Port Townsend liquids depot: environmental impact assessment of a biofuels facility on the Port Townsend Paper Corporation site

This Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been compiled in accordance to the Washington State Environmental Protection Act (SEPA). Its purpose is to analyze and determine the environmental, social, and economic impacts of co-locating a liquid depot facility at the pre-existing Port Townsend Paper Corporation. The Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) has proposed the project, which is siting a liquids depot on land owned by the PTPC. This EIA will analyze all potential significant impacts produced by the proposal and consider all elements as outlined by SEPA

The Persistence Length of a Strongly Charged, Rod-like, Polyelectrolyte in the Presence of Salt

The persistence length of a single, intrinsically rigid polyelectrolyte chain, above the Manning condensation threshold is investigated theoretically in presence of added salt. Using a loop expansion method, the partition function is consistently calculated, taking into account corrections to mean-field theory. Within a mean-field approximation, the well-known results of Odijk, Skolnick and Fixman are reproduced. Beyond mean-field, it is found that density correlations between counterions and thermal fluctuations reduce the stiffness of the chain, indicating an effective attraction between monomers for highly charged chains and multivalent counterions. This attraction results in a possible mechanical instability (collapse), alluding to the phenomenon of DNA condensation. In addition, we find that more counterions condense on slightly bent conformations of the chain than predicted by the Manning model for the case of an infinite cylinder. Finally, our results are compared with previous models and experiments.Comment: 13 pages, 2 ps figure

Conformational Instability of Rodlike Polyelectrolytes due to Counterion Fluctuations

The effective elasticity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes is studied in the presence of counterions, with and without added salt. The rigid polymer conformations may become unstable due to an effective attraction induced by counterion density fluctuations. Instabilities at the longest, or intermediate length scales may signal collapse to globule, or necklace states, respectively. In the presence of added-salt, a generalized electrostatic persistence length is obtained, which has a nontrivial dependence on the Debye screening length. It is also found that the onset of conformational instability is a re-entrant phenomenon as a function of polyelectrolyte length for the unscreened case, and the Debye length or salt concentration for the screened case. This may be relevant in understanding the experimentally observed re-entrant condensation of DNA.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Slow recovery of High Arctic heath communities from nitrogen enrichment

Acknowledgements We are indebted to Ian Alexander who initiated the fertilisation experiment with SJW; to successive researchers involved in the experiment, John Baddeley, Nanette Madan, Lars Hogbom, Bernard Moyersen, Carmen Gordon; and to field assistants, Alison Horsburgh, Andrew Coughlan, Jo Wynn, Lora Crabtree. We thank Hans Kruijer and Michael Stech for assistance with bryophyte species identification in 2011. Funding for the initial experiment was provided by the NERC Arctic Terrestrial Ecology Special Topic Programme (GR3/9424, GR9/3433) with additional support from the CEC TMR Programme, Ny-Ålesund LSF and the British Ecological Society. This recovery study was funded by NERC (NE/I016899/1). The research was made possible by use of NERC facilities at Harland Huset; special thanks to Nick Cox and colleagues for their unfailing hospitality and support.Peer reviewedPostprintPostprin

Neutral and Charged Polymers at Interfaces

Chain-like macromolecules (polymers) show characteristic adsorption properties due to their flexibility and internal degrees of freedom, when attracted to surfaces and interfaces. In this review we discuss concepts and features that are relevant to the adsorption of neutral and charged polymers at equilibrium, including the type of polymer/surface interaction, the solvent quality, the characteristics of the surface, and the polymer structure. We pay special attention to the case of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) that have a special importance due to their water solubility. We present a summary of recent progress in this rapidly evolving field. Because many experimental studies are performed with rather stiff biopolymers, we discuss in detail the case of semi-flexible polymers in addition to flexible ones. We first review the behavior of neutral and charged chains in solution. Then, the adsorption of a single polymer chain is considered. Next, the adsorption and depletion processes in the many-chain case are reviewed. Profiles, changes in the surface tension and polymer surface excess are presented. Mean-field and corrections due to fluctuations and lateral correlations are discussed. The force of interaction between two adsorbed layers, which is important in understanding colloidal stability, is characterized. The behavior of grafted polymers is also reviewed, both for neutral and charged polymer brushes.Comment: a review: 130 pages, 30 ps figures; final form, added reference

Unified Homogenization Theory for Magnetoinductive and Electromagnetic Waves in Split Ring Metamaterials

A unified homogenization procedure for split ring metamaterials taking into account time and spatial dispersion is introduced. The procedure is based on two coupled systems of equations. The first one comes from an approximation of the metamaterial as a cubic arrangement of coupled LC circuits, giving the relation between currents and local magnetic field. The second equation comes from macroscopic Maxwell equations, and gives the relation between the macroscopic magnetic field and the average magnetization of the metamaterial. It is shown that electromagnetic and magnetoinductive waves propagating in the metamaterial are obtained from this analysis. Therefore, the proposed time and spatially dispersive permeability accounts for the characterization of the complete spectrum of waves of the metamaterial. Finally, it is shown that the proposed theory is in good quantitative and qualitative agreement with full wave simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

RNA-Sequencing Analysis of 5' Capped RNAs Identifies Many New Differentially Expressed Genes in Acute Hepatitis C Virus Infection

We describe the first report of RNA sequencing of 5' capped (Pol II) RNAs isolated from acutely hepatitis C virus (HCV) infected Huh 7.5 cells that provides a general approach to identifying differentially expressed annotated and unannotated genes that participate in viral-host interactions. We identified 100, 684, and 1,844 significantly differentially expressed annotated genes in acutely infected proliferative Huh 7.5 cells at 6, 48, and 72 hours, respectively (fold change ≥ 1.5 and Bonferroni adjusted p-values < 0.05). Most of the differentially expressed genes (>80%) and biological pathways (such as adipocytokine, Notch, Hedgehog and NOD-like receptor signaling) were not identified by previous gene array studies. These genes are critical components of host immune, inflammatory and oncogenic pathways and provide new information regarding changes that may benefit the virus or mediate HCV induced pathology. RNAi knockdown studies of newly identified highly upregulated FUT1 and KLHDC7B genes provide evidence that their gene products regulate and facilitate HCV replication in hepatocytes. Our approach also identified novel Pol II unannotated transcripts that were upregulated. Results further identify new pathways that regulate HCV replication in hepatocytes and suggest that our approach will have general applications in studying viral-host interactions in model systems and clinical biospecimens

Safety and tolerability of sitagliptin in clinical studies: a pooled analysis of data from 10,246 patients with type 2 diabetes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In a previous pooled analysis of 12 double-blind clinical studies that included data on 6,139 patients with type 2 diabetes, treatment with sitagliptin, a dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitor, was shown to be generally well tolerated compared with treatment with control agents. As clinical development of sitagliptin continues, additional studies have been completed, and more patients have been exposed to sitagliptin. The purpose of the present analysis is to update the safety and tolerability assessment of sitagliptin by pooling data from 19 double-blind clinical studies.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The present analysis included data from 10,246 patients with type 2 diabetes who received either sitagliptin 100 mg/day (N = 5,429; sitagliptin group) or a comparator agent (placebo or an active comparator) (N = 4,817; non-exposed group). The 19 studies from which this pooled population was drawn represent the double-blind, randomized studies that included patients treated with the usual clinical dose of sitagliptin (100 mg/day) for between 12 weeks and 2 years and for which results were available as of July 2009. These 19 studies assessed sitagliptin taken as monotherapy, initial combination therapy with metformin or pioglitazone, or as add-on combination therapy with other antihyperglycemic agents (metformin, pioglitazone, a sulfonylurea ± metformin, insulin ± metformin, or rosiglitazone + metformin). Patients in the non-exposed group were taking placebo, metformin, pioglitazone, a sulfonylurea ± metformin, insulin ± metformin, or rosiglitazone + metformin. The analysis used patient-level data from each study to evaluate between-group differences in the exposure-adjusted incidence rates of adverse events.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Summary measures of overall adverse events were similar in the sitagliptin and non-exposed groups, except for an increased incidence of drug-related adverse events in the non-exposed group. Incidence rates of specific adverse events were also generally similar between the two groups, except for increased incidence rates of hypoglycemia, related to the greater use of a sulfonylurea, and diarrhea, related to the greater use of metformin, in the non-exposed group and constipation in the sitagliptin group. Treatment with sitagliptin was not associated with an increased risk of major adverse cardiovascular events.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>In this updated pooled safety analysis of data from 10,246 patients with type 2 diabetes, sitagliptin 100 mg/day was generally well tolerated in clinical trials of up to 2 years in duration.</p