Carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles fuelled with ethanol mixtures

The growing interest in the possible use of ethanol from natural sources to blend with petrol (gasoline) derived from crude oil (or synthesis from other fossil fuels) should be supported by knowledge of the likely effect on greenhouse gas emissions. This contribution estimates the emission of CO2 from petrolethanol blends as a function of the volume percentage ethanol in the blend and the consumption of petrol/100km in the average vehicle. The effect of the ethanol having a lower energy per unit mass or volume than petrol is specifically taken into account

Coinductive soundness of corecursive type class resolution

This work has been supported by the EPSRC grant “Coalgebraic Logic Programming for Type Inference” EP/K031864/1-2, EU Horizon 2020 grant “RePhrase: Refactoring Parallel Heterogeneous Resource-Aware Applications - a Software Engineering Approach” (ICT-644235), and by COST Action IC1202 (TACLe), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)Horn clauses and first-order resolution are commonly used to implement type classes in Haskell. Several corecursive extensions to type class resolution have recently been proposed, with the goal of allowing (co)recursive dictionary construction where resolution does not terminate. This paper shows, for the first time, that corecursive type class resolution and its extensions are coinductively sound with respect to the greatest Herbrand models of logic programs and that they are inductively unsound with respect to the least Herbrand models. We establish incompleteness results for various fragments of the proof system.Postprin

Mass coral bleaching of P. versipora in Sydney Harbour driven by the 2015–2016 heatwave

© 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. High-latitude coral communities are distinct from their tropical counterparts, and how they respond to recent heat wave events that have decimated tropical reefs remains unknown. In Australia, the 2016 El Niño resulted in the largest global mass coral bleaching event to date, reaching as far south as Sydney Harbour (~ 34°S). Coral bleaching was observed for the first time (affecting ca., 60% of all corals) as sea surface temperatures in Sydney Harbour remained > 2 °C above the long-term mean summer maxima, enabling us to examine whether high-latitude corals bleached in a manner described for tropical corals. Responses of the geographically cosmopolitan Plesiastrea versipora and southerly restricted Coscinaraea mcneilli were contrasted across two harbour sites, both in situ and among samples-maintained ex situ in aquaria continually supplied with Sydney Harbour seawater. While both coral taxa hosted the same species of microalgal endosymbiont (Breviolum spp; formerly clade B), only P. versipora bleached both in situ and ex situ via pronounced losses of endosymbiont cells. Both species displayed very different metabolic responses (growth, photosynthesis, respiration and calcification) and bleaching susceptibilities under elevated temperatures. Bacterial microbiome profiling, however, revealed a convergence of bacterial community composition across coral species throughout the bleaching. Corals species found in temperate regions, including the generalist P. versipora, will therefore likely be highly susceptible to future change as heat waves grow in frequency and severity unless their thermal thresholds increase. Our observations provide further evidence that high-latitude systems are susceptible to community reorganisation under climate change

Hybrid Rules with Well-Founded Semantics

A general framework is proposed for integration of rules and external first order theories. It is based on the well-founded semantics of normal logic programs and inspired by ideas of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) and constructive negation for logic programs. Hybrid rules are normal clauses extended with constraints in the bodies; constraints are certain formulae in the language of the external theory. A hybrid program is a pair of a set of hybrid rules and an external theory. Instances of the framework are obtained by specifying the class of external theories, and the class of constraints. An example instance is integration of (non-disjunctive) Datalog with ontologies formalized as description logics. The paper defines a declarative semantics of hybrid programs and a goal-driven formal operational semantics. The latter can be seen as a generalization of SLS-resolution. It provides a basis for hybrid implementations combining Prolog with constraint solvers. Soundness of the operational semantics is proven. Sufficient conditions for decidability of the declarative semantics, and for completeness of the operational semantics are given

Multiscale correlative tomography: an investigation of creep cavitation in 316 stainless steel

Creep cavitation in an ex-service nuclear steam header Type 316 stainless steel sample is investigated through a multiscale tomography workflow spanning eight orders of magnitude, combining X-ray computed tomography (CT), plasma focused ion beam (FIB) scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging and scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) tomography. Guided by microscale X-ray CT, nanoscale X-ray CT is used to investigate the size and morphology of cavities at a triple point of grain boundaries. In order to understand the factors affecting the extent of cavitation, the orientation and crystallographic misorientation of each boundary is characterised using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). Additionally, in order to better understand boundary phase growth, the chemistry of a single boundary and its associated secondary phase precipitates is probed through STEM energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) tomography. The difference in cavitation of the three grain boundaries investigated suggests that the orientation of grain boundaries with respect to the direction of principal stress is important in the promotion of cavity formation

Reducing drug related deaths : a pre-implementation assessment of knowledge,barriers and enablers for naloxone distribution through general practice

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Glucosylsphingosine Is a Highly Sensitive and Specific Biomarker for Primary Diagnostic and Follow-Up Monitoring in Gaucher Disease in a Non-Jewish, Caucasian Cohort of Gaucher Disease Patients

Gaucher disease (GD) is the most common lysosomal storage disorder (LSD). Based on a deficient β-glucocerebrosidase it leads to an accumulation of glucosylceramide. Standard diagnostic procedures include measurement of enzyme activity, genetic testing as well as analysis of chitotriosidase and CCL18/PARC as biomarkers. Even though chitotriosidase is the most well-established biomarker in GD, it is not specific for GD. Furthermore, it may be false negative in a significant percentage of GD patients due to mutation. Additionally, chitotriosidase reflects the changes in the course of the disease belatedly. This further enhances the need for a reliable biomarker, especially for the monitoring of the disease and the impact of potential treatments.Here, we evaluated the sensitivity and specificity of the previously reported biomarker Glucosylsphingosine with regard to different control groups (healthy control vs. GD carriers vs. other LSDs).Only GD patients displayed elevated levels of Glucosylsphingosine higher than 12 ng/ml whereas the comparison controls groups revealed concentrations below the pathological cut-off, verifying the specificity of Glucosylsphingosine as a biomarker for GD. In addition, we evaluated the biomarker before and during enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) in 19 patients, demonstrating a decrease in Glucosylsphingosine over time with the most pronounced reduction within the first 6 months of ERT. Furthermore, our data reveals a correlation between the medical consequence of specific mutations and Glucosylsphingosine.In summary, Glucosylsphingosine is a very promising, reliable and specific biomarker for GD

Reducing bias and improving transparency in medical research: A critical overview of the problems, progress so far and suggested next steps

In recent years there has been increasing awareness of problems that have undermined trust in medical research. This review outlines some of the most important issues including research culture, reporting biases, and statistical and methodological issues. It examines measures that have been instituted to address these problems and explores the success and limitations of these measures. The paper concludes by proposing three achievable actions which could be implemented to deliver significantly improved transparency and mitigation of bias. These measures are as follows: (1) mandatory registration of interests by those involved in research; (2) that journals support the ‘registered reports’ publication format; and (3) that comprehensive study documentation for all publicly funded research be made available on a World Health Organization research repository. We suggest that achieving such measures requires a broad-based campaign which mobilises public opinion. We invite readers to feedback on the proposed actions and to join us in calling for their implementation

Species-level functional profiling of metagenomes and metatranscriptomes.

Functional profiles of microbial communities are typically generated using comprehensive metagenomic or metatranscriptomic sequence read searches, which are time-consuming, prone to spurious mapping, and often limited to community-level quantification. We developed HUMAnN2, a tiered search strategy that enables fast, accurate, and species-resolved functional profiling of host-associated and environmental communities. HUMAnN2 identifies a community's known species, aligns reads to their pangenomes, performs translated search on unclassified reads, and finally quantifies gene families and pathways. Relative to pure translated search, HUMAnN2 is faster and produces more accurate gene family profiles. We applied HUMAnN2 to study clinal variation in marine metabolism, ecological contribution patterns among human microbiome pathways, variation in species' genomic versus transcriptional contributions, and strain profiling. Further, we introduce 'contributional diversity' to explain patterns of ecological assembly across different microbial community types