Emerging pollutants in developing countries: Optimising sustainable treatment solutions

This is the author accepted manuscriptOver the past decade the research surrounding the occurrence, source, fate and removal of emerging pollutants has been increasing. The aim of this study was to create an add-on program which analyses the removal of emerging pollutants, to an existing decision support tool (WiSDOM). The tool was also used to evaluate the performance of each optimal solution in terms of removal of conventional pollutants using Multi Objective Genetic Algorithms and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis. Information was collated regarding minimum and maximum concentrations of emerging pollutants for surface water, groundwater, untreated wastewater, drinking water and treated wastewater. This information was used to populate an Excel Spreadsheet Program (ESP) which analysed the removal efficiencies of 13 different emerging pollutants for 42 wastewater treatment unit processes. The ESP is incorporated into the WiSDOM tool to allow the tool to calculate the removal of emerging pollutants. Three main scenarios were created to test the application of the tool and ESP. Scenario 1 focussed on the removal of emerging pollutants from from areas effected by tourism at different scales. Scenario 2 looked at the treatment suited for the removal of emerging pollutants from different socio-economic regions. Lastly, Scenario 3 looked at removing emerging pollutants from hospital and industrial wastewater. The scenarios were focused on wastewater treatment in India and investigated the removal of 13 emerging pollutants commonly found in India.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)European CommissionNatural Environment Research Council (NERC

A systematic assessment of the pro-poor reach of development bank investments in urban sanitation

This paper presents an assessment of development banks’ investment in urban sanitation between 2010 and 2017. It reveals an overall increase in investment, yet this falls short of bridging the significant financing gap in the sector. The paper also assesses the major areas of investment to show that, on the infrastructure side, 20 times more money is invested in sewerage than faecal sludge management, while on the enabling environment side, institutional capacity building is the most financed area. Using a new pro-poor assessment tool, an appraisal was made of the extent to which the investments were pro-poor. This analysis indicates that over half of investments, where an assessment could be made, were considered to be pro-poor, yet the use of the assessment tool reflects a lack of information within development bank reporting on the pro-poor nature of investments. Going forward, improving how development banks report on the pro-poor character of their investments would be a useful step for helping the sector assess the effectiveness of investments. The paper concludes by arguing that, despite progress, development banks should be even more ambitious in seeking to support pro-poor urban sanitation investments if the world is to overcome the urban sanitation challenge

An image retrieval framework for real-time endoscopic image retargeting

Purpose Serial endoscopic examinations of a patient are important for early diagnosis of malignancies in the gastrointestinal tract. However, retargeting for optical biopsy is challenging due to extensive tissue variations between examinations, requiring the method to be tolerant to these changes whilst enabling real-time retargeting. Method This work presents an image retrieval framework for inter-examination retargeting. We propose both a novel image descriptor tolerant of long-term tissue changes and a novel descriptor matching method in real time. The descriptor is based on histograms generated from regional intensity comparisons over multiple scales, offering stability over long-term appearance changes at the higher levels, whilst remaining discriminative at the lower levels. The matching method then learns a hashing function using random forests, to compress the string and allow for fast image comparison by a simple Hamming distance metric. Results A dataset that contains 13 in vivo gastrointestinal videos was collected from six patients, representing serial examinations of each patient, which includes videos captured with significant time intervals. Precision-recall for retargeting shows that our new descriptor outperforms a number of alternative descriptors, whilst our hashing method outperforms a number of alternative hashing approaches. Conclusion We have proposed a novel framework for optical biopsy in serial endoscopic examinations. A new descriptor, combined with a novel hashing method, achieves state-of-the-art retargeting, with validation on in vivo videos from six patients. Real-time performance also allows for practical integration without disturbing the existing clinical workflow

On Large Final-State Phases in Heavy Meson Decays

An attempt is made to identify circumstances under which the weak decays of $D$ and $B$ mesons may display large differences between eigenphases of strong final-state interactions. There are several cases in which rescattering from other final states appears to enhance decay rates with respect to estimates based on the factorization hypothesis.Comment: 24 pages, latex, 4 figures, to be submitted to Phys. Rev.

Direct observation of active material concentration gradients and crystallinity breakdown in LiFePO4 electrodes during charge/discharge cycling of lithium batteries

The phase changes that occur during discharge of an electrode comprised of LiFePO4, carbon, and PTFE binder have been studied in lithium half cells by using X-ray diffraction measurements in reflection geometry. Differences in the state of charge between the front and the back of LiFePO4 electrodes have been visualized. By modifying the X-ray incident angle the depth of penetration of the X-ray beam into the electrode was altered, allowing for the examination of any concentration gradients that were present within the electrode. At high rates of discharge the electrode side facing the current collector underwent limited lithium insertion while the electrode as a whole underwent greater than 50% of discharge. This behavior is consistent with depletion at high rate of the lithium content of the electrolyte contained in the electrode pores. Increases in the diffraction peak widths indicated a breakdown of crystallinity within the active material during cycling even during the relatively short duration of these experiments, which can also be linked to cycling at high rate

New Insights into White-Light Flare Emission from Radiative-Hydrodynamic Modeling of a Chromospheric Condensation

(abridged) The heating mechanism at high densities during M dwarf flares is poorly understood. Spectra of M dwarf flares in the optical and near-ultraviolet wavelength regimes have revealed three continuum components during the impulsive phase: 1) an energetically dominant blackbody component with a color temperature of T $\sim$ 10,000 K in the blue-optical, 2) a smaller amount of Balmer continuum emission in the near-ultraviolet at lambda $<$ 3646 Angstroms and 3) an apparent pseudo-continuum of blended high-order Balmer lines. These properties are not reproduced by models that employ a typical "solar-type" flare heating level in nonthermal electrons, and therefore our understanding of these spectra is limited to a phenomenological interpretation. We present a new 1D radiative-hydrodynamic model of an M dwarf flare from precipitating nonthermal electrons with a large energy flux of $10^{13}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$. The simulation produces bright continuum emission from a dense, hot chromospheric condensation. For the first time, the observed color temperature and Balmer jump ratio are produced self-consistently in a radiative-hydrodynamic flare model. We find that a T $\sim$ 10,000 K blackbody-like continuum component and a small Balmer jump ratio result from optically thick Balmer and Paschen recombination radiation, and thus the properties of the flux spectrum are caused by blue light escaping over a larger physical depth range compared to red and near-ultraviolet light. To model the near-ultraviolet pseudo-continuum previously attributed to overlapping Balmer lines, we include the extra Balmer continuum opacity from Landau-Zener transitions that result from merged, high order energy levels of hydrogen in a dense, partially ionized atmosphere. This reveals a new diagnostic of ambient charge density in the densest regions of the atmosphere that are heated during dMe and solar flares.Comment: 50 pages, 2 tables, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in the Solar Physics Topical Issue, "Solar and Stellar Flares". Version 2 (June 22, 2015): updated to include comments by Guest Editor. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11207-015-0708-

PEXO : a global modeling framework for nanosecond timing, microsecond astrometry, and μm/s radial velocities

54 pages, 2 tables, 19 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS, PEXO is available at https://github.com/phillippro/pexoThe ability to make independent detections of the signatures of exoplanets with complementary telescopes and instruments brings a new potential for robust identification of exoplanets and precision characterization. We introduce PEXO, a package for Precise EXOplanetology to facilitate the efficient modeling of timing, astrometry, and radial velocity data, which will benefit not only exoplanet science but also various astrophysical studies in general. PEXO is general enough to account for binary motion and stellar reflex motions induced by planetary companions and is precise enough to treat various relativistic effects both in the solar system and in the target system. We also model the post-Newtonian barycentric motion for future tests of general relativity in extrasolar systems. We benchmark PEXO with the pulsar timing package TEMPO2 and find that PEXO produces numerically similar results with timing precision of about 1 ns, space-based astrometry to a precision of 1{\mu}as, and radial velocity of 1 {\mu}m/s and improves on TEMPO2 for decade-long timing data of nearby targets, due to its consideration of third-order terms of Roemer delay. PEXO is able to avoid the bias introduced by decoupling the target system and the solar system and to account for the atmospheric effects which set a practical limit for ground-based radial velocities close to 1 cm/s. Considering the various caveats in barycentric correction and ancillary data required to realize cm/s modeling, we recommend the preservation of original observational data. The PEXO modeling package is available at GitHub (https://github.com/phillippro/pexo).Peer reviewe

Report of the 2005 Snowmass Top/QCD Working Group

This report discusses several topics in both top quark physics and QCD at an International Linear Collider (ILC). Issues such as measurements at the $t\bar{t}$ threshold, including both theoretical and machine requirements, and the determination of electroweak top quark couplings, are reviewed. New results concerning the potential of a 500 GeV $e^+e^-$ collider for measuring $Wtb$ couplings and the top quark Yukawa coupling are presented. The status of higher order QCD corrections to jet production cross sections, heavy quark form factors, and longitudinal gauge boson scattering, needed for percent-level studies at the ILC, are reviewed. A new study of the measurement of the hadronic structure of the photon at a $\gamma\gamma$ collider is presented. The effects on top quark properties from several models of new physics, including composite models, Little Higgs theories, and CPT violation, are studied.Comment: 39 pages, many figs; typos fixed and refs added. Contributed to the 2005 International Linear Collider Physics and Detector Workshop and 2nd ILC Accelerator Workshop, Snowmass, Colorado, 14-27 Aug 200

Taste evaluation of potato glycoalkaloids by the Aymara: A case study in human chemical ecology

A chemical ecological model can be the basis for defining testable hypotheses concerning human interactions with plants. Selection by Aymara subsistence cultivators against toxic glycoalkaloids in the ongoing domestication of the Bolivian potato cultigen Solanum X ajanhuiri was used as a specific case study of human interactions with phytochemicals. In taste perception tests, Aymara subjects were able to discriminate between concentrations of pure glycoalkaloids in solution only above 20 mg/100 ml. Taste panel tests of potato clones indicated that glycoalkaloid levels are important to the Aymara in determining quality only as part of a decision-making process involving two character states: too high or acceptable. Glycoalkaloids in potatoes are regarded as toxic to humans above 20 mg/100 g fresh weight. Among the Aymara, a breakpoint in the curve for glycoalkaloid preference appears to occur between 20–38 mg/100 g. This distinction is evident in the Aymara potato taxonomy which distinguishes bitter (luq'i ch'oke) from nonbitter (ch'oke) potatoes .Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44480/1/10745_2004_Article_BF00888308.pd

Engineering and characterisation of chimeric monoclonal antibody 806 (ch806) for targeted immunotherapy of tumours expressing de2-7 EGFR or amplified EGFR

We report the generation of a chimeric monoclonal antibody (ch806) with specificity for an epitope on the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) that is different from that targeted by all other anti-EGFR therapies. Ch806 antibody is reactive to both de2-7 and overexpressed wild-type (wt) EGFR but not native EGFR expressed in normal tissues at physiological levels. Ch806 was stably expressed in CHO (DHFR −/−) cells and purified for subsequent characterisation and validated for use in preliminary immunotherapy investigations. Ch806 retained the antigen binding specificity and affinity of the murine parental antibody. Furthermore, ch806 displayed enhanced antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity against target cells expressing the 806 antigen in the presence of human effector cells. Ch806 was successfully radiolabelled with both iodine-125 and indium-111 without loss of antigen binding affinity or specificity. The radioimmunoconjugates were stable in the presence of human serum at 37°C for up to 9 days and displayed a terminal half-life (T1/2β) of approximately 78 h in nude mice. Biodistribution studies undertaken in BALB/c nude mice bearing de2-7 EGFR-expressing or amplified EGFR-expressing xenografts revealed that 125I-labelled ch806 failed to display any significant tumour retention. However, specific and prolonged tumour localisation of' 111In-labelled ch806 was demonstrated with uptake of 31%ID g−1 and a tumour to blood ratio of 5 : 1 observed at 7 days postinjection. In vivo therapy studies with ch806 demonstrated significant antitumour effects on established de2-7 EGFR xenografts in BALB/c nude mice compared to control, and both murine 806 and the anti-EGFR 528 antibodies. These results support a potential therapeutic role of ch806 in the treatment of suitable EGFR-expressing tumours, and warrants further investigation of the potential of ch806 as a therapeutic agent