The future of space

Purpose of space progra

Agriculture, food security, nutrition and the Millennium Development Goals

"...Today, 1.1 billion people live on less than one US dollar per day (the internationally recognized poverty threshold)—430 million in South Asia, 325 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 260 million in East Asia and the Pacific, and 55 million in Latin America. Too many children live lives characterized by hunger and illness, and all too often succumb to early death. Moreover, another 1.6 billion people live on between one and two dollars per day, often sliding temporarily below the one dollar per day threshold. To enable all these people to live in dignity, the eight goals to achieve by 2015 are: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger 2. Achieve universal primary education 3. Promote gender equality and empower women 4. Reduce child mortality 5. Improve maternal health 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases 7. Ensure environmental sustainability 8. Develop a global partnership for development." from TextMillenium Development Goals ,HIV/AIDS ,Gender issues ,Equality ,Nutrition ,Impact ,

Marginality: Addressing the Nexus of Poverty, Exclusion and Ecology

Environment, general; Environmental Law/Policy/Ecojustice; Environmental Economics; Social Polic

Minimally Invasive Surgery for the Treatment of Colorectal Cancer

Background: Reduction in operative trauma along with an improvement in endoscopic access has undoubtedly occupied surgical minds for at least the past 3 decades. It is not at all surprising that minimally invasive colon surgery has come a long way since the first laparoscopic appendectomy by Semm in 1981. It is common knowledge that the recent developments in video and robotic technologies have significantly furthered advancements in laparoscopic and minimally invasive surgery. This has led to the overall acceptance of the treatment of benign colorectal pathology via the endoscopic route. Malignant disease, however, is still primarily treated by conventional approaches. Methods and Results: This review article is based on a literature search pertaining to advances in minimally invasive colorectal surgery for the treatment of malignant pathology, as well as on personal experience in the field over the same period of time. Our search was limited to level I and II clinical papers only, according to the evidence-based medicine guidelines. We attempted to present our unbiased view on the subject relying only on the evidence available. Conclusion: Focusing on advances in colorectal minimally invasive surgery, it has to be stated that there are still a number of unanswered questions regarding the surgical management of malignant diseases with this approach. These questions do not only relate to the area of boundaries set for the use of minimally invasive techniques in this field but also to the exact modality best suited to the treatment of every particular case whilst maintaining state-of-the-art oncological principles. (C) 2016 S. Karger GmbH, Freibur

International agricultural research for food security, poverty reduction, and the environment: What to expect from scaling up CGIAR investments and “Best Bet” programs

Developing countries, CGIAR, Food prices, Poverty reduction, Hunger, Agricultural research, food security, Environment, Agricultural innovation, Agricultural development, Climate change, Agricultural biodiversity,

Sustainable intensification strategies for the rural poor : Matching innovations with human and ecological potential within and outside the agriculture sector

The rural poor differ widely with regard to their capabilities and the agro-ecological potential of the areas where they live. Thus, sustainable intensification is not just another optimization problem for ensuring higher productivity with less environmental impact. Rather it is a complex task of creating value through innovations in the institutional, organizational and technological systems of societies. Importantly, sustainable intensification is not only a challenge to be met by and within the agriculture sector alone, but by society as a whole. Relevant strategies can range from increasing crop harvest or diversity per area to increasing income opportunities outside agriculture

Precision Stellar Characterization of FGKM Stars using an Empirical Spectral Library

Classification of stars, by comparing their optical spectra to a few dozen spectral standards, has been a workhorse of observational astronomy for more than a century. Here, we extend this technique by compiling a library of optical spectra of 404 touchstone stars observed with Keck/HIRES by the California Planet Search. The spectra have high resolution (R ≈ 60,000), high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N ≈ 150/pixel), and are registered onto a common wavelength scale. The library stars have properties derived from interferometry, asteroseismology, LTE spectral synthesis, and spectrophotometry. To address a lack of well-characterized late-K dwarfs in the literature, we measure stellar radii and temperatures for 23 nearby K dwarfs, using modeling of the spectral energy distribution and Gaia parallaxes. This library represents a uniform data set spanning the spectral types ~M5–F1 (T_(eff) ≈ 3000–7000 K, R_★ ≈ 0.1–16 R ⊙). We also present "Empirical SpecMatch" (SpecMatch-Emp), a tool for parameterizing unknown spectra by comparing them against our spectral library. For FGKM stars, SpecMatch-Emp achieves accuracies of 100 K in effective temperature (T_(eff)), 15% in stellar radius (R_★), and 0.09 dex in metallicity ([Fe/H]). Because the code relies on empirical spectra it performs particularly well for stars ~K4 and later, which are challenging to model with existing spectral synthesizers, reaching accuracies of 70 K in T_(eff), 10% in R_★, and 0.12 dex in [Fe/H]. We also validate the performance of SpecMatch-Emp, finding it to be robust at lower spectral resolution and S/N, enabling the characterization of faint late-type stars. Both the library and stellar characterization code are publicly available

Fixed-N Superconductivity: The Crossover from the Bulk to the Few-Electron Limit

We present a truly canonical theory of superconductivity in ultrasmall metallic grains by variationally optimizing fixed-N projected BCS wave-functions, which yields the first full description of the entire crossover from the bulk BCS regime (mean level spacing $d \ll$ bulk gap $\tilde\Delta$) to the ``fluctuation-dominated'' few-electron regime ($d\gg\tilde\Delta$). A wave-function analysis shows in detail how the BCS limit is recovered for $d\ll \tilde \Delta$, and how for $d \gg \tilde \Delta$ pairing correlations become delocalized in energy space. An earlier grand-canonical prediction for an observable parity effect in the spectral gaps is found to survive the fixed-N projection.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX, V2: minor charges to mach final printed versio