Targeted Use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel to Maximize Climate Benefits

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) can reduce aviation’s CO2 and non-CO2 impacts. We quantify the change in contrail properties and climate forcing in the North Atlantic resulting from different blending ratios of SAF and demonstrate that intelligently allocating the limited SAF supply could multiply its overall climate benefit by factors of 9-15. A fleetwide adoption of 100% SAF increases contrail occurrence (+5%), but lower nonvolatile particle emissions (-52%) reduce the annual mean contrail net radiative forcing (-44%), adding to climate gains from reduced life cycle CO2 emissions. However, in the short term, SAF supply will be constrained. SAF blended at a 1% ratio and uniformly distributed to all transatlantic flights would reduce both the annual contrail energy forcing (EFcontrail) and the total energy forcing (EFtotal, contrails + change in CO2 life cycle emissions) by ~0.6%. Instead, targeting the same quantity of SAF at a 50% blend ratio to ~2% of flights responsible for the most highly warming contrails reduces EFcontrail and EFtotal by ~10 and ~6%, respectively. Acknowledging forecasting uncertainties, SAF blended at lower ratios (10%) and distributed to more flights (~9%) still reduces EFcontrail (~5%) and EFtotal (~3%). Both strategies deploy SAF on flights with engine particle emissions exceeding 1012 m-1, at nighttime, and in winter

The effect of uncertainty in humidity and model parameters on the prediction of contrail energy forcing

Previous work has shown that while the net effect of aircraft condensation trails (contrails) on the climate is warming, the exact magnitude of the energy forcing per meter of contrail remains uncertain. In this paper, we explore the skill of a Lagrangian contrail model (CoCiP) in identifying flight segments with high contrail energy forcing. We find that skill is greater than climatological predictions alone, even accounting for uncertainty in weather fields and model parameters. We estimate the uncertainty due to humidity by using the ensemble ERA5 weather reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) as Monte Carlo inputs to CoCiP. We unbias and correct under-dispersion on the ERA5 humidity data by forcing a match to the distribution of in situ humidity measurements taken at cruising altitude. We take CoCiP energy forcing estimates calculated using one of the ensemble members as a proxy for ground truth, and report the skill of CoCiP in identifying segments with large positive proxy energy forcing. We further estimate the uncertainty due to model parameters in CoCiP by performing Monte Carlo simulations with CoCiP model parameters drawn from uncertainty distributions consistent with the literature. When CoCiP outputs are averaged over seasons to form climatological predictions, the skill in predicting the proxy is 44%, while the skill of per-flight CoCiP outputs is 84%. If these results carry over to the true (unknown) contrail EF, they indicate that per-flight energy forcing predictions can reduce the number of potential contrail avoidance route adjustments by 2x, hence reducing both the cost and fuel impact of contrail avoidance

Abbreviated BioBrick Prefix and Suffix for More Efficient Primer Design

This Request for Comments (RFC) modifies the assembly standard for biological parts proposed in BBF RFC 10 by removing the NotI restriction site from the BioBrick Prefix and Suffix

Pathogens and host immunity in the ancient human oral cavity.

Calcified dental plaque (dental calculus) preserves for millennia and entraps biomolecules from all domains of life and viruses. We report the first, to our knowledge, high-resolution taxonomic and protein functional characterization of the ancient oral microbiome and demonstrate that the oral cavity has long served as a reservoir for bacteria implicated in both local and systemic disease. We characterize (i) the ancient oral microbiome in a diseased state, (ii) 40 opportunistic pathogens, (iii) ancient human-associated putative antibiotic resistance genes, (iv) a genome reconstruction of the periodontal pathogen Tannerella forsythia, (v) 239 bacterial and 43 human proteins, allowing confirmation of a long-term association between host immune factors, 'red complex' pathogens and periodontal disease, and (vi) DNA sequences matching dietary sources. Directly datable and nearly ubiquitous, dental calculus permits the simultaneous investigation of pathogen activity, host immunity and diet, thereby extending direct investigation of common diseases into the human evolutionary past

Health, education, and social care provision after diagnosis of childhood visual disability

Aim: To investigate the health, education, and social care provision for children newly diagnosed with visual disability.Method: This was a national prospective study, the British Childhood Visual Impairment and Blindness Study 2 (BCVIS2), ascertaining new diagnoses of visual impairment or severe visual impairment and blindness (SVIBL), or equivalent vi-sion. Data collection was performed by managing clinicians up to 1-year follow-up, and included health and developmental needs, and health, education, and social care provision.Results: BCVIS2 identified 784 children newly diagnosed with visual impairment/SVIBL (313 with visual impairment, 471 with SVIBL). Most children had associated systemic disorders (559 [71%], 167 [54%] with visual impairment, and 392 [84%] with SVIBL). Care from multidisciplinary teams was provided for 549 children (70%). Two-thirds (515) had not received an Education, Health, and Care Plan (EHCP). Fewer children with visual impairment had seen a specialist teacher (SVIBL 35%, visual impairment 28%, χ2p < 0.001), or had an EHCP (11% vs 7%, χ2p < 0 . 01).Interpretation: Families need additional support from managing clinicians to access recommended complex interventions such as the use of multidisciplinary teams and educational support. This need is pressing, as the population of children with visual impairment/SVIBL is expected to grow in size and complexity.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

Initial Public Offerings and the Firm Location

The firm geographic location matters in IPOs because investors have a strong preference for newly issued local stocks and provide abnormal demand in local offerings. Using equity holdings data for more than 53,000 households, we show the probability to participate to the stock market and the proportion of the equity wealth is abnormally increasing with the volume of the IPOs inside the investor region. Upon nearly the universe of the 167,515 going public and private domestic manufacturing firms, we provide consistent evidence that the isolated private firms have higher probability to go public, larger IPO underpricing cross-sectional average and volatility, and less pronounced long-run under-performance. Similar but opposite evidence holds for the local concentration of the investor wealth. These effects are economically relevant and robust to local delistings, IPO market timing, agglomeration economies, firm location endogeneity, self-selection bias, and information asymmetries, among others. Findings suggest IPO waves have a strong geographic component, highlight that underwriters significantly under-estimate the local demand component thus leaving unexpected money on the table, and support state-contingent but constant investor propensity for risk

Proceedings of the 13th annual conference of INEBRIA

CITATION: Watson, R., et al. 2016. Proceedings of the 13th annual conference of INEBRIA. Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, 11:13, doi:10.1186/s13722-016-0062-9.The original publication is available at https://ascpjournal.biomedcentral.comENGLISH SUMMARY : Meeting abstracts.https://ascpjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13722-016-0062-9Publisher's versio