Reducing vehicle-related NOx and PM emissions in metropolitan areas

With scientific discoveries indicating a relationship between nitrogen oxides/particulate matter and cancers/heart disease, and the growing road transport sector in Western Europe, there is an increasing urgency to further reduce vehicle emissions. This comprises a large part of the total emissions in urban areas. In this article, we address the question of how various local policy instruments and technology can be used to support the use of clean road vehicles in urban areas. Despite some moderate success in specific areas, local policies and technology need to become even more effective. Using the STREAMS model, a comparative analysis is made of six urban cases in the Randstad and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan areas. The study provides new insights into the dynamics between the perceived problems, policy making (in terms of the adoption of policy instruments), politics (in terms of the fit/misfit between stakeholders’ interests, which may result in a wind

A top-down methodology to calculate the CO2-footprint for terminal operations; the 6-step approach

There is an increasing need for green and effective operations at terminals and in port due to existing and upcoming stricter air quality standards and regulations. At the same time there is an increasing awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption of ports and terminals and to focus on the carbon footprint which is dependent not only on equipment and operations, but also the energy mix and the management of energy consumption. This is an important objective for the terminals but also for a wide variety of stakeholders, such as port authorities and transport service clients. Sustainable terminal operations require a good insight in terminal configurations, the use of equipment and the availability of reliable data about the energy consumption on the terminal. This information is in many cases not available for a variety of reasons, such as the very competitive environment and the competition between terminals, sometimes simply because the information is not known. In this deliverable an innovative top-down approach is presented to calculate the CO2-emissions of terminals. This methodology is named ‘the 6-step-approach’. This approach can be considered as an easy applicable tool to get a brief and coherent overview of the total energy consumption of a terminal. The 6-step approach is a standardised methodology which is coherent with CEN standard CEN 16258 “Methodology for calculation and declaration of energy consumption and GHG emissions of transport services (freight and passengers)”. The CEN standard contributes to the standardisation, comprehensiveness, transparency, consistency, generalization and predetermination. __The methodology consists of 6 steps:__ 1- the operations on the terminal (what is actually happening?) 2- the construction of an analytical model of activities 3- the development of an algorithm based on the analytical model 4- application of the model (preferably with real data, presently mostly based on estimations) 5- valorisation of the outcomes of the model 6- policy recommendations In coherence with the consumption scheme based on the GHG Protocol or to ISO 14064 standard and the CEN EN 16258 standard, the methodology concentrates on three domains of energy consumption: the terminal operations and related equipment, the consumption of reefers and the lighting of the yard. These three elements cover more than 95% of all energy consumption at a terminal. An important contribution of the 6-step approach to the port community is the fact that the model delivers outcomes that can function as the basis for tailor made recommendations that cover almost all activities. Therefore the main objective of the tool is that it can function as a benchmark tool for companies, port authorities, E.U., WorldBank/IMF/OECD, etc. (policy investment). Furthermore the application of tool can be considered as a basis for evaluation (rising awareness and motivation to use energy competently and thoughtfully), organizational investments (modifying operations to increase productivity versus energy consumption), technical modification investments (modifying equipment and systems to reduce consumption/increase productivity), technical purchase investments (put new equipment/systems into operation). But overall, the 6-step approach is a source for inspiration, it gives structure to process and the methodology recognizes the new challenges: to apply the model as a a pro-active methodology that addresses the economic (profit), environmental (planet), and social objectives (people) in one coherent strategy. By doing this, the 6-step approach offers an opportunity for cooperation and interaction between the private firms su

Grounding event references in news

Events are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to language understanding. Yet they are diverse and complex in ontology and reference; computational processing hence proves challenging. News provides a shared basis for communication by reporting events. We perform several studies into news event reference. One annotation study characterises each news report in terms of its update and topic events, but finds that topic is better consider through explicit references to background events. In this context, we propose the event linking task which—analogous to named entity linking or disambiguation—models the grounding of references to notable events. It defines the disambiguation of an event reference as a link to the archival article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. Event linking hopes to provide an intuitive approximation to coreference, erring on the side of over-generation in contrast with the literature. The task is also distinguished in considering event references from multiple perspectives over time. We diagnostically evaluate the task by first linking references to past, newsworthy events in news and opinion pieces to an archive of the Sydney Morning Herald. The intensive annotation results in only a small corpus of 229 distinct links. However, we observe that a number of hyperlinks targeting online news correspond to event links. We thus acquire two large corpora of hyperlinks at very low cost. From these we learn weights for temporal and term overlap features in a retrieval system. These noisy data lead to significant performance gains over a bag-of-words baseline. While our initial system can accurately predict many event links, most will require deep linguistic processing for their disambiguation

Alkaloid production by a Cinchona officinalis "Ledgeriana" hairy root culture containing constitutive expression constructs of tryptophan decarboxylase and strictosidine synthase cDNAs from Catharanthus roseus

Cinchona officinalis ‘Ledgeriana’, former called Cinchona ledgeriana, hairy roots were initiated containing constitutive-expression constructs of cDNAs encoding the enzymes tryptophan decarboxylase (TDC) and strictosidine synthase (STR) from Catharanthus roseus, two key enzymes in terpenoid indole and quinoline alkaloid biosynthesis. The successful integration of these genes and the reporter gene gus-int was demonstrated using Southern blotting and the polymerase chain reaction. The products of TDC and STR, tryptamine and strictosidine, were found in high amounts, 1200 and 1950 mg g–1 dry weight, respectively. Quinine and quinidine levels were found to rise up to 500 and 1000 mg g–1 dry weight, respectively. The results show that genetic engineering with multiple genes is well possible in hairy roots of C. officinalis. However, 1 year after analyzing the hairy roots for the first time, they had completely lost their capacity to accumulate alkaloids.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Alkaloid production by a Cinchona officinalis "Ledgeriana" hairy root culture containing constitutive expression constructs of tryptophan decarboxylase and strictosidine synthase cDNAs from Catharanthus roseus

Cinchona officinalis ‘Ledgeriana’, former called Cinchona ledgeriana, hairy roots were initiated containing constitutive-expression constructs of cDNAs encoding the enzymes tryptophan decarboxylase (TDC) and strictosidine synthase (STR) from Catharanthus roseus, two key enzymes in terpenoid indole and quinoline alkaloid biosynthesis. The successful integration of these genes and the reporter gene gus-int was demonstrated using Southern blotting and the polymerase chain reaction. The products of TDC and STR, tryptamine and strictosidine, were found in high amounts, 1200 and 1950 mg g–1 dry weight, respectively. Quinine and quinidine levels were found to rise up to 500 and 1000 mg g–1 dry weight, respectively. The results show that genetic engineering with multiple genes is well possible in hairy roots of C. officinalis. However, 1 year after analyzing the hairy roots for the first time, they had completely lost their capacity to accumulate alkaloids.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

3D-Fractal engineering based on oxide-only corner lithography

This paper reports a new highly simplified machining process for three dimensional (3D)-fractal nanofabrication based on oxide-only corner lithography. It consists of a repeated sequence of wet etching (silicon), thermal oxidation and wet etching (silicon oxide). The previously reported 3D-fractal fabrication process needed additional low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) steps of silicon nitride, as well as local oxidation of silicon (LOCOS). Employing this new procedure, a three generation folded silicon oxide fractal sheet with approx. a 10 µm footprint has been fabricated