Cumulative Impacts in Environmental Review: The New York Standpoint

This comment focuses on the increasingly difficult process of analyzing cumulative environmental impacts of a proposed project under New York\u27s State Environmental Quality Review Act. Most approving agencies and developers are now seeking answers from the courts to the perplexing question of exactly when is this type of impact analysis needed? Finally, the courts are answering some of their questions, but many more remain. The author, using both New York Department of Environmental Conservation administrative hearing records and New York court cases, examines the current trends in this fast developing area of environmental impact review. The comment concludes with a call on the legislature and the courts to act promptly in alleviating the remaining ambiguities in this ever more important aspect of environmental impact review

Microelectrode recordings in human epilepsy: a case for clinical translation

With their ‘all-or-none’ action potential responses, single neurons (or units) are accepted as the basic computational unit of the brain. There is extensive animal literature to support the mechanistic importance of studying neuronal firing as a way to understand neuronal microcircuits and brain function. Although most studies have emphasized physiology, there is increasing recognition that studying single units provides novel insight into system-level mechanisms of disease. Microelectrode recordings are becoming more common in humans, paralleling the increasing use of intracranial electroencephalography recordings in the context of presurgical evaluation in focal epilepsy. In addition to single-unit data, microelectrode recordings also record local field potentials and high-frequency oscillations, some of which may be different to that recorded by clinical macroelectrodes. However, microelectrodes are being used almost exclusively in research contexts and there are currently no indications for incorporating microelectrode recordings into routine clinical care. In this review, we summarize the lessons learnt from 65 years of microelectrode recordings in human epilepsy patients. We cover the electrode constructs that can be utilized, principles of how to record and process microelectrode data and insights into ictal dynamics, interictal dynamics and cognition. We end with a critique on the possibilities of incorporating single-unit recordings into clinical care, with a focus on potential clinical indications, each with their specific evidence base and challenges

Review of Residential Low-Load HVAC Systems

In support of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building America Program, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) conducted an investigation to inventory commercially available HVAC technologies that are being installed in low-load homes. The first step in this investigation was to conduct a review of published literature to identify low-load HVAC technologies available in the United States and abroad, and document the findings of existing case studies that have evaluated the performance of the identified technologies. This report presents the findings of the literature review, identifies gaps in the literature or technical understanding that must be addressed before low-load HVAC technologies can be fully evaluated, and introduces PNNL’s planned research and analysis for this project to address identified gaps and potential future work on residential low-load HVAC systems

Slocum gliders provide accurate near real-time estimates of baleen whale presence from human-reviewed passive acoustic detection information

© The Author(s), 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Baumgartner, M. F., Bonnell, J., Corkeron, P. J., Van Parijs, S. M., Hotchkin, C., Hodges, B. A., Thornton, J. B., Mensi, B. L., & Bruner, S. M. Slocum gliders provide accurate near real-time estimates of baleen whale presence from human-reviewed passive acoustic detection information. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, (2020):100, doi:10.3389/fmars.2020.00100.Mitigating the effects of human activities on marine mammals often depends on monitoring animal occurrence over long time scales, large spatial scales, and in real time. Passive acoustics, particularly from autonomous vehicles, is a promising approach to meeting this need. We have previously developed the capability to record, detect, classify, and transmit to shore information about the tonal sounds of baleen whales in near real time from long-endurance ocean gliders. We have recently developed a protocol by which a human analyst reviews this information to determine the presence of marine mammals, and the results of this review are automatically posted to a publicly accessible website, sent directly to interested parties via email or text, and made available to stakeholders via a number of public and private digital applications. We evaluated the performance of this system during two 3.75-month Slocum glider deployments in the southwestern Gulf of Maine during the spring seasons of 2015 and 2016. Near real-time detections of humpback, fin, sei, and North Atlantic right whales were compared to detections of these species from simultaneously recorded audio. Data from another 2016 glider deployment in the same area were also used to compare results between three different analysts to determine repeatability of results both among and within analysts. False detection (occurrence) rates on daily time scales were 0% for all species. Daily missed detection rates ranged from 17 to 24%. Agreement between two trained novice analysts and an experienced analyst was greater than 95% for fin, sei, and right whales, while agreement was 83–89% for humpback whales owing to the more subjective process for detecting this species. Our results indicate that the presence of baleen whales can be accurately determined using information about tonal sounds transmitted in near real-time from Slocum gliders. The system is being used operationally to monitor baleen whales in United States, Canadian, and Chilean waters, and has been particularly useful for monitoring the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale throughout the northwestern Atlantic Ocean.Funding for this project was provided by the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program of the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy’s Living Marine Resources Program

Modeling deep ocean shipping noise in varying acidity conditions

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2010. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128 (2010): EL130–EL136, doi:10.1121/1.3402284.Possible future changes of ambient shipping noise at 0.1–1 kHz in the North Pacific caused by changing seawater chemistry conditions are analyzed with a simplified propagation model. Probable decreases of pH would cause meaningful reduction of the sound absorption coefficient in near-surface ocean water for these frequencies. The results show that a few decibels of increase may occur in 100 years in some very quiet areas very far from noise sources, with small effects closer to noise sources. The use of ray physics allows sound energy attenuated via volume absorption and by the seafloor to be compared.This work was supported by the Ocean Acoustics Program at the U.S. Office of Naval Research, Code 321, including an ONR Postdoctoral Fellowship award to the first author

The Spring 1985 high precision baseline test of the JPL GPS-based geodetic system

The Spring 1985 High Precision Baseline Test (HPBT) was conducted. The HPBT was designed to meet a number of objectives. Foremost among these was the demonstration of a level of accuracy of 1 to 2:10 to the 7th power, or better, for baselines ranging in length up to several hundred kilometers. These objectives were all met with a high degree of success, with respect to the demonstration of system accuracy in particular. The results from six baselines ranging in length from 70 to 729 km were examined for repeatability and, in the case of three baselines, were compared to results from colocated VLBI systems. Repeatability was found to be 5:10 to the 8th power (RMS) for the north baseline coordinate, independent of baseline length, while for the east coordinate RMS repeatability was found to be larger than this by factors of 2 to 4. The GPS-based results were found to be in agreement with those from colocated VLBI measurements, when corrected for the physical separations of the VLBI and CPG antennas, at the level of 1 to 2:10 to the 7th power in all coordinates, independent of baseline length. The results for baseline repeatability are consistent with the current GPA error budget, but the GPS-VLBI intercomparisons disagree at a somewhat larger level than expected. It is hypothesized that these differences may result from errors in the local survey measurements used to correct for the separations of the GPS and VLBI antenna reference centers

Interleukin‐5 drives glycolysis and reactive oxygen species‐dependent citric acid cycling by eosinophils

Introduction Eosinophils have been long implicated in antiparasite immunity and allergic diseases and, more recently, in regulating adipose tissue homeostasis. The metabolic processes that govern eosinophils, particularly upon activation, are unknown. Methods Peripheral blood eosinophils were isolated for the analysis of metabolic processes using extracellular flux analysis and individual metabolites by stable isotope tracer analysis coupled to gas chromatography‐mass spectrometry following treatment with IL‐3, IL‐5 or granulocyte‐macrophage colony‐stimulating factor (GM‐CSF). Eosinophil metabolism was elucidated using pharmacological inhibitors. Results Human eosinophils engage a largely glycolytic metabolism but also employ mitochondrial metabolism. Cytokine stimulation generates citric acid cycle (TCA) intermediates from both glucose and glutamine revealing this previously unknown role for mitochondria upon eosinophil activation. We further show that the metabolic programme driven by IL‐5 is dependent on the STAT5/PI3K/Akt signalling axis and that nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidase (NOX)‐dependent ROS production might be a driver of mitochondrial metabolism upon eosinophil activation. Conclusion We demonstrate for the first time that eosinophils are capable of metabolic plasticity, evidenced by increased glucose‐derived lactate production upon ROS inhibition. Collectively, this study reveals a role for both glycolysis and mitochondrial metabolism in cytokine‐stimulated eosinophils. Selective targeting of eosinophil metabolism may be of therapeutic benefit in eosinophil‐mediated diseases and regulation of tissue homeostasis