Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Life cycle assessment in support of sustainable transportation

In our rapidly urbanizing world, sustainable transportation presents a major challenge. Transportation decisions have considerable direct impacts on urban society, both positive and negative, for example through changes in transit times and economic productivity, urban connectivity, tailpipe emissions and attendant air quality concerns, traffic accidents, and noise pollution. Much research has been dedicated to quantifying these direct impacts for various transportation modes. Transportation planning decisions also result in a variety of indirect environmental and human health impacts, a portion of which can accrue outside of the transit service area and so outside of the local decision-making process. Integrated modeling of direct and indirect impacts over the life cycle of different transportation modes provides decision support that is more comprehensive and less prone to triggering unintended consequences than a sole focus on direct tailpipe emissions. The recent work of Chester et al (2013) in this journal makes important contributions to this research by examining the environmental implications of introducing bus rapid transit and light rail in Los Angeles using life cycle assessment (LCA). Transport in the LA region is dominated by automobile trips, and the authors show that potential shifts to either bus or train modes would reduce energy use and emissions of criteria air pollutants, on an average passenger mile travelled basis. This work compares not just the use of each vehicle, but also upstream impacts from its manufacturing and maintenance, as well as the construction and maintenance of the entire infrastructure required for each mode. Previous work by the lead author (Chester and Horvath 2009), has shown that these non-operational sources and largely non-local can dominate life cycle impacts from transportation, again on an average (or attributional) basis, for example increasing rail-related GHG emissions by >150% over just operational emissions. While average results are valuable in comparing transport modes generally, they are less representative of local planning decisions, where the focus is on understanding the consequences of new infrastructure and how it might affect traffic, community impacts, and environmental aspects going forward. Chester et al (2013) also present their results using consequential LCA, which provides more detailed insights about the marginal effects of the specific rapid bus and light rail lines under study. The trade-offs between the additional resources required to install the public transit infrastructure (the ‘resource debt’) and the environmental advantages during the operation of these modes can be considered explicitly in terms of environmental impact payback periods, which vary with the type of environmental impact being considered. For example, bus rapid transit incurs a relatively small carbon debt associated with the GHG emissions of manufacturing new buses and installing transit infrastructure and pays this debt off almost immediately, while it takes half a century for the light rail line to pay off the ‘smog debt’ of its required infrastructure. This payback period approach, ubiquitous in life cycle costing, has been useful for communicating the magnitude of unintended environmental consequences from other resource and land management decisions, e.g., the release of soil carbon from land conversion to bioenergy crops (Fargione et al 2008), and will likely grow in prevalence as consequential LCA is used for decision support. The locations of projected emissions is just as important to decision-making as their magnitudes, as policy-making bodies seek to understand effects in their jurisdictions; however, life cycle impact assessment methods typically aggregate results by impact category rather than by source or sink location. Chester et al (2013) address this issue by providing both local (within Los Angeles) and total emissions results, with accompanying local-only payback periods. Much more challenging is the geographic mapping of impacts that these emissions will cause, given the many point and mobile sources of air pollutants over the entire transportation life cycle. Integration of LCA with high-resolution data sets is an active area of model development (Mutel and Hellweg 2009) and will provide site- and population-specific information for impacts ranging from water quality to biodiversity to human respiratory health. Another complex challenge in modeling environmental impacts of transportation (and cities in general) is the long run, interdependent relationship between transportation technologies and urban form. LCA modeling has tended to assume a fixed pattern of settlements and demand for mobility and then examined changes to a particular technology or practice within the transportation system, such as electric or hybrid vehicles or improved pavement materials. New transit options or other travel demand management strategies might induce mode switching or reduced trips, but the overall pattern of where people live and work is generally assumed in these models to be constant in the short run. In contrast, the automobile has been influencing land-use patterns for a century, and it is the resulting geographic structure that determines the baseline need for transportation, and thus drives the use of material and energy resources used in transportation systems (Kunstler 1994). We have seen that cities with high population densities tend to have lower tailpipe emissions from transportation (Kennedy et al 2009). Recent studies have modeled how changes in urban land-use or zoning changes the geographic structure of transportation demand and then used LCA to determine the environmental benefits of such policies. For example, Mashayekh et al (2012) summarized travel demand reductions projected from several studies of compact, smart growth, and brownfield in-fill development strategies to find benefits ranging up to 75% reductions in life cycle GHG and air pollutant emissions. A related study in Toronto on life cycle energy use and GHG emissions for high- and low-density development strategies found a ~60% difference in GHG emissions, largely due to transportation (Norman et al 2006). System dynamics and agent-based models may complement LCA in capturing long-term effects of transportation strategies as they are inherently dynamic (Stepp et al 2009), and can internalize spatially resolved decisions about where to settle and work (Waddell 2002). Transportation planning decisions have both direct and indirect, spatially distributed, often long-term effects on our health and our environment. The accompanying work by Chester et al (2013) provides a well-documented case study that highlights the potential of LCA as a rich source of decision support. References Chester M, Pincetl S, Elizabeth Z, Eisenstein W and Matute J 2013 Infrastructure and automobile shifts: positioning transit to reduce life-cycle environmental impacts for urban sustainability goals Environ. Res. Lett. 8 015041 Chester M V and Horvath A 2009 Environmental assessment of passenger transportation should include infrastructure and supply chains Environ. Res. Lett. 4 024008 Fargione J, Hill J, Tilman D, Polasky S and Hawthorne P 2008 Land clearing and the biofuel carbon debt Science 319 1235–8 Kennedy C, Steinberger J, Gasson B, Hansen Y, Hillman T, Havránek M, Pataki D, Phdungsilp A, Ramaswami A and Mendez G V 2009 Greenhouse gas emissions from global cities Environ. Sci. Technol. 43 7297–302 Kunstler J H 1994 Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Free Press) Mashayekh Y, Jaramillo P, Samaras C, Hendrickson C T, Blackhurst M, MacLean H L and Matthews H S 2012 Potentials for sustainable transportation in cities to alleviate climate change impacts Environ. Sci. Technol. 46 2529–37 Mutel C L and Hellweg S 2009 Regionalized life cycle assessment: computational methodology and application to inventory databases Environ. Sci. Technol. 43 5797–803 Norman J, MacLean H L and Kennedy C A 2006 Comparing high and low residential density: life-cycle analysis of energy use and greenhouse gas emissions J. Urban Plann. Dev. 132 10–21 Stepp M D, Winebrake J J, Hawker J S and Skerlos S J 2009 Greenhouse gas mitigation policies and the transportation sector: the role of feedback effects on policy effectiveness Energy Policy 37 2774–87 Waddell P 2002 UrbanSim: modeling urban development for land use, transportation, and environmental planning J. Am. Plann. Assoc. 68 297–31

Markov chain modeling of the global technological lifetime of copper

Markov chain modeling is applied to the global anthropogenic copper cycle for the year 2000. The lifetime of copper varies from product to product and region to region, as well as through time. Assumptions of average lifetimes are therefore subject to a high degree of uncertainty. A large state transition table is created that encompasses the life-cycle stages of copper (mining, smelting, refining, fabrication, use, waste management, scrap, and final disposal), five end-uses (buildings, transportation, consumer products, electrical equipment, and machinery) in eight world regions, including trade at every stage. The system requires closure by mass balance, so all possible routes of copper trade and recycling are considered. Transitions between each pair of states are calculated using previous material flow analysis data. The main result is that an atom of copper is used 1.9 times by human society before it enters final disposal. Scaling by the lifetime of copper in each life-cycle stage in each region gives a total average technological lifetime of copper of 60 years. A sensitivity analysis is applied to the model in order to test the robustness of the results. Several scenarios are also considered: increasing the recycling rate in each region to 70%, applying European or North American in-use lifetimes to all regions, and increasing the share of the world copper cathode and scrap markets taken in by Asia to 50%. Several limitations of the Markov chain approach are discussed, as are the further research opportunities it affords.Copper Lifetimes Markov chain modeling Recycling Global cycle In-use stock

Long-term trends of electric efficiencies in electricity generation in developing countries

This analysis provides time-series data on electric efficiencies for 138 countries and regions, covering all fossil fuels for the period 1971-2005, with an emphasis on non-Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation in non-OECD countries now exceeds that in the OECD. The historical performance of the top five non-OECD consumers of each fossil fuel for which reliable data are available is presented and discussed. For each fuel, the countries that lead the world in efficiency are used for benchmarks; bringing the rest of the world up to these standards would result in energy savings of 26EJ (equivalent to 5% of global energy consumption) and CO2 emissions reduction of 2.1Pg (equivalent to 8% of global CO2 emissions). Coal showed the largest potential margin of improvement for both energy and CO2, with possible savings equivalent to 3% of current global energy consumption and 5% of global CO2 emissions. The gap in electric efficiency between OECD and non-OECD countries over the past 35 years has widened for coal-fired generation, stayed relatively constant for natural gas, but has shrunk for petroleum. The results show the very gradual nature of overall efficiency improvements and the significant differences among regions and countries.Electric efficiency Power generation Carbon dioxide emissions

Environmental Impacts of the U.S. Health Care System and Effects on Public Health

<div><p>The U.S. health care sector is highly interconnected with industrial activities that emit much of the nation’s pollution to air, water, and soils. We estimate emissions directly and indirectly attributable to the health care sector, and potential harmful effects on public health. Negative environmental and public health outcomes were estimated through economic input-output life cycle assessment (EIOLCA) modeling using National Health Expenditures (NHE) for the decade 2003–2013 and compared to national totals. In 2013, the health care sector was also responsible for significant fractions of national air pollution emissions and impacts, including acid rain (12%), greenhouse gas emissions (10%), smog formation (10%) criteria air pollutants (9%), stratospheric ozone depletion (1%), and carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic air toxics (1–2%). The largest contributors to impacts are discussed from both the supply side (EIOLCA economic sectors) and demand side (NHE categories), as are trends over the study period. Health damages from these pollutants are estimated at 470,000 DALYs lost from pollution-related disease, or 405,000 DALYs when adjusted for recent shifts in power generation sector emissions. These indirect health burdens are commensurate with the 44,000–98,000 people who die in hospitals each year in the U.S. as a result of preventable medical errors, but are currently not attributed to our health system. Concerted efforts to improve environmental performance of health care could reduce expenditures directly through waste reduction and energy savings, and indirectly through reducing pollution burden on public health, and ought to be included in efforts to improve health care quality and safety.</p></div

Life Cycle Assessment of Metals: A Scientific Synthesis

<div><p>We have assembled extensive information on the cradle-to-gate environmental burdens of 63 metals in their major use forms, and illustrated the interconnectedness of metal production systems. Related cumulative energy use, global warming potential, human health implications and ecosystem damage are estimated by metal life cycle stage (i.e., mining, purification, and refining). For some elements, these are the first life cycle estimates of environmental impacts reported in the literature. We show that, if compared on a per kilogram basis, the platinum group metals and gold display the highest environmental burdens, while many of the major industrial metals (e.g., iron, manganese, titanium) are found at the lower end of the environmental impacts scale. If compared on the basis of their global annual production in 2008, iron and aluminum display the largest impacts, and thallium and tellurium the lowest. With the exception of a few metals, environmental impacts of the majority of elements are dominated by the purification and refining stages in which metals are transformed from a concentrate into their metallic form. Out of the 63 metals investigated, 42 metals are obtained as co-products in multi output processes. We test the sensitivity of varying allocation rationales, in which the environmental burden are allocated to the various metal and mineral products, on the overall results. Monte-Carlo simulation is applied to further investigate the stability of our results. This analysis is the most comprehensive life cycle comparison of metals to date and allows for the first time a complete bottom-up estimate of life cycle impacts of the metals and mining sector globally. We estimate global direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions in 2008 at 3.4 Gt CO₂-eq per year and primary energy use at 49 EJ per year (9.5% of global use), and report the shares for all metals to both impact categories.</p></div

Green Infrastructure as a climate change mitigation strategy. Quantification of environmental & economic benefits for the City of Somerville

The growing awareness of the negative impact of human activities on climate has led to adopt territorial adaptation and mitigation policies. Strategies capable of coping with increasingly extreme and sudden negative impacts make their way into the scenario of territorial planning, which focuses on choices that create more resilient cities. A suitable strategy for this new approach to territorial planning includes green infra-structure a multifunctional tool designed to mitigate impacts of climate change and to intervene on "urban waste" and dismiss places to re-naturalize and make them more inclusive. The paper examines the innovative scenario of the Inner Core in Bos-ton, Massachusetts, exploring the policies of the city of Somerville, which focus on the implementation of green infrastructure to provide multiple benefits. Former industrialized area of Somerville, the Inner Belt is one of the settlements most exposed to the climate crisis and particularly weak territorial context from a social, economic, and political point of view. The evidence of a settlement that "ceded to environmental blackmail" in exchange for jobs, required a procedural approach by rethinking the area in a strategic perspective capable of combining the needs of the community with adaptation to change. The Inner Belt was thus reconsidered as a hub (system of places), that is, as an integral part of the new vision of a green infrastructure network for the city of Somerville and an urban area of planning emergency in the re-composition and identity re-appropriation of its widespread and pervasive waterproofed spaces. This choice highlighted the importance of the local scale in the process of redesigning the public space and forgotten places in the evolution of green infrastructure. This study analyzes and quantifies the environmental and economic benefits provided by the green infrastructure, demonstrating the effectiveness of the adoption of this multi-functional strategy

Breakdown of Global CO2 Emissions and Cumulative Energy Demand Per Metal in 2008.

<p>Breakdown of Global CO2 Emissions and Cumulative Energy Demand Per Metal in 2008.</p