Metal contamination budget at the river basin scale: an original Flux-Flow Analysis (F2A) for the Seine River

Material flow analysis and environmental contamination analysis are merged into a Flux-Flow analysis (F2A) as illustrated for the metal circulation in the Seine River catchment. F2A combines about 30 metal flows in the anthroposphere (14 million people) and/or metal fluxes in the environment (atmosphere, soils, and aquatic system) originating from two dozens of sources. The nature and quality of data is very heterogeneous going from downscaled national economic statistics to upscaled daily environmental surveys. <br><br> A triple integration is performed: space integration over the catchment (65 000 km<sup>2</sup>), time integration for the 1950–2000 trend analysed at 5 year resolution, and a conceptual integration resulting in two F2A indicators. <br><br> Despite the various data sources an average metal circulation is established for the 1994–2003 period and illustrated for zinc: (i) metal circulation in the anthroposphere is now two orders of magnitude higher than river outputs, (ii) long term metal storage, and their potential leaks, in soils, wastedumps and structures is also orders of magnitude higher than present river fluxes. Trend analysis is made through two F2A indicators, the per capita excess load at the river outlet and the leakage ratio (excess fluxes/metal demand). From 1950 to 2000, they both show a ten fold improvement of metal recycling while the metal demand has increased by 2.5 to 5 for Cd, Cu, Cr, Pb and Zn, and the population by 50%

Marketing and compromising for sustainability:Competing orders of worth in the North Atlantic

The purpose of our paper is to propose that compromising is a constitutive characteristic of those marketing systems that entail matters of public interest or concern. In such markets, actors design compromises as they encounter criticisms of and contending justifications for the market’s products, as these refer to price, efficiency in production and use, regulatory compliance, or ecological sustainability. Tests and justifications are vital in order to determine what is valuable and by which measure. As a theory framework, the economic sociology of conventions (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006) provides a basis for assessing these contests, compromises and justifications over the issue of worth in a marketing context. Through an ethnographic study of the regulated activities of chemicals service companies supporting the upstream petroleum industry, we assess how actors evaluate and justify the market’s products and services in this environmentally sensitive setting by means of tests drawing from different orders of worth: the green, the industrial and the market order. Our contributions show that by artful and pragmatic compromising around exchanges, actors in marketing systems can balance several conflicting orders of worth over the question of worth without needing to converge on an overriding institutional logic

Human rights and ethical reasoning : capabilities, conventions and spheres of public action

This interdisciplinary article argues that human rights must be understood in terms of opportunities for social participation and that social and economic rights are integral to any discussion of the subject. We offer both a social constructionist and a normative framework for a sociology of human rights which reaches beyond liberal individualism, combining insights from the work of Amartya Sen and from French convention theory. Following Sen, we argue that human rights are founded on the promotion of human capabilities as ethical demands shaped by public reasoning. Using French convention theory, we show how the terms of such deliberation are shaped by different constructions of collectively held values and the compromises reached between them. We conclude by demonstrating how our approach offers a new perspective on spheres of public action and the role these should play in promoting social cohesion, individual capabilities and human rights

Metal contamination budget at the river basin scale: an original Flux-Flow Analysis (F2A) for the Seine River

International audienc

Investigating the "Discrete Memory" of the Seveso Disaster in Italy

In this text, I bring a long term perspective to bear on an industrial accident that resulted in the contamination of an inhabited territory. Going beyond the immediate temporality of the event itself, I seek to recount the manner in which a disaster persists, is diluted and transformed in the life of the affected community. I also question the link often drawn in the literature between the experience of disaster and the emergence of a "local risk culture." From a reflexive point of view, finally, I seek to shed light upon and discuss some of the difficulties and tensions involved in research that above all aims to understand how a population responds to the radical disruption of its relationship to a territory

Covalent enzyme coupling on cellulose acetate membranes for glucose sensor development

International audienceMethods for immobilizing glucose oxidase (GOx) on cellulose acetate (CA) membranes are compared. The optimal method involves covalent coupling of bovine serum albumin (BSA) to CA membrane and a subsequent reaction of the membrane with GOx, which has previously been activated with an excess of p-benzoquinone. This coupling procedure is fairly reproducible and allows the preparation of thin membranes (5-20 µm) showing high surface activities (1-3 U/cm2) which are stable over a period of 1-3 months. Electrochemical and radiolabeling experiments show that enzyme inactivation as a result of immobilization is negligible. A good correlation between surface activity of membranes and their GOx load is observed

The metaRbolomics Toolbox in Bioconductor and beyond

Metabolomics aims to measure and characterise the complex composition of metabolites in a biological system. Metabolomics studies involve sophisticated analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and generate large amounts of high-dimensional and complex experimental data. Open source processing and analysis tools are of major interest in light of innovative, open and reproducible science. The scientific community has developed a wide range of open source software, providing freely available advanced processing and analysis approaches. The programming and statistics environment R has emerged as one of the most popular environments to process and analyse Metabolomics datasets. A major benefit of such an environment is the possibility of connecting different tools into more complex workflows. Combining reusable data processing R scripts with the experimental data thus allows for open, reproducible research. This review provides an extensive overview of existing packages in R for different steps in a typical computational metabolomics workflow, including data processing, biostatistics, metabolite annotation and identification, and biochemical network and pathway analysis. Multifunctional workflows, possible user interfaces and integration into workflow management systems are also reviewed. In total, this review summarises more than two hundred metabolomics specific packages primarily available on CRAN, Bioconductor and GitHub

Interoperable and scalable data analysis with microservices: applications in metabolomics.

Developing a robust and performant data analysis workflow that integrates all necessary components whilst still being able to scale over multiple compute nodes is a challenging task. We introduce a generic method based on the microservice architecture, where software tools are encapsulated as Docker containers that can be connected into scientific workflows and executed using the Kubernetes container orchestrator. We developed a Virtual Research Environment (VRE) which facilitates rapid integration of new tools and developing scalable and interoperable workflows for performing metabolomics data analysis. The environment can be launched on-demand on cloud resources and desktop computers. IT-expertise requirements on the user side are kept to a minimum, and workflows can be re-used effortlessly by any novice user. We validate our method in the field of metabolomics on two mass spectrometry, one nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and one fluxomics study. We showed that the method scales dynamically with increasing availability of computational resources. We demonstrated that the method facilitates interoperability using integration of the major software suites resulting in a turn-key workflow encompassing all steps for mass-spectrometry-based metabolomics including preprocessing, statistics and identification. Microservices is a generic methodology that can serve any scientific discipline and opens up for new types of large-scale integrative science. The PhenoMeNal consortium maintains a web portal (https://portal.phenomenal-h2020.eu) providing a GUI for launching the Virtual Research Environment. The GitHub repository https://github.com/phnmnl/ hosts the source code of all projects. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Development of a biosensor for urea assay based on amidase inhibition, using an ion-selective electrode

A biosensor for urea has been developed based on the observation that urea is a powerful active-site inhibitor of amidase, which catalyzes the hydrolysis of amides such as acetamide to produce ammonia and the corresponding organic acid. Cell-free extract from Pseudomonas aeruginosa was the source of amidase (acylamide hydrolase, EC 3.5.1.4) which was immobilized on a polyethersulfone membrane in the presence of glutaraldehyde; anion-selective electrode for ammonium ions was used for biosensor development. Analysis of variance was used for optimization of the biosensorresponse and showed that 30 mu L of cell-free extract containing 7.47 mg protein mL(-1), 2 mu L of glutaraldehyde (5%, v/v) and 10 mu L of gelatin (15%, w/v) exhibited the highest response. Optimization of other parameters showed that pH 7.2 and 30 min incubation time were optimum for incubation ofmembranes in urea. The biosensor exhibited a linear response in the range of 4.0-10.0 mu M urea, a detection limit of 2.0 mu M for urea, a response timeof 20 s, a sensitivity of 58.245 % per mu M urea and a storage stability of over 4 months. It was successfully used for quantification of urea in samples such as wine and milk; recovery experiments were carried out which revealed an average substrate recovery of 94.9%. The urea analogs hydroxyurea, methylurea and thiourea inhibited amidase activity by about 90%, 10% and 0%, respectively, compared with urea inhibition