Microcavity controlled coupling of excitonic qubits

Controlled non-local energy and coherence transfer enables light harvesting in photosynthesis and non-local logical operations in quantum computing. The most relevant mechanism of coherent coupling of distant qubits is coupling via the electromagnetic field. Here, we demonstrate the controlled coherent coupling of spatially separated excitonic qubits via the photon mode of a solid state microresonator. This is revealed by two-dimensional spectroscopy of the sample's coherent response, a sensitive and selective probe of the coherent coupling. The experimental results are quantitatively described by a rigorous theory of the cavity mediated coupling within a cluster of quantum dots excitons. Having demonstrated this mechanism, it can be used in extended coupling channels - sculptured, for instance, in photonic crystal cavities - to enable a long-range, non-local wiring up of individual emitters in solids

Decreased endothelin receptor B expression in large primary uveal melanomas is associated with early clinical metastasis and short survival

The most devastating aspect of cancer is the metastasis of tumour cells to organs distant from the original tumour site. The major problem facing oncologists treating uveal melanoma, the most common cancer of the eye, is metastatic disease. To lower mortality, it is necessary to increase our understanding of the molecular genetic alterations involved in this process. Using suppression subtractive hybridisation, we have analysed differential gene expression between four primary tumours from patients who have developed clinical metastasis and four primary tumours from patients with no evidence of metastasis to date. We have identified endothelin receptor type B as differentially expressed between these tumours and confirmed this observation using comparative multiplex RT–PCR. In a further 33 tumours, reduced endothelin receptor type B expression correlated with death from metastatic disease. Reduced expression also correlated with other known prognostic indicators, including the presence of epithelioid cells, chromosome 3 allelic imbalance and chromosome 8q allelic imbalance. Endothelin receptor type B expression was also reduced in four out of four primary small cell lung carcinomas compared to normal bronchial epithelium. We also show that the observed down-regulation of endothelin receptor type B in uveal melanoma was not due to gene deletion. Our findings suggest a role for endothelin receptor type B in the metastasis of uveal melanoma and, potentially, in the metastasis of other neural crest tumours

The charcoal trap: Miombo forests and the energy needs of people

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study evaluates the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas fluxes to the atmosphere resulting from charcoal production in Zambia. It combines new biomass and flux data from a study, that was conducted in a <it>miombo </it>woodland within the Kataba Forest Reserve in the Western Province of Zambia, with data from other studies.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The measurements at Kataba compared protected area (3 plots) with a highly disturbed plot outside the forest reserve and showed considerably reduced biomass after logging for charcoal production. The average aboveground biomass content of the reserve (Plots 2-4) was around 150 t ha^-1, while the disturbed plot only contained 24 t ha^-1. Soil carbon was not reduced significantly in the disturbed plot. Two years of eddy covariance measurements resulted in net ecosystem exchange values of -17 ± 31 g C m^-2y^-1, in the first and 90 ± 16 g C m^-2in the second year. Thus, on the basis of these two years of measurement, there is no evidence that the <it>miombo </it>woodland at Kataba represents a present-day carbon sink. At the country level, it is likely that deforestation for charcoal production currently leads to a per capita emission rate of 2 - 3 t CO₂y^-1. This is due to poor forest regeneration, although the resilience of <it>miombo </it>woodlands is high. Better post-harvest management could change this situation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>We argue that protection of <it>miombo </it>woodlands has to account for the energy demands of the population. The production at national scale that we estimated converts into 10,000 - 15,000 GWh y^-1of energy in the charcoal. The term "Charcoal Trap" we introduce, describes the fact that this energy supply has to be substituted when woodlands are protected. One possible solution, a shift in energy supply from charcoal to electricity, would reduce the pressure of forests but requires high investments into grid and power generation. Since Zambia currently cannot generate this money by itself, the country will remain locked in the charcoal trap such as many other of its African neighbours. The question arises whether and how money and technology transfer to increase regenerative electrical power generation should become part of a post-Kyoto process. Furthermore, better inventory data are urgently required to improve knowledge about the current state of the woodland usage and recovery. Net greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced substantially by improving the post-harvest management, charcoal production technology and/or providing alternative energy supply.</p

Degradation of communal rangelands in South Africa: towards an improved understanding to inform policy

In South Africa, the relative extent of range degradation under freehold compared to communal tenure has been strongly debated. We present a perspective on the processes that drive rangeland degradation on land under communal tenure. Our findings are based on literature as well as extensive field work on both old communal lands and ‘released’ areas, where freehold farms have been transferred to communal ownership. We discuss the patterns of degradation that have accompanied communal stewardship and make recommendations on the direction policy should follow to prevent further degradation and mediate rehabilitation of existing degraded land.Keywords: communal rangelands, land degradation, rehabilitation, social systemsAfrican Journal of Range &amp; Forage Science 2013, 30(1&amp;2): 57–6

Complexity in water and carbon dioxide fluxes following rain pulses in an African savanna

The idea that many processes in arid and semi-arid ecosystems are dormant until activated by a pulse of rainfall, and then decay from a maximum rate as the soil dries, is widely used as a conceptual and mathematical model, but has rarely been evaluated with data. This paper examines soil water, evapotranspiration (ET), and net ecosystem CO2 exchange measured for 5 years at an eddy covariance tower sited in an Acacia–Combretum savanna near Skukuza in the Kruger National Park, South Africa. The analysis characterizes ecosystem flux responses to discrete rain events and evaluates the skill of increasingly complex “pulse models”. Rainfall pulses exert strong control over ecosystem-scale water and CO2 fluxes at this site, but the simplest pulse models do a poor job of characterizing the dynamics of the response. Successful models need to include the time lag between the wetting event and the process peak, which differ for evaporation, photosynthesis and respiration. Adding further complexity, the time lag depends on the prior duration and degree of water stress. ET response is well characterized by a linear function of potential ET and a logistic function of profile-total soil water content, with remaining seasonal variation correlating with vegetation phenological dynamics (leaf area). A 1- to 3-day lag to maximal ET following wetting is a source of hysteresis in the ET response to soil water. Respiration responds to wetting within days, while photosynthesis takes a week or longer to reach its peak if the rainfall was preceded by a long dry spell. Both processes exhibit nonlinear functional responses that vary seasonally. We conclude that a more mechanistic approach than simple pulse modeling is needed to represent daily ecosystem C processes in semiarid savannas

Impacts of savanna trees on forage quality for a large African herbivore

Recently, cover of large trees in African savannas has rapidly declined due to elephant pressure, frequent fires and charcoal production. The reduction in large trees could have consequences for large herbivores through a change in forage quality. In Tarangire National Park, in Northern Tanzania, we studied the impact of large savanna trees on forage quality for wildebeest by collecting samples of dominant grass species in open grassland and under and around large Acacia tortilis trees. Grasses growing under trees had a much higher forage quality than grasses from the open field indicated by a more favourable leaf/stem ratio and higher protein and lower fibre concentrations. Analysing the grass leaf data with a linear programming model indicated that large savanna trees could be essential for the survival of wildebeest, the dominant herbivore in Tarangire. Due to the high fibre content and low nutrient and protein concentrations of grasses from the open field, maximum fibre intake is reached before nutrient requirements are satisfied. All requirements can only be satisfied by combining forage from open grassland with either forage from under or around tree canopies. Forage quality was also higher around dead trees than in the open field. So forage quality does not reduce immediately after trees die which explains why negative effects of reduced tree numbers probably go initially unnoticed. In conclusion our results suggest that continued destruction of large trees could affect future numbers of large herbivores in African savannas and better protection of large trees is probably necessary to sustain high animal densities in these ecosystems

Data hosting infrastructure for primary biodiversity data

© The Author(s), 2011. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in BMC Bioinformatics 12 Suppl. 15 (2011): S5, doi:10.1186/1471-2105-12-S15-S5.Today, an unprecedented volume of primary biodiversity data are being generated worldwide, yet significant amounts of these data have been and will continue to be lost after the conclusion of the projects tasked with collecting them. To get the most value out of these data it is imperative to seek a solution whereby these data are rescued, archived and made available to the biodiversity community. To this end, the biodiversity informatics community requires investment in processes and infrastructure to mitigate data loss and provide solutions for long-term hosting and sharing of biodiversity data. We review the current state of biodiversity data hosting and investigate the technological and sociological barriers to proper data management. We further explore the rescuing and re-hosting of legacy data, the state of existing toolsets and propose a future direction for the development of new discovery tools. We also explore the role of data standards and licensing in the context of data hosting and preservation. We provide five recommendations for the biodiversity community that will foster better data preservation and access: (1) encourage the community's use of data standards, (2) promote the public domain licensing of data, (3) establish a community of those involved in data hosting and archival, (4) establish hosting centers for biodiversity data, and (5) develop tools for data discovery. The community's adoption of standards and development of tools to enable data discovery is essential to sustainable data preservation. Furthermore, the increased adoption of open content licensing, the establishment of data hosting infrastructure and the creation of a data hosting and archiving community are all necessary steps towards the community ensuring that data archival policies become standardized

Reciprocity as a foundation of financial economics

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice

Coupling GIS and LCA for biodiversity assessments of land use

Geospatial details about land use are necessary to assess its potential impacts on biodiversity. Geographic information systems (GIS) are adept at modeling land use in a spatially explicit manner, while life cycle assessment (LCA) does not conventionally utilize geospatial information. This study presents a proof-of-concept approach for coupling GIS and LCA for biodiversity assessments of land use and applies it to a case study of ethanol production from agricultural crops in California. GIS modeling was used to generate crop production scenarios for corn and sugar beets that met a range of ethanol production targets. The selected study area was a four-county region in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California, USA. The resulting land use maps were translated into maps of habitat types. From these maps, vectors were created that contained the total areas for each habitat type in the study region. These habitat compositions are treated as elementary input flows and used to calculate different biodiversity impact indicators in a second paper (Geyer et al., submitted). Ten ethanol production scenarios were developed with GIS modeling. Current land use is added as baseline scenario. The parcels selected for corn and sugar beet production were generally in different locations. Moreover, corn and sugar beets are classified as different habitat types. Consequently, the scenarios differed in both the habitat types converted and in the habitat types expanded. Importantly, land use increased nonlinearly with increasing ethanol production targets. The GIS modeling for this study used spatial data that are commonly available in most developed countries and only required functions that are provided in virtually any commercial or open-source GIS software package. This study has demonstrated that GIS-based inventory modeling of land use allows important refinements in LCA theory and practice. Using GIS, land use can be modeled as a geospatial and nonlinear function of output. For each spatially explicit process, land use can be expressed within the conventional structure of LCA methodology as a set of elementary input flows of habitat types

The Nature Index: A General Framework for Synthesizing Knowledge on the State of Biodiversity

The magnitude and urgency of the biodiversity crisis is widely recognized within scientific and political organizations. However, a lack of integrated measures for biodiversity has greatly constrained the national and international response to the biodiversity crisis. Thus, integrated biodiversity indexes will greatly facilitate information transfer from science toward other areas of human society. The Nature Index framework samples scientific information on biodiversity from a variety of sources, synthesizes this information, and then transmits it in a simplified form to environmental managers, policymakers, and the public. The Nature Index optimizes information use by incorporating expert judgment, monitoring-based estimates, and model-based estimates. The index relies on a network of scientific experts, each of whom is responsible for one or more biodiversity indicators. The resulting set of indicators is supposed to represent the best available knowledge on the state of biodiversity and ecosystems in any given area. The value of each indicator is scaled relative to a reference state, i.e., a predicted value assessed by each expert for a hypothetical undisturbed or sustainably managed ecosystem. Scaled indicator values can be aggregated or disaggregated over different axes representing spatiotemporal dimensions or thematic groups. A range of scaling models can be applied to allow for different ways of interpreting the reference states, e.g., optimal situations or minimum sustainable levels. Statistical testing for differences in space or time can be implemented using Monte-Carlo simulations. This study presents the Nature Index framework and details its implementation in Norway. The results suggest that the framework is a functional, efficient, and pragmatic approach for gathering and synthesizing scientific knowledge on the state of biodiversity in any marine or terrestrial ecosystem and has general applicability worldwide