Aggregates : is there a need for indigenous production in England?

Quality of life in a modern society depends on having the right infrastructure, of the right quality, in the right places – housing, schools, hospitals, transport links, workplaces and recreation facilities. All these elements of the built environment require aggregates in their construction. However many people today fail to make the connection between their standard of living and the quarries that are required to provide that standard. With the opposition to mineral extraction becoming more vociferous and with increasing competition for land uses, this research project, funded through the Aggregates Levy, examined England’s true ‘need’ for aggregates together with the costs and benefits to society and the economy of indigenous supply. It also considered whether it is physically possible to import large quantities of aggregates and assessed the likely implications of doing so. The research found that the demand for aggregates is created by society’s desire for a high standard of living and that the true ‘need’ is to meet that demand. It determined that aggregates extraction directly contributes £810 million to the English economy and this outweighs the estimated environmental cost of indigenous extraction of approximately £445 million. England’s current aggregates requirement is more than double the existing port capacity for dry bulk cargoes and importing large quantities of aggregates would likely double the cost of this material, with serious consequences for downstream industries. There will continue to be a need to meet demand for aggregates and this will have to be provided mainly from indigenous sources for the foreseeable future

Privilege and Responsibility

This Essay argues that exercising privilege responsibly is particularly difficult in the United States, whose culture rests more than any other on formal commitment to the equality and dignity of the individual. This is because our legal culture not only disavows privilege formally but also shifts responsibility for the moral character of people’s social behavior away from individual actors and onto the abstract institutions of politics and markets. The culture has, however, from time to time thrown up occasional examples of individuals and groups who did manage to exercise virtue in public life and, in doing so, kept the country’s original ideals alive while adapting them to changed circumstances. Professor McEvoy provides an overview of these occasional examples, notably the anti-slavery and civil rights movements and the twentieth-century campaign to advance the rights of industrial workers. Professor McEvoy argues that these movements, and others like them, may offer hints as to how politics might acknowledge privilege while making it responsible, to individuals, to the society at large, and to history

Vapour and electro-deposited metal films on copper: structure and reactivity

The systems studied involve deposition of metals of a larger atomic diameter on a Cu{100} single crystal surface under vacuum and determining the structures formed along with the effect on the Cu{100} substrate. Cu microelectrodes were fabricated and characterised with Indium electrodeposited on the electrode surface. The In on Cu{ 100} growth mode is compared with the growth mode of electrodeposited Indium on Cu microelectrodes. The Cu{100}/In system has been studied for the In coverage range 0.1-0.65 monolayer using Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), low energy electron diffraction (LEED) and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM). The Auger signal versus deposition time plot for the deposition of In on Cu{ 100} is characteristic of the Stranski-Krastanov growth mode. In this deposition mechanism the first atomic layer grows in a layer by layer fashion but when monolayer point is reached, subsequent growth occurs in the form of 3D crystallites. At a concentration of 0.4±0.05 monolayer In forms a ( 9 V 2 x 2 a / 2 )R 4 5 ° on the Cu{100} surface which on heating above a temperature of 373K undergoes a reproducible phase transition to form a c(2x2) phase. Increasing the In deposited to a surface concentration of 0.6±0.05 monolayer results in a Cu{100}-c(4x4)-ln overlayer structure which remains uniform with heating. A Tensor LEED analysis was conducted on this structure in conjunction with K. Pussi et al., from which it was found that the In overlayer consisted of two layers. The In layer closest to bulk comprises a c(2x2) structure with In atoms occupying 4 fold hollow sites with respect to substrate. The top layer is a c(4x4) In layer in which the atoms lie at four fold hollow sites with respect to the c(2 x2 ) layer. The deposition of 0.25ML Sb on clean Cu{ 100} at room temperature results in a p(2x2) LEED pattern which is confirmed by STM. Using Tensor LEED calculations, the structure of the Cu{100}-p(2x2)-Sb phase has been determined. The results show that despite the large size mismatch between Sb (atomic radius = 1.450A) and Cu (atomic radius = 1.278A), a surface alloy is formed in which Sb atoms substitute Cu atoms in the outermost layer. Sb is found to ripple outward from the surface by 0.56+0.05 A. The second and deeper Cu layers are found to be close to their bulk values. As the Sb coverage is increased to a concentration of 0.33ML, the surface exhibits a p(6x6 ) LEED pattern. The atomic resolution STM images for this surface display alternating double and single rows of atoms implying a reconstruction in the selvedge. Based on the STM and LEED results possible models for the Cu{ 100}- p(6 x6 )-Sb structure have been proposed. The favoured structures are based on a slight deformation from the simple c(2 x2 ) surface. Cu microelectrodes were fabricated and characterized using cyclic voltammetry and chronoamperometry. The Cu microelectrodes were found to have a potential window of —0.08 to -0.6V in HCIO4, although this can be improved with pH adjustment, with the potential window found to be at a maximum of +0.1 to -1 .0V at a pH of 4. Chronoamperometric data was taken in differing concentrations of HCIO4 giving resistance, capacitance and RC time constant values for the Cu microelectrode in an HCIO4 electrolyte system. Indium was electrochemically deposited on the Cu microelectrode at a potential of— 0.6V. Cyclic voltammograms are taken at different scan rates to determine the dynamics of In deposition. At low scan rates there was an increase in the amount of. In deposited as witnessed by hysteresis on the cyclic voltammograms. This hysteresis is thought to be caused by In on In deposition. Al scan rates of 1.0Vs"! and above it is thought that little or no In deposition occurs as peaks corresponding to indium reduction or subsequent oxidation are no longer observed. SEM and EDX were used to confirm the deposition of In on the Cu microelectrodes. Chronoamperometric measurements were taken to determine the growth mode and nucleation type of the deposited In. From these measurements, a plot of I/Imax versus t for the. In deposition is compared with nucleation and growth models for 2D progressive, 2D instantaneous, 3D progressive and 3D instantaneous. After comparison it was found that the electrodeposition of In on Cu microelectrodes obeys a progressive nucleation mode with further In growth found to be 3D. This result compares favourably with the growth mode for In deposition on a Cu{ 100} substrate under vacuum, with the growth mode for both being 3D. It was found that the nucleation types for both were remarkably similar with vacuum deposited In and electrodeposited indium both undergoing progressive nucleation

Environmental Law and the Collapse of New Deal Constitutionalism

This Article, which is a précis for a book in progress about the history of late twentieth-century U.S. environmental law, argues that our modern environmental law is peculiarly a creature of the New Deal. Despite its obvious legacy from common-law nuisance and Progressive regulation, what makes modern environmental law different from anything that came before is the way in which reformers built it out of parts copied from New Deal reform projects: cooperative federalism, the tax-and-spend power, representation-reinforcing, rights trumps, and so on. Environmental law’s history, its character, its accomplishments, and its shortcomings thus entwined with those of the New Deal regime as a whole, as it reached the peak of its vigor in the early 1970s and decayed gradually but steadily thereafter. Historians are rightly skeptical of “rise and fall” stories that ascribe any organic structure or teleology to the arc of a culture. Historians find such arcs all the time nonetheless, in American history just as readily as in the Third Reich or the Roman Empire. As literary devices, narrative arcs have no inherent truth of their own; what matters is the extent to which they help us understand our history in useful ways. As a regime or a “legal culture,” then—the term is Lawrence Friedman’s—the New Deal has a life history, much as did the Jacksonian Era that began in the early nineteenth century and ended with the Civil War, or the Victorian, laissez-faire era that emerged out of Reconstruction and collapsed, in its turn, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Environmental law has been a key target for anti-New Deal reformers precisely because it epitomizes the essential character of the entire suite of late-twentieth-century projects, from affirmative action to universal health care, that reformers aim to dismantle... In the end, the rise and fall of environmental law may have much to tell us about the character of American law in the late twentieth century generally

The VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey

We present a number of notable results from the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS), an ESO Large Program during which we obtained multi-epoch medium-resolution optical spectroscopy of a very large sample of over 800 massive stars in the 30 Doradus region of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This unprecedented data-set has enabled us to address some key questions regarding atmospheres and winds, as well as the evolution of (very) massive stars. Here we focus on O-type runaways, the width of the main sequence, and the mass-loss rates for (very) massive stars. We also provide indications for the presence of a top-heavy initial mass function (IMF) in 30 Dor.Comment: 7 Figures, 8 pages. Invited talk: IAUS 329: "The Lives and Death-Throes of Massive Stars

Interpreting the seasonal cycles of atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations at American Samoa Observatory

We present seven years of atmospheric O2/N2 ratio and CO2 concentration data measured from flask samples collected at American Samoa. These data are unusual, exhibiting higher short-term variability, and seasonal cycles not in phase with other sampling stations. The unique nature of atmospheric data from Samoa has been noted previously from measurements of CO2, methyl chloroform, and ozone. With our O2 data, we observe greater magnitude in the short-term variability, but, in contrast, no clear seasonal pattern to this variability. This we attribute to significant regional sources and sinks existing for O2 in both hemispheres, and a dependence on both the latitudinal and altitudinal origins of air masses. We also hypothesize that some samples exhibit a component of "older" air, demonstrating recirculation of air within the tropics. Our findings could be used to help constrain atmospheric transport models which are not well characterized in tropical regions

A systematic review of physiological signals based driver drowsiness detection systems.

Driving a vehicle is a complex, multidimensional, and potentially risky activity demanding full mobilization and utilization of physiological and cognitive abilities. Drowsiness, often caused by stress, fatigue, and illness declines cognitive capabilities that affect drivers' capability and cause many accidents. Drowsiness-related road accidents are associated with trauma, physical injuries, and fatalities, and often accompany economic loss. Drowsy-related crashes are most common in young people and night shift workers. Real-time and accurate driver drowsiness detection is necessary to bring down the drowsy driving accident rate. Many researchers endeavored for systems to detect drowsiness using different features related to vehicles, and drivers' behavior, as well as, physiological measures. Keeping in view the rising trend in the use of physiological measures, this study presents a comprehensive and systematic review of the recent techniques to detect driver drowsiness using physiological signals. Different sensors augmented with machine learning are utilized which subsequently yield better results. These techniques are analyzed with respect to several aspects such as data collection sensor, environment consideration like controlled or dynamic, experimental set up like real traffic or driving simulators, etc. Similarly, by investigating the type of sensors involved in experiments, this study discusses the advantages and disadvantages of existing studies and points out the research gaps. Perceptions and conceptions are made to provide future research directions for drowsiness detection techniques based on physiological signals. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Heterothermy in a Small Passerine : Eastern Yellow Robins Use Nocturnal Torpor in Winter

Torpor is a controlled reduction of metabolism and body temperature, and its appropriate use allows small birds to adapt to and survive challenging conditions. However, despite its great energy conservation potential, torpor use by passerine birds is understudied although they are small and comprise over half of extant bird species. Here, we first determined whether a free-living, small ~20 g Australian passerine, the eastern yellow robin (Eopsaltria australis), expresses torpor by measuring skin temperature (Ts) as a proxy for body temperature. Second, we tested if skin temperature fluctuated in relation to ambient temperature (Ta). We found that the Ts of eastern yellow robins fluctuated during winter by 9.1 ± 3.9°C on average (average minimum Ts 30.1 ± 2.3°C), providing the first evidence of torpor expression in this species. Daily minimum Ts decreased with Ta, reducing the estimated metabolic rate by as much as 32%. We hope that our results will encourage further studies to expand our knowledge on the use of torpor in wild passerines. The implications of such studies are important because species with highly flexible energy requirements may have an advantage over strict homeotherms during the current increasing frequency of extreme and unpredictable weather events, driven by changing climate

Proximate cues to phases of movement in a highly dispersive waterfowl, Anas superciliosa

BACKGROUND: Waterfowl can exploit distant ephemeral wetlands in arid environments and provide valuable insights into the response of birds to rapid environmental change, and behavioural flexibility of avian movements. Currently much of our understanding of behavioural flexibility of avian movement comes from studies of migration in seasonally predictable biomes in the northern hemisphere. We used GPS transmitters to track 20 Pacific black duck (Anas superciliosa) in arid central Australia. We exploited La Niña conditions that brought extensive flooding, so allowing a rare opportunity to investigate how weather and other environmental factors predict initiation of long distance movement toward freshly flooded habitats. We employed behavioural change point analysis to identify three phases of movement: sedentary, exploratory and long distance oriented movement. We then used random forest models to determine the ability of meteorological and remote sensed landscape variables to predict initiation of these phases. RESULTS: We found that initiation of exploratory movement phases is influenced by fluctuations in local weather conditions and accumulated rainfall in the landscape. Initiation of long distance movement phases was found to be highly individualistic with minor influence from local weather conditions. CONCLUSIONS: Our study reveals how individuals utilise local conditions to respond to changes in resource distribution at broad scales. Our findings suggest that individual movement decisions of dispersive birds are informed by the integration of multiple weather cues operating at different temporal and spatial scales