Operative Fields of the Artificial

This article investigates the composite phenomena of the artificialin examples from literature and science, exploring the interrelationsof narrative and spatial creation. It introduces the sciences of the artificial to the narrative architecture of fictional space and applies the terminology to the structure of the narrative form itself

Carbon Lorenz Curves revisited: Do the Paris Agreement and its Nationally Determined Contributions reflect a more equitable future emissions pathway?

Climate change and its consequences threaten human development and lead to environmental inequality: The inequality is two-sided, both in terms of historic and current contribution to global emissions and how countries are impacted by the resulting climate change. This generated an important debate about historic responsibility of developed countries and the need for sustainable growth pathways for developing countries. This conference contribution looks into the equality dimension of the Paris Climate Agreement and its (Intended) Nationally Determined Contributions, (I)NDCs. We use the Gini index and the Lorenz curves to assess the carbon equity performance of the (I)NDCs. We compare the Gini index of annual and cumulative national average per capita GHG emissions for the time frame 2015-2030 of conditional and unconditional (I)NDCs and set this into perspective with the recent evolution of GHG emissions equality. Our results show that the (I)NDCs, while not meeting the Paris temperature goal, lead towards a more equitable future, though at a slower rate and mostly attributed to efforts by developing countries

Granular technologies to accelerate decarbonization

Of the 45 energy technologies deemed critical by the International Energy Agency for meeting global climate targets, 38 need to improve substan- tially in cost and performance while accelerating deployment over the next decades.Low-carbon technological solutions vary in scale from solar panels, e-bikes, and smart thermostats to carbon capture and storage, light rail transit, and whole-building retrofits. We make three contributions to long-standing debates on the appropriate scale of technological responses in the energy system. First, we focus on the specific needs of accelerated low-carbon transformation: rapid technology deployment, escaping lock-in, and social legitimacy. Second, we synthesize evidence on energy end-use technologies in homes, transport, and industry, as well as electricity generation and energy supply. Third, we go beyond technical and economic considerations to include innovation, investment, deployment, social, and equity criteria for assessing the relative advantage of alternative technologies as a function of their scale. We suggest numerous potential advantages of more-granular energy technologies for accelerating progress toward climate targets, as well as the conditions on which such progress depends

Screening of a macroion by multivalent ions: A new boundary condition for Poisson-Boltzmann equation and charge inversion

Screening of a macroion by multivalent counterions is considered. It is shown that ions form strongly correlated liquid at the macroion surface. Cohesive energy of this liquid leads to strong additional attraction of counterions to the surface. Away from the surface this attraction is taken into account by a new boundary condition for the Poisson-Boltzmann equation. This equation is solved with the new boundary condition for a charged flat surface and a long cylinder. For a cylinder Onsager-Manning theory looses its universality so that apparent charge of the cylinder is smaller than their theory predicts and depends on its bare charge. It can also vanish or change sign.Comment: 4 pages, no figure

Identifying Sustainability and Knowledge Gaps in Socio-Economic Pathways Vis-à-Vis the Sustainable Development Goals

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the global community has set itself an ambitious development agenda. Current analytical and quantitative modeling capabilities fall short of being able to capture all 17 SDGs and their targets. Even highly ambitious and optimistic pathways currently used in research, such as SSP1/SSP1-2.6, do not meet all SDGs (sustainability gaps) and fail to provide information on some of them (knowledge gaps). We show that for research and modeling purposes, the SDG targets can serve as a basis but need to be operationalized to reduce complexity and also to account for long-term sustainability concerns beyond 2030. We have explored here the requirements for assessing more comprehensively the sustainability of development pathways, guided by holistic interpretation of the SDGs to enable an assessment of the potential embedded synergies and trade-offs between the economic, social and environmental objectives. We see this as call for action for science to work on filling these gaps. At the same time, this is also a call for policy makers and the global community to close the sustainability gaps that emerge from such analysis. We anticipate that such analysis will provide useful information for policy advice and investment decisions during implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda

A Model for the Thermodynamics of Globular Proteins

Comments: 6 pages RevTeX, 6 Postscript figures. We review a statistical mechanics treatment of the stability of globular proteins based on a simple model Hamiltonian taking into account protein self interactions and protein-water interactions. The model contains both hot and cold folding transitions. In addition it predicts a critical point at a given temperature and chemical potential of the surrounding water. The universality class of this critical point is new