Clean Energy Innovation: Sources of Technical and Commercial Breakthroughs

Low-carbon energy innovation is essential to combat climate change, promote economic competitiveness, and achieve energy security. Using U.S. patent data and additional patent-relevant data collected from the Internet, we map the landscape of low-carbon energy innovation in the United States since 1975. We isolate 10,603 renewable and 10,442 traditional energy patents and develop a database that characterizes proxy measures for technical and commercial impact, as measured by patent citations and Web presence, respectively. Regression models and multivariate simulations are used to compare the social, institutional, and geographic drivers of breakthrough clean energy innovation. Results indicate statistically significant effects of social, institutional, and geographic variables on technical and commercial impacts of patents and unique innovation trends between different energy technologies. We observe important differences between patent citations and Web presence of licensed and unlicensed patents, indicating the potential utility of using screened Web hits as a measure of commercial importance. We offer hypotheses for these revealed differences and suggest a research agenda with which to test these hypotheses. These preliminary findings indicate that leveraging empirical insights to better target research expenditures would augment the speed and scale of innovation and deployment of clean energy technologies

The role of childhood social position in adult type 2 diabetes: Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Copyright @ 2014 Pikhartova et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Background: Socioeconomic circumstances in childhood and early adulthood may influence the later onset of chronic disease, although such research is limited for type 2 diabetes and its risk factors at the different stages of life. The main aim of the present study is to examine the role of childhood social position and later inflammatory markers and health behaviours in developing type 2 diabetes at older ages using a pathway analytic approach. Methods. Data on childhood and adult life circumstances of 2,994 men and 4,021 women from English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) were used to evaluate their association with diabetes at age 50 years and more. The cases of diabetes were based on having increased blood levels of glycated haemoglobin and/or self-reported medication for diabetes and/or being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Father's job when ELSA participants were aged 14 years was used as the measure of childhood social position. Current social characteristics, health behaviours and inflammatory biomarkers were used as potential mediators in the statistical analysis to assess direct and indirect effects of childhood circumstances on diabetes in later life. Results: 12.6 per cent of participants were classified as having diabetes. A disadvantaged social position in childhood, as measured by father's manual occupation, was associated at conventional levels of statistical significance with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in adulthood, both directly and indirectly through inflammation, adulthood social position and a risk score constructed from adult health behaviours including tobacco smoking and limited physical activity. The direct effect of childhood social position was reduced by mediation analysis (standardised coefficient decreased from 0.089 to 0.043) but remained statistically significant (p = 0.035). All three indirect pathways made a statistically significantly contribution to the overall effect of childhood social position on adulthood type 2 diabetes. Conclusions: Childhood social position influences adult diabetes directly and indirectly through inflammatory markers, adulthood social position and adult health behaviours. © 2014Pikhartova et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.Economic and Social Research Council-funded International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society and Health (RES-596-28-0001)

Evolution of form in metal-organic frameworks

Self-assembly has proven to be a widely successful synthetic strategy for functional materials, especially for metal-organic materials (MOMs), an emerging class of porous materials consisting of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and metal-organic polyhedra (MOPs). However, there are areas in MOM synthesis in which such self-assembly has not been fully utilized, such as controlling the interior of MOM crystals. Here we demonstrate sequential self-assembly strategy for synthesizing various forms of MOM crystals, including double-shell hollow MOMs, based on single-crystal to single-crystal transformation from MOP to MOF. Moreover, this synthetic strategy also yields other forms, such as solid, core-shell, double and triple matryoshka, and single-shell hollow MOMs, thereby exhibiting form evolution in MOMs. We anticipate that this synthetic approach might open up a new direction for the development of diverse forms in MOMs, with highly advanced areas such as sequential drug delivery/release and heterogeneous cascade catalysis targeted in the foreseeable future.ope

Surface Modification and Planar Defects of Calcium Carbonates by Magnetic Water Treatment

Powdery calcium carbonates, predominantly calcite and aragonite, with planar defects and cation–anion mixed surfaces as deposited on low-carbon steel by magnetic water treatment (MWT) were characterized by X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, and vibration spectroscopy. Calcite were found to form faceted nanoparticles having 3x () commensurate superstructure and with well-developed {} and {} surfaces to exhibit preferred orientations. Aragonite occurred as laths having 3x () commensurate superstructure and with well-developed () surface extending along [100] direction up to micrometers in length. The (hkil)-specific coalescence of calcite and rapid lath growth of aragonite under the combined effects of Lorentz force and a precondensation event account for a beneficial larger particulate/colony size for the removal of the carbonate scale from the steel substrate. The coexisting magnetite particles have well-developed {011} surfaces regardless of MWT

Heterologous Amyloid Seeding: Revisiting the Role of Acetylcholinesterase in Alzheimer's Disease

Neurodegenerative diseases associated with abnormal protein folding and ordered aggregation require an initial trigger which may be infectious, inherited, post-inflammatory or idiopathic. Proteolytic cleavage to generate vulnerable precursors, such as amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) production via β and γ secretases in Alzheimer's Disease (AD), is one such trigger, but the proteolytic removal of these fragments is also aetiologically important. The levels of Aβ in the central nervous system are regulated by several catabolic proteases, including insulysin (IDE) and neprilysin (NEP). The known association of human acetylcholinesterase (hAChE) with pathological aggregates in AD together with its ability to increase Aβ fibrilization prompted us to search for proteolytic triggers that could enhance this process. The hAChE C-terminal domain (T40, AChE575-614) is an exposed amphiphilic α-helix involved in enzyme oligomerisation, but it also contains a conformational switch region (CSR) with high propensity for conversion to non-native (hidden) β-strand, a property associated with amyloidogenicity. A synthetic peptide (AChE586-599) encompassing the CSR region shares homology with Aβ and forms β-sheet amyloid fibrils. We investigated the influence of IDE and NEP proteolysis on the formation and degradation of relevant hAChE β-sheet species. By combining reverse-phase HPLC and mass spectrometry, we established that the enzyme digestion profiles on T40 versus AChE586-599, or versus Aβ, differed. Moreover, IDE digestion of T40 triggered the conformational switch from α- to β-structures, resulting in surfactant CSR species that self-assembled into amyloid fibril precursors (oligomers). Crucially, these CSR species significantly increased Aβ fibril formation both by seeding the energetically unfavorable formation of amyloid nuclei and by enhancing the rate of amyloid elongation. Hence, these results may offer an explanation for observations that implicate hAChE in the extent of Aβ deposition in the brain. Furthermore, this process of heterologous amyloid seeding by a proteolytic fragment from another protein may represent a previously underestimated pathological trigger, implying that the abundance of the major amyloidogenic species (Aβ in AD, for example) may not be the only important factor in neurodegeneration

Status of Biodiversity in the Baltic Sea

The brackish Baltic Sea hosts species of various origins and environmental tolerances. These immigrated to the sea 10,000 to 15,000 years ago or have been introduced to the area over the relatively recent history of the system. The Baltic Sea has only one known endemic species. While information on some abiotic parameters extends back as long as five centuries and first quantitative snapshot data on biota (on exploited fish populations) originate generally from the same time, international coordination of research began in the early twentieth century. Continuous, annual Baltic Sea-wide long-term datasets on several organism groups (plankton, benthos, fish) are generally available since the mid-1950s. Based on a variety of available data sources (published papers, reports, grey literature, unpublished data), the Baltic Sea, incl. Kattegat, hosts altogether at least 6,065 species, including at least 1,700 phytoplankton, 442 phytobenthos, at least 1,199 zooplankton, at least 569 meiozoobenthos, 1,476 macrozoobenthos, at least 380 vertebrate parasites, about 200 fish, 3 seal, and 83 bird species. In general, but not in all organism groups, high sub-regional total species richness is associated with elevated salinity. Although in comparison with fully marine areas the Baltic Sea supports fewer species, several facets of the system's diversity remain underexplored to this day, such as micro-organisms, foraminiferans, meiobenthos and parasites. In the future, climate change and its interactions with multiple anthropogenic forcings are likely to have major impacts on the Baltic biodiversity

Lawson criterion for ignition exceeded in an inertial fusion experiment

For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition as a proof of principle of various fusion concepts. Following the Lawson criterion, an ignited plasma is one where the fusion heating power is high enough to overcome all the physical processes that cool the fusion plasma, creating a positive thermodynamic feedback loop with rapidly increasing temperature. In inertially confined fusion, ignition is a state where the fusion plasma can begin "burn propagation" into surrounding cold fuel, enabling the possibility of high energy gain. While "scientific breakeven" (i.e., unity target gain) has not yet been achieved (here target gain is 0.72, 1.37 MJ of fusion for 1.92 MJ of laser energy), this Letter reports the first controlled fusion experiment, using laser indirect drive, on the National Ignition Facility to produce capsule gain (here 5.8) and reach ignition by nine different formulations of the Lawson criterion

Study of double parton scattering using W+2-jet events in proton-proton collisions at √s=7 TeV

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