, surface concentrations in the Arctic winter are enhanced by about 70% (30%) during high phases of the NAO (in the following referred to as NAO<sup>+</sup>) compared to its low phases (NAO<sup>-</sup>). This is mainly due to great differences in the pathways of European pollution during NAO<sup>+</sup> and NAO<sup>-</sup> phases, respectively, but reinforced by North American pollution, which is also enhanced in the Arctic during NAO<sup>+ </sup>phases. In contrast, Asian pollution in the Arctic does not significantly depend on the NAO phase. The model results are confirmed using remotely-sensed NO<sub>2</sub> vertical atmospheric columns obtained from seven years of satellite measurements, which show enhanced northward NO<sub>2</sub> transport and reduced NO<sub>2</sub> outflow into the North Atlantic from Central Europe during NAO<sup>+</sup> phases. Surface measurements of carbon monoxide (CO) and black carbon at high-latitude stations further corroborate the overall picture of enhanced Arctic pollution levels during NAO<sup>+</sup> phase
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