Financial Feasibility of Increasing Carbon Sequestration in Mississippi Forests Sector

The specific objectives of this project were: 1) Determine financial viability of enrolling forest landowners in Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) forestry carbon offset protocols; 2) Determine financial trade-offs associated with managing loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) and Cherrybark oak (Quercus pagoda Raf.) stands for increased carbon sequestration and timber; 3) Examine financial feasibility of increasing carbon accumulation in wood products carbon by extending rotation length of loblolly pine stands; and 4) Explore potential impacts of carbon policies and programs on future carbon accumulation in Mississippi’s forest sector

Difference Structures from Time-resolved SAXS/WAXS

It has been thought that there is not enough information to recover a solution to the problem of inverting time-resolved Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS) / Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (WAXS) difference data. In this context, this study presents a new idea by extending the concept of “difference Fourier method” which aims to overcome the above limitation in the idealized case of simulated data. If the structural changes in a typical time-resolved studies are generally confined to a relatively localized region, they can be found from difference SAXS/WAXS curves and knowledge of the atomic coordinates of one of the states. The method has some similarities to the difference Fourier method of crystallography, which may not be directly applicable to SAXS/WAXS analysis. This study demonstrates the identification of the displaced residues once this proposed idea/method is applied to structural changes involved in Photoactive Yellow Protein (PYP), which has been used as a test case in time-resolved studies

Financial Feasibility of Increasing Carbon Sequestration in Mississippi Forests Sector

The specific objectives of this project were: 1) Determine financial viability of enrolling forest landowners in Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) forestry carbon offset protocols; 2) Determine financial trade-offs associated with managing loblolly pine (Pinus taeda L.) and Cherrybark oak (Quercus pagoda Raf.) stands for increased carbon sequestration and timber; 3) Examine financial feasibility of increasing carbon accumulation in wood products carbon by extending rotation length of loblolly pine stands; and 4) Explore potential impacts of carbon policies and programs on future carbon accumulation in Mississippi’s forest sector

The plight of the forgotten ones: civil war and internal displacement in Nepal

Although different theoretical arguments have been developed for understanding civil wars, very few efforts have been made to study their impact. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing a systematic explanation of conflict-induced internal displacement. We use sub-national data from Nepal to explain whether or not conflict is directly responsible for displacing people, as is generally assumed, or whether there is an indirect link between conflict and displacement. We argue that internal displacement occurs as a result of the direct as well as indirect impacts of civil war. Both the government and the rebels are involved in violating human rights during conflict that causes direct threat to civilians’ life and forces them to flee. But civil war also leads to deterioration in economic conditions that causes a plethora of problems for people living in the conflict-hit area. Destruction of the local economy creates insecurity in the form of the lack of employment opportunities as well as other social services such as education, health, and communication. These problems, which are more indirect causes of internal displacement, also force people to flee home during conflict

ConTaaS: An Approach to Internet-Scale Contextualisation for Developing Efficient Internet of Things Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new internet evolution that involves connecting billions of sensors and other devices to the Internet. Such IoT devices or IoT things can communicate directly. They also allow Internet users and applications to access and distil their data, control their functions, and harness the information and functionality provided by multiple IoT devices to offer novel smart services. IoT devices collectively generate massive amounts of data with an incredible velocity. Processing IoT device data and distilling high-value information from them presents an Internet-scale computational challenge. Contextualisation of IoT data can help improve the value of information extracted from IoT. However, existing contextualisation techniques can only handle small datasets from a modest number of IoT devices. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose architecture and related techniques for the contextualisation of IoT data. In particular, we introduce a Contextualisation-as-a-Service (ConTaaS) architecture that incorporates scalability improving techniques, as well as a proof-of-concept implementation of all these that utilises elastic cloud-based infrastructure to achieve near real-time contextualisation of IoT data. Experimental evaluations validating the efficiency of ConTaaS are also provided in this paper

Projecting global and regional outlooks for planted forests under the shared socio-economic pathways

There is rising global interest in growing more trees in order to meet growing population, climate change, and wood energy needs. Using recently published data on planted forests by country, we estimated relationships between per capita income and planted forest area that are useful for understanding prospective planted forest area futures through 2100 under various United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-inspired Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs). Under all SSPs, projections indicate increasing global planted forest area trends for the next three to four decades and declining trends thereafter, commensurate with the quadratic functions employed. Our projections indicate somewhat less total future planted forest area than prior linear forecasts. Compared to 293 million ha (Mha) of planted forests globally in 2015, SSP5 (a vision of a wealthier world) projects the largest increase (to 334 Mha, a 14% gain) by 2055, followed by SSP2 (a continuation of historical socio-economic trends, to 327 Mha, or an 11% gain), and SSP3 (a vision of a poorer world, to 319 Mha, a 9% gain). The projected trends for major world regions differ from global trends, consistent with differing socio-economic development trajectories in those regions. Our projections based on empirical FAO data for the past 25 years, as well as those by other researchers, suggest that achieving the much more ambitious global planted forest targets proposed recently will require exceptional forest land and investment supply shifts.Peer reviewe

Carbon Impacts of Engineered Wood Products in Construction

Buildings and the construction sector together account for about 39% of the global energy-related CO2 emissions. Recent building designs are introducing promising new mass timber products that have the capacity to partially replace concrete and steel in traditional buildings. The inherently lower environmental impacts of engineered wood products for construction are seen as one of the key strategies to mitigate climate change through their increased use in the construction sector. This chapter synthesizes the estimated carbon benefits of using engineered wood products and mass timber in the construction sector based on insights obtained from recent Life Cycle Assessment studies in the topic area of reduced carbon emissions and carbon sequestration/storage

Medical Waste Storage Practice in Health Care Institutions of Pokhara Sub-metropolitan City

Introduction: Medical wastes include all the waste generated by health care establishments, research facilities, and laboratories. Medi­cal waste is any waste that is generated in the diagnosis, treatment or immunization of human beings or animals, in research pertaining there to or in the productions or testing of biological culture. Methods: The fourteen numbers of health care institutions (HCIs) having inpatient facilities, were sampled for the study. After taking ob­servation, the collected information was entered into a computer. Basi­cally, the percentages, projection analysis, simple average, and scenario analysis were used as an analysis tools. Results: Out of the HCIs surveyed, only 21.43% of them had a separate room assigned for primary storage of all sorts of waste and remaining 78.57% of them had open storage facilities for un-segregated mass of waste nearby the incineration area or open burning area. Conclusion: There was lack of appropriate information on waste stor­age practices, and unaware of designing central storage system in HCIs. In most of the HCIs, a separate storage room was not assigned for stor­age of all sorts of waste. Journal of Gandaki Medical College Vol. 10, No. 1, 2017, page: 31-3

Combination of convalescent plasma therapy and repurposed drugs to treat severe COVID-19 patient with multimorbidity.

Combination of convalescent plasma therapy and repurposed drugs such as dexamethasone and remdesivir could be beneficial for severe COVID-19 patients with obesity and chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension

Protecting 30% of the planet for nature: costs, benefits and economic implications

A. Waldron, K. Nakamura, J. Sze, T. Vilela, A. Escobedo, P. Negret Torres, R. Button, K. Swinnerton, A. Toledo, P. Madgwick, N. Mukherjee were supported by National Geographic and the Resources Legacy Fund. V. Christensen was supported by NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2019-04901. M. Coll and J. Steenbeek were supported by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 817578 (TRIATLAS). D. Leclere was supported by TradeHub UKRI CGRF project. R. Heneghan was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Acciones de Programacion Conjunta Internacional (PCIN-2017-115). M. di Marco was supported by MIUR Rita Levi Montalcini programme. A. Fernandez-Llamazares was supported by Academy of Finland (grant nr. 31176). S. Fujimori and T. Hawegawa were supported by The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-2002) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan and the Sumitomo Foundation. V. Heikinheimo was supported by Kone Foundation, Social Media for Conservation project. K. Scherrer was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 682602. U. Rashid Sumaila acknowledges the OceanCanada Partnership, which funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). T. Toivonen was supported by Osk. Huttunen Foundation & Clare Hall college, Cambridge. W. Wu was supported by The Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-2002) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency of Japan. Z. Yuchen was supported by a Ministry of Education of Singapore Research Scholarship Block (RSB) Research Fellowship