The damming of the Narmadā River : progress, technology and the sacred.

Pressure on the limited amount of available natural resources is growing rapidly and primarily stems from population growth and individual/national aspirations for development. Harnessing more water is seen as the best available way to meet the increasing demands. However, despite often the best intentions and the use of widely accepted tools to assess the likely impacts (such as Environmental Impact Assessment – EIA) water “development projects” are not without costs. In this thesis I will address the global issue of the over-¬-use of natural resources by looking at the specific example of the Narmada River. The Narmada is a sacred river in India and as such, has a long culturally significant history. The Narmada is currently experiencing a large development project being built along its course. This project proposed over 3000 dams, though only a fraction of those have been built. This thesis employs a case study of the Narmada River in India to explore the rationale and approaches taken for development, as well as the costs that this development has incurred such as environmental and social impacts. Specific attention has been given to the description of the religious impacts, cultural transformations and impact upon minority indigenous groups; aspects frequently ignored or given little attention. An improved recognition of the religious and cultural significance of freshwater is needed to enable more positive local acceptance of developments such as dams as well as protecting national identity. These components are critical for sustainable development. I use the terms ‘development’ and ‘sacred’ in this thesis. These are widely interpreted terms and as such mean different things to different people. The definition of ‘development’ I have used is: “the process of converting land to a new purpose by constructing buildings or making use of its resources.” The term ‘sacred’ is also widely interpreted. In terms of this thesis, I will use Mircea Eliade’s definition of sacred. He defines it as a cover-¬-term for that category of ‘objects' constituted in the mind of the believer as both 'ultimately real' and as distinct from the profane world. A sacred river is real in a physical sense but also separate from other rivers because of its divine origins

Genomic ancestry estimation quantifies use of wild species in grape breeding

BACKGROUND: Grapes are one of the world’s most valuable crops and most are made into wine. Grapes belong to the genus Vitis, which includes over 60 inter-fertile species. The most common grape cultivars derive their entire ancestry from the species Vitis vinifera, but wild relatives have also been exploited to create hybrid cultivars, often with increased disease resistance. RESULTS: We evaluate the genetic ancestry of some of the most widely grown commercial hybrids from North America and Europe. Using genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), we generated 2482 SNPs and 56 indels from 7 wild Vitis, 7 V. vinifera, and 64 hybrid cultivars. We used a principal component analysis (PCA) based ancestry estimation procedure and verified its accuracy with both empirical and simulated data. V. vinifera ancestry ranged from 11 % to 76 % across hybrids studied. Approximately one third (22/64) of the hybrids have ancestry estimates consistent with F1 hybridization: they derive half of their ancestry from wild Vitis and half from V. vinifera. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that hybrid grape breeding is in its infancy. The distribution of V. vinifera ancestry across hybrids also suggests that backcrosses to wild Vitis species have been more frequent than backcrosses to V. vinifera during hybrid grape breeding. This pattern is unusual in crop breeding, as it is most common to repeatedly backcross to elite, or domesticated, germplasm. We anticipate our method can be extended to facilitate marker-assisted selection in order to introgress beneficial wild Vitis traits, while allowing for offspring with the highest V. vinifera content to be selected at the seedling stage. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-2834-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Merlin: an integrated path differential absorption (IPDA) lidar for global methane remote sensing

International audienc

Highly-efficient, frequency-tripled Nd:YAG laser for spaceborne LIDARs

For a spaceborne lidar a highly reliable, long living and efficient laser source is absolutely essential. Within the frame of the development of a laser source for the backscatter lidar ATLID, which will be flown on EarthCare mission, we setup and tested a predevelopment model of an injection-seeded, diode pumped, frequency tripled, pulsed high power Nd:YAG MOPA laser operating nominally at 100 Hz pulse repetition frequency. We also tested the burst operation mode. The excellent measured performance parameter will be introduced. The oscillator rod is longitudinally pumped from both sides. The oscillator has been operated with three cavity control methods: "Cavity Dither", "Pound-Drever-Hall" and "Adaptive Ramp & Fire". Especially the latter method is very suitable to operate the laser in harsh vibrating environment such in airplanes. The amplifier bases on the InnoSlab design concept. The constant keeping of a moderate fluence in the InnoSlab crystal permits excellent possibilities to scale the pulse energy to several 100 mJ. An innovative pump unit and optics makes the laser performance insensitive to inhomogeneous diode degradation and allows switching of additional redundant diodes. Further key features have been implemented in a FM design concept. The operational lifetime is extended by the implementation of internal redundancies for the most critical parts. The reliability is increased due to the higher margin onto the laser induced damage threshold by a pressurized housing. Additionally air-to-vacuum effects becomes obsolete. A high efficient heat removal concept has been implemented

All-fiber-coupled, master oscillator fiber power amplifier based laser assembly for the LISA gravitational wave detector

We review possible alternatives for the realization of the LISA laser assembly against the requirements and present a concept for a tailored master oscillator fiber power amplifier solution. An all-solid-state, all- fiber coupled approach with a Nd:YAG NPRO seed appears particularly attractive due to the possibility to combine excellent spectral properties and high output powers with superior environmental robustness