Under what conditions is the bioethanol and biodiesel produced entirely in the Basque Country sustainable?

4 p.*The process of agricultural production, and especially anything related to the management of fertilisation, largely determines the uncertainty in the estimation of the different environmental impact of biofuel production. *The most widely used methodologies for estimating the impact on biofuel production are not sufficiently precise for the production agricultural stage of the same. *The handling of nitrogen fertilisers and the effect of climatology during the cultivation stage greatly affects nitrous oxide emissions and are the major determinants of the carbon footprint during biofuel production. *Organic fertilisation promotes the reduction of the carbon footprint during the production of biofuels such as wheat-derived ethanol and rapeseed-derived diesel. They in turn increase other effects such as water contamination or the acidification of ecosystems. *There is very little likelihood of meeting the requirement of legislation on biofuel sustainability, which recommends a reduction of at least 35 % in greenhouse gases compared to its equivalent fossil fuel, in the case of the production of ethanol and diesel through the use of crops such as wheat and rapeseed for the current limited fertilisation conditions in those areas vulnerable to nitrate contamination and especially in the case of mineral fertilisers . *While organic fertilisation is more likely to meet the standards of sustainability, the direct impact on the use of the land is even greater than in the case of minerally fertilised crops

The role of the European small ruminant dairy sector in stabilising global temperatures : lessons from GWP* warming-equivalent emission metrics

Recent calls advocate that a huge reduction in the consumption of animal products (including dairy) is essential to mitigate climate change and stabilise global warming below the 1.5 and 2°C targets. The Paris Agreement states that to stabilise temperatures we must reach a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the second half of this century. Consequently, many countries have adopted overall GHG reduction targets (e.g. EU, at least 40% by 2030 compared to 1990). However, using conventional metric-equivalent emissions (CO2-e GWP100) as the basis to account for emissions does not result in capturing the effect on atmospheric warming of changing emission rates from short-lived GHG (e.g. methane: CH4), which are the main source of GHG emissions by small ruminants. This shortcoming could be solved by using warming-equivalent emissions (CO2-we, GWP*), which can accurately link annual GHG emission rates to its warming effect in the atmosphere. In our study, using this GWP* methodology and different modelling approaches, we first examined the historical (1990–2018) contribution of European dairy small ruminant systems to additional atmosphere warming levels and then studied different emission target scenarios for 2100. These scenarios allow us to envision the necessary reduction of GHG emissions from Europe's dairy small ruminants to achieve a stable impact on global temperatures, i.e. to be climatically neutral. Our analysis showed that, using this type of approach, the whole European sheep and goat dairy sector seems not to have contributed to additional warming in the period 1990–2018. Considering each subsector separately, increases in dairy goat production has led to some level of additional warming into the atmosphere, but these have been compensated by larger emission reductions in the dairy sheep sector. The estimations of warming for future scenarios suggest that to achieve climate neutrality, understood as not adding additional warming to the atmosphere, modest GHG reductions of sheep and goat GHG would be required (e.g. via feed additives). This reduction would be even lower if potential soil organic carbon (SOC) from associated pastures is considered.Peer reviewe

Comparable GHG emissions from animals in wildlife and livestock-dominated savannas

Pastoralism in Old World savannas is known to emit a significant share of global livestock-sourced greenhouse gases (GHG). Here, we compare calculated emissions from animals in a wildlife-dominated savanna (14.3 Mg km(-2)), to those in an adjacent land with similar ecological characteristics but under pastoralism (12.8 Mg km(-2)). The similar estimates for both, wildlife and pastoralism (76.2 vs 76.5 Mg CO2-eq km(-2)), point out an intrinsic association of emissions with herbivore ecological niches. Considering natural baseline or natural background emissions in grazing systems has important implications in the analysis of global food systems.Peer reviewe

100 years after the Constitution from Weimar what do we have left?: The controversial heritage of Carl Schmitt

Pocos periodos de la historia moderna resultan tan convulsionados y decisivos como la República de Weimar. Más allá de una crisis particular de la historia alemana, las vicisitudes políticas de Weimar configuran un “nudo gordiano” en el que se entrelazan hilos ideológicos que, de forma intermitente, se mantienen en pugna hasta el presente. En este artículo se examina el aporte del padre del decisionismo contemporáneo: Carl Schmitt. En el artículo se analiza la riqueza de la herencia schmittiana y su vigencia en el siglo XXIFew moments in modern age are as convulsive and decisive like the Weimar Republic. Beyond a particular crisis in German history, the political vicissitudes of Weimar Republic make up a “Gordian knot” in which ideological threads are woven together that, intermittently, they remain valid. In this paper we examine the contribution of the main representative of contemporary decisionism: Carl Schmitt. The document analyzes the richness of the Schmittian heritage and its validity in the 21st centur

Caracterización molecular del melanoma mediante inteligencia artificial: Implicaciones en pacientes tratados con inmunoterapia

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Medicina, Departamento de Bioquímica. Fecha de lectura: 16-04-2021Melanoma is the most lethal malignancy of the skin. The molecular analysis of melanoma has improved our understanding of the disease. eThe Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Net-work proposed the transcriptomic classification of melanoma in three subtypes: Keratin, MITF-low and Immune. However, this classification has not translated into therapeutic advances yet. The aim of this study is to characterize molecular differences of melanoma at biological and molecular levels. A novel approach based on the existence of different molecular informative layers was used in this study to establish independently sets of information. Probabilistic graphical models followed by successive sparse k-means and consensus cluster analyses was used to classify melanoma tumor samples from the TCGA cohort. Two independent classifications of molecular information were found: an im-mune and a molecular layer. The molecular classification provided four groups: epider-mis development, membrane, melanogenesis low and keratin. The immune classification subdivided the TCGA cohort into an immune-high and an immune-low group. We also studied another cohort of patients treated with immunotherapy mimicking the methods used in the TCGA cohort. The main result was an informative layer that divide the pa-tients in two groups according to their immune response whereas the immune low group had worse prognosis than the immune high. Summarizing, in this work we propose a novel analytical approach based on informative molecular layers. In this way, two inde-pendent classifications, an immune-based and a molecular-based classification, were es-tablished for melanoma. Information from immune layer in a cohort treated with immu-notherapy showed a resistant group with low expression of the immune response gene

Unique fermionic vacuum in de Sitter spacetime from hybrid quantum cosmology

In this work we show how the criterion of asymptotic Hamiltonian diagonalization originated in hybrid quantum cosmology serves to pick out a unique vacuum for the Dirac field in de Sitter, in the context of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. This criterion is based on the dynamical definition of annihilation and creationlike variables for the fermionic field, which obey the linearized dynamics of a Hamiltonian that has been diagonalized in a way that is adapted to its local spatial structure. This leads to fermionic variables that possess a precise asymptotic expansion in the ultraviolet limit of large wavenumbers. We explicitly show that, when the cosmological background is fixed as a de Sitter solution, this expansion uniquely selects the choice of fermionic annihilation and creationlike variables for all spatial scales, and thus picks out a unique privileged Fock representation and vacuum state for the Dirac field in de Sitter. The explicit form of the basis of solutions to the Dirac equation associated with this vacuum is then computed.Comment: 14 pages. Published versio

Underrated past herbivore densities could lead to misoriented sustainability policies

Knowing the carrying capacity of the Earth’s grazed ecosystems, and the relevance of herbivory, is important for many scientific disciplines, as well as for policy. Current herbivore levels are estimated to be four to five times larger than at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition or the start of the industrial revolution. While this estimate can lead the general public and the scientific community to predict severe, widespread environmental impacts by livestock in terms of deforestation, biodiversity loss and climate change, it ignores the inherent uncertainty of such calculations. We revise the evidence published during the last decade regarding Late Pleistocene herbivore abundance, along with contemporary and some pre-industrial data on herbivore density in grazed ecosystems. Both Late Pleistocene and pre-industrial herbivore levels are likely to be consistently higher than what has generally been assumed, confirming increasing awareness on the importance of herbivory as a widespread ecological process. We therefore call for more refined research in this field to have the reliable baselines currently demanded by society and policy. These baselines should orient sound action towards policies on biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration, food systems, and climate change.Peer reviewe

Do Parent–Adolescent Discrepancies in Family Functioning Increase the Risk of Hispanic Adolescent HIV Risk Behaviors?

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107542/1/famp12067.pd

Derechos al ambiente sano y de la naturaleza: límites y aproximaciones conceptuales

En el presente trabajo se podrá evidenciar que no existe una clara diferencia entre el ambiente sano y derechos de la naturaleza que permita conocer hasta qué punto pueden tener un acercamiento o un distanciamiento teórico y práctico, lo que conlleva a que se mantenga una conceptualización e interpretación errónea al momento de la aplicación de estos derechos, lo que puede provocar una inseguridad jurídica. No es lo mismo hablar de derechos de la naturaleza que ambiente sano, lo que ha llevado a pensar en algunas ocasiones, que al proteger el ambiente se protege la naturaleza, lo cual es erróneo, ya que son dos derechos con connotaciones distintas y con ciertas características que los asemeja. La presente investigación tiene como finalidad determinar a través de un estudio comparativo, las diferencias y similitudes conceptuales de estas categorías jurídicas mediante un análisis con dimensiones teóricas e históricas, tomando en cuenta el ámbito de estudio, su aplicación y tutela. Así mismo se abordará el mecanismo más efectivo para la protección de los derechos. Los derechos de la naturaleza representan un hito de ámbito mundial al ser constitucionalizados en Ecuador, pero lastimosamente la puesta en práctica no ha sido la esperada. El cambio de paradigma es positivo, pero no representa la aplicabilidad que se esperaba, ya que Ecuador al tener una economía dependiente de la extracción de recursos naturales no renovables, en sus políticas públicas no se ve reflejado la protección que amerita el reconocimiento de estos derechos