A New FP7 Project Demonstrating CO2 Capture Technologies

AbstractThe OCTAVIUS project (Optimisation of CO2 Capture Technology Allowing Verification and Implementation at Utility Scale) has started on March 1st 2012 for a period of 5 years, as part of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Gathering 15 European and 2 South African partners, OCTAVIUS was conceived as contributing to demonstration of integrated concepts for zero emission power plants covering all the components needed for power generation as well as CO2 post-combustion capture and compression facilities.This paper presents the objectives of the project, its main expected outcomes and the results obtained within the first six months period

A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users

On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their characterisation still requires experimenting. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant footprint on Twitter. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream. The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics, enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise specific classes of online users. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore

Animal Behaviour Packs a Punch: From Parasitism to Production, Pollution and Prevention in Grazing Livestock

Behaviour is often the fundamental driver of disease transmission, where behaviours of individuals can be seen to scale up to epidemiological patterns seen at the population level. Here we focus on animal behaviour, and its role in parasite transmission to track its knock-on consequences for parasitism, production and pollution. Livestock face a nutrition versus parasitism trade-off in grazing environments where faeces creates both a nutritional benefit, fertilizing the surrounding sward, but also a parasite risk from infective nematode larvae contaminating the sward. The grazing decisions of ruminants depend on the perceived costs and benefits of the trade-off, which depend on the variations in both environmental (e.g., amounts of faeces) and animal factors (e.g., physiological state). Such grazing decisions determine the intake of both nutrients and parasites, affecting livestock growth rates and production efficiency. This impacts on the greenhouse gas costs of ruminant livestock production via two main mechanisms: (1) slower growth results in longer durations on-farm and (2) parasitised animals produce more methane per unit food intake. However, the sensitivity of behaviour to host parasite state offers opportunities for early detection of parasitism and control. Remote monitoring technology such as accelerometers can detect parasite-induced sickness behaviours soon after exposure, before impacts on growth, and thus may be used for targeting individuals for early treatment. We conclude that livestock host x parasite interactions are at the centre of the global challenges of food security and climate change, and that understanding livestock behaviour can contribute to solving both

The climatic importance of uncertainties in regional aerosol-cloud radiative forcings over recent decades

This is the final version of the article. Available from American Meteorological Society via the DOI in this record.Regional patterns of aerosol radiative forcing are important for understanding climate change on decadal time scales. Uncertainty in aerosol forcing is likely to vary regionally and seasonally because of the short aerosol lifetime and heterogeneous emissions. Here the sensitivity of regional aerosol cloud albedo effect (CAE) forcing to 31 aerosol process parameters and emission fluxes is quantified between 1978 and 2008. The effects of parametric uncertainties on calculations of the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation are found to be spatially and temporally dependent. Regional uncertainty contributions of opposite sign cancel in global-mean forcing calculations, masking the regional importance of some parameters. Parameters that contribute little to uncertainty in Earth's global energy balance during recent decades make significant contributions to regional forcing variance. Aerosol forcing sensitivities are quantified within 11 climatically important regions, where surface temperatures are thought to influence large-scale climate effects. Substantial simulated uncertainty in CAE forcing in the eastern Pacific leaves open the possibility that apparent shifts in the mean ENSO state may result from a forced aerosol signal on multidecadal time scales. A likely negative aerosol CAE forcing in the tropical North Atlantic calls into question the relationship between Northern Hemisphere aerosol emission reductions and CAE forcing of sea surface temperatures in the main Atlantic hurricane development region on decadal time scales. Simulated CAE forcing uncertainty is large in the North Pacific, suggesting that the role of the CAE in altering Pacific tropical storm frequency and intensity is also highly uncertain.Data can be made available upon request from the corresponding author. L. A. Regayre is funded by a Doctoral Training Grant from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and a CASE studentship with the Met Office Hadley Centre. B. B. B. Booth was supported by the Joint UK DECC/Defra Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme (GA01101). K. S. Carslaw acknowledges funding from the Royal Society Wolfson Award. We acknowledge funding from NERC under AEROS and GASSP Grants NE/G006172/1 and NE/J024252/1. This work made use of the facilities of N8 HPC provided and funded by the N8 consortium and EPSRC (EP/K000225/1). The Met Office Hadley Centre is coordinated by the University of Leeds and the University of Manchester. The authors thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this article

Animal Behaviour Packs a Punch: From Parasitism to Production, Pollution and Prevention in Grazing Livestock

Behaviour is often the fundamental driver of disease transmission, where behaviours of individuals can be seen to scale up to epidemiological patterns seen at the population level. Here we focus on animal behaviour, and its role in parasite transmission to track its knock-on consequences for parasitism, production and pollution. Livestock face a nutrition versus parasitism trade-off in grazing environments where faeces creates both a nutritional benefit, fertilizing the surrounding sward, but also a parasite risk from infective nematode larvae contaminating the sward. The grazing decisions of ruminants depend on the perceived costs and benefits of the trade-off, which depend on the variations in both environmental (e.g., amounts of faeces) and animal factors (e.g., physiological state). Such grazing decisions determine the intake of both nutrients and parasites, affecting livestock growth rates and production efficiency. This impacts on the greenhouse gas costs of ruminant livestock production via two main mechanisms: (1) slower growth results in longer durations on-farm and (2) parasitised animals produce more methane per unit food intake. However, the sensitivity of behaviour to host parasite state offers opportunities for early detection of parasitism and control. Remote monitoring technology such as accelerometers can detect parasite-induced sickness behaviours soon after exposure, before impacts on growth, and thus may be used for targeting individuals for early treatment. We conclude that livestock host x parasite interactions are at the centre of the global challenges of food security and climate change, and that understanding livestock behaviour can contribute to solving both

Warm Water and Cool Nests Are Best. How Global Warming Might Influence Hatchling Green Turtle Swimming Performance

For sea turtles nesting on beaches surrounded by coral reefs, the most important element of hatchling recruitment is escaping predation by fish as they swim across the fringing reef, and as a consequence hatchlings that minimize their exposure to fish predation by minimizing the time spent crossing the fringing reef have a greater chance of surviving the reef crossing. One way to decrease the time required to cross the fringing reef is to maximize swimming speed. We found that both water temperature and nest temperature influence swimming performance of hatchling green turtles, but in opposite directions. Warm water increases swimming ability, with hatchling turtles swimming in warm water having a faster stroke rate, while an increase in nest temperature decreases swimming ability with hatchlings from warm nests producing less thrust per stroke

Are there asymmetries in the effects of training on the conditional male wage distribution?

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel, we utilise both ordinary least squares and QR techniques to estimate associations between work-related training and wages for private sector men in ten European Union countries. Our results show that, for the majority of countries, there is a fairly uniform association between training and hourly wages across the conditional wage distribution. However, there are considerable differences across countries in mean associations between training and wages

In situ XAFS Study of Palladium Electrodeposition at the Liquid/Liquid Interface

We report the use of XAFS (X-ray absorption fine structure) as an in situ method to follow the electrochemically driven deposition of palladium nanoparticles at a liquid/liquid interface. A novel glass/plastic hybrid electrochemical cell was used to enable control of the potential applied to the liquid/liquid interface. In situ measurements indicate that the nucleation of metallic nanoparticles can be triggered through chronoamperometry or cyclic voltammetry. In contrast to spontaneous nucleation at the liquid/liquid interface, whereby fluctuations in Pd oxidation state and concentration are observed, under a fixed interfacial potential the growth process occurs at a steady rate leading to a build-up of palladium at the interface. Raman spectroscopy of the deposit suggests that the organic electrolyte binds directly to the surface of the deposited nanoparticles. It was found that the introduction of citric acid results in the formation of spherical nanoparticles at the interface

Is The Iberian-African plates boundary well defined in the Alboran Basin of the Westernmost Mediterranean?

European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly 2018, 8-13 April 2018, Vienna, Austria.-- 1 pageThe Alboran Basin (Westernmost Mediterranean) hosts the boundary between the Iberian and African plates. Traditionally, this boundary has been described as a wide deformation zone, in which the convergence is accommodated by several onshore-offshore tectonic structures. Extensional processes that led to the Alboran Basin formation took place from the Early to the Late Miocene, led by slab roll-back and slab tearing. During the Plio-Quaternary, the basin has been deformed due to the Iberia – Africa tectonic plates convergence, producing the contractive reorganization of some structures at the basin. In this study, we estimate the total slip accommodated by the most prominent tectonic structures in the area of Ear-liest Pliocene in age. We use Pre-Stack Depth Migrated sections of the crustal structure, that allow us to analyzed the real geometry of these structures at depth and to measure strain. We use the deformation-related geometry of strata and faults to estimate slip on the main faults. Results show that estimated total slip accommodated by the main fault system may be similar (with error bounds) to the estimated plate convergence value since the Messinian time (∼24 km). Thus, slip on that faults may have accommodated most of the Iberian – African plate convergence during the Plio-Quaternary, revealing that the contractive reorganization of the Alboran basin is focused on a few first-order structures that act as lithospheric boundaries, rather than widespread and diffuse along the entire basinPeer Reviewe