The case for building climate reporting into financial accounting

For mitigation efforts against climate breakdown to be effective they need to bring in the private sector in a meaningful way. Current standards for financial reporting for commercial organizations focus on the interests of capital suppliers to the exclusion of other stakeholders and civil society. These stakeholders include the suppliers of capital, trading partners, employees, regulators, tax authorities, and civil society. So far initiatives to include environmental and social costs have been additive rather than substantive. In this think piece we offer a radical proposal in the form of sustainable cost accounting (SCA). As a standard SCA would build on existing accounting principles to require commercial organizations to report on how they will manage the costs of becoming net carbon zero compliant. SCA does not include carbon pricing or the cost of offsets. It would require the commercial organization to establish the costs of the transition to carbon neutrality. Regulatory requirements, enmeshment in transnational standards, and adequate auditing would implement SCA. If SCA was mandatory and comprehensively applied it would take a significant step in bringing business onside in addressing climate breakdown

Free healthy breakfasts in primary schools: A cluster randomised controlled trial of a policy intervention in Wales, UK

Objective: The present study evaluated the impact of a national school programme of universal free healthy breakfast provision in Wales, UK. Design: A cluster randomised controlled trial with repeated cross-sectional design and a 12-month follow-up. Primary outcomes were breakfast skipping, breakfast diet and episodic memory. Secondary outcomes were frequency of eating breakfast at home and at school, breakfast attitudes, rest-of-day diet and class behaviour. Setting: Primary schools in nine local education authority areas. Subjects: A total of 4350 students (aged 9–11 years) at baseline and 4472 at follow-up in 111 schools. Results: Students in intervention schools reported significantly higher numbers of healthy food items consumed at breakfast and more positive attitudes towards breakfast eating at 12 months. Parents in intervention schools reported significantly higher rates of consumption of breakfast at school and correspondingly lower rates of breakfast consumption at home. No other significant differences were found. Conclusions: The intervention did not reduce breakfast skipping; rather, pupils substituted breakfast at home for breakfast at school. However, there were improvements in children’s nutritional intake at breakfast time, if not the rest of the day, and more positive attitudes to breakfast, which may have implications for life-course dietary behaviours. There was no impact on episodic memory or classroom behaviour, which may require targeting breakfast skippers

Spin-dependent recombination in Czochralski silicon containing oxide precipitates

Electrically detected magnetic resonance is used to identify recombination centers in a set of Czochralski grown silicon samples processed to contain strained oxide precipitates with a wide range of densities (~ 1e9 cm-3 to ~ 7e10 cm-3). Measurements reveal that photo-excited charge carriers recombine through Pb0 and Pb1 dangling bonds and comparison to precipitate-free material indicates that these are present at both the sample surface and the oxide precipitates. The electronic recombination rates vary approximately linearly with precipitate density. Additional resonance lines arising from iron-boron and interstitial iron are observed and discussed. Our observations are inconsistent with bolometric heating and interpreted in terms of spin-dependent recombination. Electrically detected magnetic resonance is thus a very powerful and sensitive spectroscopic technique to selectively probe recombination centers in modern photovoltaic device materials.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure

Prosomal-width-to-weight relationships in American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus): examining conversion factors used to estimate landings

Horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) are valued by many stakeholders, including the commercial fishing industry, biomedical companies, and environmental interest groups. We designed a study to test the accuracy of the conversion factors that were used by NOAA Fisheries and state agencies to estimate horseshoe crab landings before mandatory reporting that began in 1998. Our results indicate that the NOAA Fisheries conversion factor consistently overestimates the weight of male horseshoe crabs, particularly those from New England populations. Because of the inaccuracy of this and other conversion factors, states are now mandated to report the number (not biomass) and sex of landed horseshoe crabs. However, accurate estimates of biomass are still necessary for use in prediction models that are being developed to better manage the horseshoe crab fishery. We recommend that managers use the conversion factors presented in this study to convert current landing data from numbers to biomass of harvested horseshoe crabs for future assessments

First constraint on cosmological variation of the proton-to-electron mass ratio from two independent telescopes

A high signal-to-noise spectrum covering the largest number of hydrogen lines (90 H2 lines and 6 HD lines) in a high redshift object was analyzed from an observation along the sight-line to the bright quasar source J2123$-$005 with the UVES spectrograph on the ESO Very Large Telescope (Paranal, Chile). This delivers a constraint on a possible variation of the proton-to-electron mass ratio of Dmu/mu = (8.5 \pm 3.6_{stat} \pm 2.2_{syst}) x 10^{-6} at redshift z=2.059$, which agrees well with a recently published result on the same system observed at the Keck telescope yielding Dmu/mu = (5.6 \pm 5.5_{stat} \pm 2.9_{syst}) x 10^{-6}. Both analyses used the same robust absorption line fitting procedures with detailed consideration of systematic errors.Comment: Accepte

Low uptake of antiretroviral therapy after admission with human immunodeficiency virus and tuberculosis in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

A prospective cohort study was conducted among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infected in-patients with tuberculosis (TB) or other opportunistic infections (OIs) in South Africa to estimate subsequent antiretroviral therapy (ART) uptake and survival

Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE). User requirements

There are no author-identified significant results in this report