Respiratory Health Effects of In Vivo Sub-Chronic Diesel and Biodiesel Exhaust Exposure

Biodiesel, which can be made from a variety of natural oils, is currently promoted as a sustainable, healthier replacement for commercial mineral diesel despite little experimental data supporting this. The aim of our research was to investigate the health impacts of exposure to exhaust generated by the combustion of diesel and two different biodiesels. Male BALB/c mice (n = 24 per group) were exposed for 2 h/day for 8 days to diluted exhaust from a diesel engine running on ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) or Tallow or Canola biodiesel, with room air exposures used as control. A variety of respiratory-related end-point measurements were assessed, including lung function, responsiveness to methacholine, airway inflammation and cytokine response, and airway morphometry. Exposure to Tallow biodiesel exhaust resulted in the most significant health impacts compared to Air controls, including increased airway hyperresponsiveness and airway inflammation. In contrast, exposure to Canola biodiesel exhaust resulted in fewer negative health effects. Exposure to ULSD resulted in health impacts between those of the two biodiesels. The health effects of biodiesel exhaust exposure vary depending on the feedstock used to make the fuel

Biodiesel feedstock determines exhaust toxicity in 20% biodiesel: 80% mineral diesel blends

To address climate change concerns, and reduce the carbon footprint caused by fossil fuel use, it is likely that blend ratios of renewable biodiesel with commercial mineral diesel fuel will steadily increase, resulting in biodiesel use becoming more widespread. Exhaust toxicity of unblended biodiesels changes depending on feedstock type, however the effect of feedstock on blended fuels is less well known. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of biodiesel feedstock on exhaust toxicity of 20% blended biodiesel fuels (B20). Primary human airway epithelial cells were exposed to exhaust diluted 1/15 with air from an engine running on conventional ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) or 20% blends of soy, canola, waste cooking oil (WCO), tallow, palm or cottonseed biodiesel in diesel. Physico-chemical exhaust properties were compared between fuels and the post-exposure effect of exhaust on cellular viability and media release was assessed 24 h later. Exhaust properties changed significantly between all fuels with cottonseed B20 being the most different to both ULSD and its respective unblended biodiesel. Exposure to palm B20 resulted in significantly decreased cellular viability (96.3 ± 1.7%; p < 0.01) whereas exposure to soy B20 generated the greatest number of changes in mediator release (including IL-6, IL-8 and TNF-α, p < 0.05) when compared to air exposed controls, with palm B20 and tallow B20 closely following. In contrast, canola B20 and WCO B20 were the least toxic with only mediators G-CSF and TNF-α being significantly increased. Therefore, exposure to palm B20, soy B20 and tallow B20 were found to be the most toxic and exposure to canola B20 and WCO B20 the least. The top three most toxic and the bottom three least toxic B20 fuels are consistent with their unblended counterparts, suggesting that feedstock type greatly impacts exhaust toxicity, even when biodiesel only comprises 20% of the fuel

Providing the Context for Intentional Learning

This article is written in response to Sharon Derry's article “Remediating Academic Difficulties Through Strategy Training: The Acquisition of Useful Knowledge.” The features of effective strategy instruction, to which Derry refers, are illustrated by examining the nature of the decisions the teacher confronts; specifically, determining the purposes of instruction, the context in which instruction occurs, and the roles of the teacher and students in instruction.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69150/2/10.1177_074193259001100608.pd

Multi-century trends to wetter winters and drier summers in the England and Wales precipitation series explained by observational and sampling bias in early records

Globally, few precipitation records extend to the 18th century. The England Wales Precipitation (EWP) series is a notable exception with continuous monthly records from 1766. EWP has found widespread use across diverse fields of research including trend detection, evaluation of climate model simulations, as a proxy for mid-latitude atmospheric circulation, a predictor in long-term European gridded precipitation data sets, the assessment of drought and extremes, tree-ring reconstructions and as a benchmark for other regional series. A key finding from EWP has been the multi-centennial trends towards wetter winters and drier summers. We statistically reconstruct seasonal EWP using independent, quality-assured temperature, pressure and circulation indices. Using a sleet and snow series for the UK derived by Profs. Gordon Manley and Elizabeth Shaw to examine winter reconstructions, we show that precipitation totals for pre-1870 winters are likely biased low due to gauge under-catch of snowfall and a higher incidence of snowfall during this period. When these factors are accounted for in our reconstructions, the observed trend to wetter winters in EWP is no longer evident. For summer, we find that pre-1820 precipitation totals are too high, likely due to decreasing network density and less certain data at key stations. A significant trend to drier summers is not robustly present in our reconstructions of the EWP series. While our findings are more certain for winter than summer, we highlight (a) that extreme caution should be exercised when using EWP to make inferences about multi-centennial trends, and; (b) that assessments of 18th and 19th Century winter precipitation should be aware of potential snow biases in early records. Our findings underline the importance of continual re-appraisal of established long-term climate data sets as new evidence becomes available. It is also likely that the identified biases in winter EWP have distorted many other long-term European precipitation series

Integrated microsphere planar lightwave circuits

Multicomponent glass microspheres self-assembled on optical waveguides combine tailored optical properties with strong light/material interaction potentially leading to compact low-power photonic devices. Progress and prospects for microsphere/waveguide integration will be described

Quantitative Concept Analysis

Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) begins from a context, given as a binary relation between some objects and some attributes, and derives a lattice of concepts, where each concept is given as a set of objects and a set of attributes, such that the first set consists of all objects that satisfy all attributes in the second, and vice versa. Many applications, though, provide contexts with quantitative information, telling not just whether an object satisfies an attribute, but also quantifying this satisfaction. Contexts in this form arise as rating matrices in recommender systems, as occurrence matrices in text analysis, as pixel intensity matrices in digital image processing, etc. Such applications have attracted a lot of attention, and several numeric extensions of FCA have been proposed. We propose the framework of proximity sets (proxets), which subsume partially ordered sets (posets) as well as metric spaces. One feature of this approach is that it extracts from quantified contexts quantified concepts, and thus allows full use of the available information. Another feature is that the categorical approach allows analyzing any universal properties that the classical FCA and the new versions may have, and thus provides structural guidance for aligning and combining the approaches.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures, ICFCA 201

Search for lepton-flavor violation at HERA

A search for lepton-flavor-violating interactions $e p \to \mu X$ and $e p\to \tau X$ has been performed with the ZEUS detector using the entire HERA I data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 130 pb^{-1}. The data were taken at center-of-mass energies, $\sqrt{s}$, of 300 and 318 GeV. No evidence of lepton-flavor violation was found, and constraints were derived on leptoquarks (LQs) that could mediate such interactions. For LQ masses below $\sqrt{s}$, limits were set on $\lambda_{eq_1} \sqrt{\beta_{\ell q}}$, where $\lambda_{eq_1}$ is the coupling of the LQ to an electron and a first-generation quark $q_1$, and $\beta_{\ell q}$ is the branching ratio of the LQ to the final-state lepton $\ell$ ($\mu$ or $\tau$) and a quark $q$. For LQ masses much larger than $\sqrt{s}$, limits were set on the four-fermion interaction term $\lambda_{e q_\alpha} \lambda_{\ell q_\beta} / M_{\mathrm{LQ}}^2$ for LQs that couple to an electron and a quark $q_\alpha$ and to a lepton $\ell$ and a quark $q_\beta$, where $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are quark generation indices. Some of the limits are also applicable to lepton-flavor-violating processes mediated by squarks in $R$-Parity-violating supersymmetric models. In some cases, especially when a higher-generation quark is involved and for the process $e p\to \tau X$, the ZEUS limits are the most stringent to date.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures, Accepted by EPJC. References and 1 figure (Fig. 6) adde

Multijet production in neutral current deep inelastic scattering at HERA and determination of alpha_s

Multijet production rates in neutral current deep inelastic scattering have been measured in the range of exchanged boson virtualities 10 < Q2 < 5000 GeV2. The data were taken at the ep collider HERA with centre-of-mass energy sqrt(s) = 318 GeV using the ZEUS detector and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 82.2 pb-1. Jets were identified in the Breit frame using the k_T cluster algorithm in the longitudinally invariant inclusive mode. Measurements of differential dijet and trijet cross sections are presented as functions of jet transverse energy E_{T,B}{jet}, pseudorapidity eta_{LAB}{jet} and Q2 with E_{T,B}{jet} > 5 GeV and -1 < eta_{LAB}{jet} < 2.5. Next-to-leading-order QCD calculations describe the data well. The value of the strong coupling constant alpha_s(M_Z), determined from the ratio of the trijet to dijet cross sections, is alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.1179 pm 0.0013(stat.) {+0.0028}_{-0.0046}(exp.) {+0.0064}_{-0.0046}(th.)Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Measurement of (anti)deuteron and (anti)proton production in DIS at HERA

The first observation of (anti)deuterons in deep inelastic scattering at HERA has been made with the ZEUS detector at a centre-of-mass energy of 300--318 GeV using an integrated luminosity of 120 pb-1. The measurement was performed in the central rapidity region for transverse momentum per unit of mass in the range 0.3<p_T/M<0.7. The particle rates have been extracted and interpreted in terms of the coalescence model. The (anti)deuteron production yield is smaller than the (anti)proton yield by approximately three orders of magnitude, consistent with the world measurements.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, submitted to Nucl. Phys.