Increasing flood exposure in the Netherlands: implications for risk financing

The effectiveness of disaster risk management and financing mechanisms depends on an accurate assessment of current and future hazard exposure. The increasing availability of detailed data offers policy makers and the insurance sector new opportunities to understand trends in risk, and to make informed decisions on ways to deal with these trends. In this paper we show how comprehensive property level information can be used for the assessment of exposure to flooding on a national scale, and how this information provides valuable input to discussions on possible risk financing practices. The case study used is the Netherlands, which is one of the countries most exposed to flooding globally, and which is currently undergoing a debate on strategies for the compensation of potential losses. Our results show that flood exposure has increased rapidly between 1960 and 2012, and that the growth of the building stock and its economic value in flood-prone areas has been higher than in non-flood-prone areas. We also find that property values in flood-prone areas are lower than those in non-flood-prone areas. We argue that the increase in the share of economic value located in potential flood-prone areas can have a negative effect on the feasibility of private insurance schemes in the Netherlands. The methodologies and results presented in this study are relevant for many regions around the world where the effects of rising flood exposure create a challenge for risk financing

Speeding Up Microevolution: The Effects of Increasing Temperature on Selection and Genetic Variance in a Wild Bird Population

The authors show that environmental variation may lead to a positive association between the annual strength of selection and expression of genetic variance in a wild bird population, which can speed up microevolution and have important consequences for how fast natural populations adapt to environmental changes

Calling structural variants with confidence from short-read data in wild bird populations

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available on open access from Oxford University Press via the DOI in this recordData Availability: The Illumina reads and assembled reference genome from this article are available at NCBI, Bioproject number PRJNA255814 (P. domesticus reference accession number SAMN02929199). Additional data and script are available at the Dryad database: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.6q573n647Comprehensive characterisation of structural variation in natural populations has only become feasible in the last decade. To investigate the population genomic nature of structural variation (SV), reproducible and high-confidence SV callsets are first required. We created a population-scale reference of the genome-wide landscape of structural variation across 33 Nordic house sparrows (Passer domesticus) individuals. To produce a consensus callset across all samples using short-read data, we compare heuristic-based quality-filtering and visual curation (Samplot/PlotCritic and Samplot-ML) approaches. We demonstrate that curation of SVs is important for reducing putative false positives and that the time invested in this step outweighs the potential costs of analysing short-read discovered SV datasets that include many potential false positives. We find that even a lenient manual curation strategy (e.g. applied by a single curator) can reduce the proportion of putative false positives by up to 80%, thus enriching the proportion of high-confidence variants. Crucially, in applying a lenient manual curation strategy with a single curator, nearly all (>99%) variants rejected as putative false positives were also classified as such by a more stringent curation strategy using three additional curators. Furthermore, variants rejected by manual curation failed to reflect expected population structure from SNPs, whereas variants passing curation did. Combining heuristic-based quality-filtering with rapid manual curation of structural variants in short-read data can therefore become a time- and cost-effective first step for functional and population genomic studies requiring high-confidence SV callsets.Swedish Research CouncilResearch Council of NorwayDepartment of Ecology and Genetics, Uppsala UniversityBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC

Data acquisition systems for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will image {Pi} steradians about the north galactic cap in five filters, and acquire one million spectra using a dedicated 2.5 meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The authors describe the data acquisition system for the survey`s three main detectors: an imaging camera, mounting 54 Tektronix charge-coupled devices (CCD); a pair of spectrographs, each mounting a pair of CCDs; and a smaller monitor telescope camera. The authors describe the system`s hardware and software architecture, and relate it to the survey`s special requirements for high reliability and need to understand its instrumentation in order to produce a consistent survey over a five year period

Early rheumatoid arthritis is characterized by a distinct and transient synovial fluid cytokine profile of T cell and stromal cell origin

Pathological processes involved in the initiation of rheumatoid synovitis remain unclear. We undertook the present study to identify immune and stromal processes that are present soon after the clinical onset of rheumatoid arthritis ( RA) by assessing a panel of T cell, macrophage, and stromal cell related cytokines and chemokines in the synovial fluid of patients with early synovitis. Synovial fluid was aspirated from inflamed joints of patients with inflammatory arthritis of duration 3 months or less, whose outcomes were subsequently determined by follow up. For comparison, synovial fluid was aspirated from patients with acute crystal arthritis, established RA and osteoarthritis. Rheumatoid factor activity was blocked in the synovial fluid samples, and a panel of 23 cytokines and chemokines measured using a multiplex based system. Patients with early inflammatory arthritis who subsequently developed RA had a distinct but transient synovial fluid cytokine profile. The levels of a range of T cell, macrophage and stromal cell related cytokines ( e. g. IL-2, IL-4, IL-13, IL-17, IL-15, basic fibroblast growth factor and epidermal growth factor) were significantly elevated in these patients within 3 months after symptom onset, as compared with early arthritis patients who did not develop RA. In addition, this profile was no longer present in established RA. In contrast, patients with non-rheumatoid persistent synovitis exhibited elevated levels of interferon-gamma at initiation. Early synovitis destined to develop into RA is thus characterized by a distinct and transient synovial fluid cytokine profile. The cytokines present in the early rheumatoid lesion suggest that this response is likely to influence the microenvironment required for persistent RA

To respond or not to respond - a personal perspective of intestinal tolerance

For many years, the intestine was one of the poor relations of the immunology world, being a realm inhabited mostly by specialists and those interested in unusual phenomena. However, this has changed dramatically in recent years with the realization of how important the microbiota is in shaping immune function throughout the body, and almost every major immunology institution now includes the intestine as an area of interest. One of the most important aspects of the intestinal immune system is how it discriminates carefully between harmless and harmful antigens, in particular, its ability to generate active tolerance to materials such as commensal bacteria and food proteins. This phenomenon has been recognized for more than 100 years, and it is essential for preventing inflammatory disease in the intestine, but its basis remains enigmatic. Here, I discuss the progress that has been made in understanding oral tolerance during my 40 years in the field and highlight the topics that will be the focus of future research

Should digestion assays be used to estimate persistence of potential allergens in tests for safety of novel food proteins?

Food allergies affect an estimated 3 to 4% of adults and up to 8% of children in developed western countries. Results from in vitro simulated gastric digestion studies with purified proteins are routinely used to assess the allergenic potential of novel food proteins. The digestion of purified proteins in simulated gastric fluid typically progresses in an exponential fashion allowing persistence to be quantified using pseudo-first-order rate constants or half lives. However, the persistence of purified proteins in simulated gastric fluid is a poor predictor of the allergenic status of food proteins, potentially due to food matrix effects that can be significant in vivo. The evaluation of the persistence of novel proteins in whole, prepared food exposed to simulated gastric fluid may provide a more correlative result, but such assays should be thoroughly validated to demonstrate a predictive capacity before they are accepted to predict the allergenic potential of novel food proteins