Early stage investing in green SMEs: the case of the UK

How might a Green New Deal be applied to the early stage financing of Cleantechs? Amidst rising interest and adoption of Green New Deals in the US, the paper explores the need for more focused policy to address early stage long horizon financing of Cleantechs. We argue that insufficient focus has been applied to early stage investing into these types of innovative SMEs that could lower CO2 emissions across a range of sectors (including renewable energy, recycling, advanced manufacturing, transport and bio-science). Adopting a resource complementarity lens and borrowing from transaction cost theory, we illustrate and build theory through longitudinal UK case studies. These demonstrate how government policy can scale-up through international collaboration public-private, principally venture capital, cofinance to facilitate cleantech innovation with potentially game changing impacts on reducing CO2 emissions in order to meet the Paris 2015 Climate Change targets

Short-term studies underestimate 30-generation changes in a butterfly metapopulation

Most studies of rare and endangered species are based on work carried out within one generation, or over one to a few generations of the study organism. We report the results of a study that spans 30 generations (years) of the entire natural range of a butterfly race that is endemic to 35 km2 of north Wales, UK. Short-term studies (surveys in single years and dynamics over 4 years) of this system led to the prediction that the regional distribution would be quite stable, and that colonization and extinction dynamics would be relatively unimportant. However, a longer-term study revealed unexpectedly high levels of population turnover (local extinction and colonization), affecting 18 out of the 20 patches that were occupied at any time during the period. Modelling the system (using the 'incidence function model' (IFM) for metapopulations) also showed higher levels of colonization and extinction with increasing duration of the study. The longer-term dynamics observed in this system can be compared, at a metapopulation level, with the increased levels of variation observed with increasing time that have been observed in single populations. Long-term changes may arise from local changes in the environment that make individual patches more or less suitable for the butterfly, or from unusual colonization or extinction events that take metapopulations into alternative states. One implication is that metapopulation and population viability analyses based on studies that cover only a few animal or plant generations may underestimate extinction threats

Exhausted without trust and inherent worth: A model of the suicide process based on experiential accounts

Methods and Rationale. Suicides are related to diverse demographic, socio-economical, medical and behavioural ‘risk factors’. Theoretical work in suicidology attempts to construct models that explicate the mechanisms underlying these suicides; however, models taking first person perspectives as their primary evidential bases are scarce. Drawing on interviews carried out by researchers at a UK mental health charity during 2010-2012 with people bereaved by suicide (n=25), suicidal individuals (n=14) and their ‘significant others’ (n=15), we present an explanatory model of the process of suicide derived from a Grounded Theory study. Results. Suicide/attempt can be understood as the result of a complex interaction of three elements of experience: ‘lack of trust’, ‘lack of inherent worth’ and ‘suicidal exhaustion’. The first two may be seen as conditions from which the third emerges, but so that all the elements are related to each other reciprocally and the exhaustion and the suicidal thoughts, feelings and behaviours it gives rise to feed back into the initial conditions. Trust, understood as an aspect of experience that allows a person to accommodate uncertainty in relationships and in thinking about the future, is lacking in suicidal people, as is a self-determined sense of worth that is independent of external factors. Substituting inherent worth with self-worth gained from extrinsic factors, and trustful experiencing with strategies of self-reliance and withdrawal, a person begins to consume mental resources at a high rate. ‘Suicidal exhaustion’ is distinguished from other types of chronic mental exhaustion in that it is experienced as non-contingent (arises from living itself) and hopeless in that the exhausted person is unable to envisage a future in which demands on his/her mental resources are fewer, and their replenishment available. Conclusion. The model has potential applications for public participation in suicide prevention, which should be mapped and assessed in further research

The X-ray Luminosity Function of Nearby Rich and Poor Clusters of Galaxies: A Cosmological Probe

In this letter, we present a new determination of the local (z<0.09) X-ray luminosity function (XLF) using a large, statistical sample of 294 Abell clusters and the ROSAT All-Sky-Survey. Given our large sample size, we have reduced errors by a factor of two for L(X)(0.5-2keV)>10^43 ergs/sec. We combine our data with previous work in order to explore possible constraints imposed by the shape of the XLF on cosmological models. A set of currently viable cosmologies is used to construct theoretical XLFs assuming Lx is proportional to M^p and a sigma_8-Omega_0 constraint (from Viana & Liddle 1996) based on the local X-ray temperature function. We fit these models to our observed XLF and verify that the simplest adiabatic, analytic scaling relation (e.g. Kaiser 1986) disagrees strongly with observations. If we assume that clusters can be described by the pre-heated, constant core-entropy models of Evrard & Henry (1991) then the observed XLF is consistent only with 0.1 < Omega_0 < 0.4 if the energy per unit mass in galaxies is roughly equal to the gas energy (ie if beta=1). (abridged)Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters. uses emulateapj.st

Heterogeneous CPU/GPU co-execution of CFD simulations on the POWER9 architecture: Application to airplane aerodynamics

High fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations are generally associated with large computing requirements, which are progressively acute with each new generation of supercomputers. However, significant research efforts are required to unlock the computing power of leading-edge systems, currently referred to as pre-Exascale systems, based on increasingly complex architectures. In this paper, we present the approach implemented in the computational mechanics code Alya. We describe in detail the parallelization strategy implemented to fully exploit the different levels of parallelism, together with a novel co-execution method for the efficient utilization of heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures. The latter is based on a multi-code co-execution approach with a dynamic load balancing mechanism. The assessment of the performance of all the proposed strategies has been carried out for airplane simulations on the POWER9 architecture accelerated with NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs

In situ measurement of atmospheric krypton and xenon on Mars with Mars Science Laboratory

Mars Science Laboratory's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) investigation has measured all of the stable isotopes of the heavy noble gases krypton and xenon in the martian atmosphere, in situ, from the Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater, Mars. Previous knowledge of martian atmospheric krypton and xenon isotope ratios has been based upon a combination of the Viking mission's krypton and xenon detections and measurements of noble gas isotope ratios in martian meteorites. However, the meteorite measurements reveal an impure mixture of atmospheric, mantle, and spallation contributions. The xenon and krypton isotopic measurements reported here include the complete set of stable isotopes, unmeasured by Viking. The new results generally agree with Mars meteorite measurements but also provide a unique opportunity to identify various non-atmospheric heavy noble gas components in the meteorites. Kr isotopic measurements define a solar-like atmospheric composition, but deviating from the solar wind pattern at 80Kr and 82Kr in a manner consistent with contributions originating from neutron capture in Br. The Xe measurements suggest an intriguing possibility that isotopes lighter than 132Xe have been enriched to varying degrees by spallation and neutron capture products degassed to the atmosphere from the regolith, and a model is constructed to explore this possibility. Such a spallation component, however, is not apparent in atmospheric Xe trapped in the glassy phases of martian meteorites