Estimating European volatile organic compound emissions using satellite observations of formaldehyde from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument

Emission of non-methane Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) to the atmosphere stems from biogenic and human activities, and their estimation is difficult because of the many and not fully understood processes involved. In order to narrow down the uncertainty related to VOC emissions, which negatively reflects on our ability to simulate the atmospheric composition, we exploit satellite observations of formaldehyde (HCHO), an ubiquitous oxidation product of most VOCs, focusing on Europe. HCHO column observations from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) reveal a marked seasonal cycle with a summer maximum and winter minimum. In summer, the oxidation of methane and other long-lived VOCs supply a slowly varying background HCHO column, while HCHO variability is dominated by most reactive VOC, primarily biogenic isoprene followed in importance by biogenic terpenes and anthropogenic VOCs. The chemistry-transport model CHIMERE qualitatively reproduces the temporal and spatial features of the observed HCHO column, but display regional biases which are attributed mainly to incorrect biogenic VOC emissions, calculated with the Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosol from Nature (MEGAN) algorithm. These "bottom-up" or a-priori emissions are corrected through a Bayesian inversion of the OMI HCHO observations. Resulting "top-down" or a-posteriori isoprene emissions are lower than "bottom-up" by 40% over the Balkans and by 20% over Southern Germany, and higher by 20% over Iberian Peninsula, Greece and Italy. We conclude that OMI satellite observations of HCHO can provide a quantitative "top-down" constraint on the European "bottom-up" VOC inventories

Biases of Odonata in Habitats Directive: Trends, trend drivers, and conservation status of European threatened Odonata

Dragonflies and damselflies, within the order of Odonata, are important ecological indicators with widely recognised conservation value. They are generally better researched and protected than other invertebrates, yet, they have received limited protection from the European Union (EU)'s Habitats Directive, which serves as the major legislative tool for species conservation in Europe. We reviewed the conservation status and trends, legal protection status, and knowledge gaps of Odonates within the EU. Among the 22 threatened and 27 endemic species in EU, respectively 19 and 11 of them are not protected by the Directive. Out of the 35 species which are threatened and/or listed on the Annexes, 61.5% of them are declining. Nevertheless, threatened non‐Annex species are more likely to have a decreasing population trend than Annex species. There are also 26% of threatened non‐Annex species with unknown trends. Inaccuracies in evaluating Odonata trends are also revealed due to the lack of standardised methodology and incomplete surveys. Moreover, most conservation research focuses on climate change's effects on range shift, therefore knowledge gaps exist in understating how water and habitat qualities, the most important Odonate trend drivers, shape Odonata conservation status. There is an urgent need to revise the legal protection status of Odonata in Europe, for instance by revising the EU Habitats Directive Annexes to include threatened damselflies and dragonflies. There is also an urgent need for systematic, standardised, and regular survey to be able to investigate trends and drivers of change to identify priority conservation actions

Biases of Odonata in Habitats Directive: Trends, trend drivers, and conservation status of European threatened Odonata

Dragonflies and damselflies, within the order of Odonata, are important ecological indicators with widely recognised conservation value. They are generally better researched and protected than other invertebrates, yet, they have received limited protection from the European Union (EU)'s Habitats Directive, which serves as the major legislative tool for species conservation in Europe. We reviewed the conservation status and trends, legal protection status, and knowledge gaps of Odonates within the EU. Among the 22 threatened and 27 endemic species in EU, respectively 19 and 11 of them are not protected by the Directive. Out of the 35 species which are threatened and/or listed on the Annexes, 61.5% of them are declining. Nevertheless, threatened non-Annex species are more likely to have a decreasing population trend than Annex species. There are also 26% of threatened non-Annex species with unknown trends. Inaccuracies in evaluating Odonata trends are also revealed due to the lack of standardised methodology and incomplete surveys. Moreover, most conservation research focuses on climate change's effects on range shift, therefore knowledge gaps exist in understating how water and habitat qualities, the most important Odonate trend drivers, shape Odonata conservation status. There is an urgent need to revise the legal protection status of Odonata in Europe, for instance by revising the EU Habitats Directive Annexes to include threatened damselflies and dragonflies. There is also an urgent need for systematic, standardised, and regular survey to be able to investigate trends and drivers of change to identify priority conservation actions

Update about "minimally verbal" children with autism spectrum disorder.

OBJECTIVE: To review clinical and neurobiological features of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder. DATA SOURCE: We carried out a narrative review using the PubMed database. We considered the following search terms combined through the Boolean operator "AND": "autism spectrum disorder"; "minimally verbal." DATA SYNTHESIS: To date, there is no shared definition of minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder. The heterogeneity in intellectual functioning and in linguistic abilities among these individuals suggests there is no single mechanism underlying their difficulties in learning to speak. However, the reasons why these children do not speak and the biological markers that can identify them are still unknown. Language impairment in these children can lead to several unfavorable consequences, including behavior problems (such as self-aggression, hetero-aggression, and property destruction), poorer daily living and social skills. Psychiatric comorbidities (including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, specific phobias, and compulsions) consist in a serious problem related to the lack of verbal language in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Although in the literature there are very few evidence-based results, several findings suggest that an alternative and augmentative communication intervention, creating an extra-verbal communication channel, may be effective in these individuals. CONCLUSIONS: The exact definition, clinical characteristics, associated disorders, etiology, and treatment of minimally verbal subjects with autism spectrum disorder must still be further studied and understood

Lidar observations of mesospheric sodium over Italy

We have developed a lidar system for the measurements of the mesospheric atomic sodium (Na) number density profile. The performances and the main characteristics of the system are evaluated showing the first observations: Na number density profiles can be obtained with a resolution of 300 m in altitude and of 200 s in time, the relative uncertainty is between 5% and 10%. These features also allow to discuss the capability of the system to detect the time and space variability of Na density profiles, which is typical of the gravity wave propagation. The preliminary analysis of the sodium profile dynamics along a 7 hours measurement session, started from 19:30UT on 10 April 1997, shows the presence of wave-like perturbations with characteristics typical of propagating gravity waves

Validation and analysis of regional present-day climate and climate change simulations over Europe

In the European Commission (EC) project "Regionalization of Anthropogenic Climate Change Simulations, RACCS, recently terminated, 11 European institutions have carried out tests of dynamical and statistical regionalization techniques. The outcome of the "dynamical part" of the project, utilizing a series of high resolution LAMs and a variable resolution global model (all of which we shall refer to as RCMs, Regional Climate Models), is presented here. The per- formance of the dqterent LAMs had first, in a preceding EC project, been tested with "perfect" boundary forcing fields (ECMWF analyses) and also multi-year present-day climate simula- tions with AMIP "perfect ocean " or mixed layer ocean GCM boundary conditions had been validated against available climatological data. The present report involves results of vali- dation and analysis of RCM present-day climate simulations and anthropogenic climate change experiments. Multi-year (5 - 30 years) present-day climate simulations have been per- formed with resolutions between 19 and 70 km (grid lengths) and with boundary conditions from the newest CGCM simulations. The climate change experiments involve various 2xCO2 - ]xCO2 transient greenhouse gas experiments and in one case also changing sulphur aerosols. A common validation and inter-comparison was made at the coordinating institution, MPIfor Meteorology. The validation of the present-day climate simulations shows the importance of systematic errors in the low level general circulation. Such errors seem to induce large errors in precipitation and surface air temperature in the RCMs as well as in the CGCMs providing boundary conditions. Over Europe the field of systematic errors in the mean sea level pressure (MSLP) usually involve an area of too low pressure, often in the form of an east-west trough across Europe with too high pressure to the north and south. New storm-track analyses confirm that the areas of too low pressure are caused by enhanced cyclonic activity and similarly that the areas of too high pressure are caused by reduced such activity. The precise location and strength of the extremes in the MSLP error field seems to be dependent on the physical param- eterization package used. In model pairs sharing the same package the area of too low pressure is deepened further in the RCM compared to the corresponding CGCM, indicating an increase of the excessive cyclonic activity with increasing resolution. From the experiments performed it seems not possible to decide to what extent the systematic errors in the general circulation are the result of local errors in the physical parameterization schemes or remote errors trans- mitted to the European region via the boundary conditions. Additional errors in precipitation and temperature seems to be due to direct local effects of errors in certain parameterization schemes and errors in the SSTs taken from the CGCMs. For all seasons many biases are fOund to be statistically significant compared to estimates of the internal model variability of the time- slice mean values. In the climate change experiments statistically significant European mean temperature changes which are large compared to the corresponding biases are found. How- ever, the changes in the deviations from the European mean temperature as well as the changes in precipitation are only partly sign wcan ce and are of the same order of magnitude or smaller than the corresponding biases found in the present-day climate simulations. Cases of an inter- action between the systematic model errors and the radiative forcing show that generally the errors are not canceling out when the changes are computed. Therefore, reliable regional cli- mate changes can only be achieved after model improvements which reduce their systematic errors sufficiently. Also in future RCM experiments sujiciently long time-slices must be used in order to obtain statistically sign ijicant climate changes on the sub-continental scale aimed at with the present regionalization technique

Determination of propofol by GC/MS and fast GC/MS-TOF in two cases of poisoning

Two cases of suspected acute and lethal intoxication caused by propofol were delivered by the judicial authority to the Department of Sciences for Health Promotion and Mother-Child Care in Palermo, Sicily. In the first case a female nurse was found in a hotel room, where she lived with her mother; four 10 mg/mL vials and two 20 mg/mL vials of propofol were found near the decedent along with syringes and needles. In the second case a male nurse was found in the operating room of a hospital, along with a used syringe. In both cases a preliminary systematic and toxicological analysis indicated the presence of propofol in the blood and urine. As a result, a method for the quantitative determination of propofol in biological fluids was optimized and validated using a liquid-liquid extraction protocol followed by GC/MS and fast GC/MS-TOF. In the first case, the concentration of propofol in blood was determined to be 8.1 \u3bcg/mL while the concentration of propofol in the second case was calculated at 1.2 \u3bcg/mL. Additionally, the tissue distribution of propofol was determined for both cases. Brain and liver concentrations of propofol were, respectively, 31.1 and 52.2 \u3bcg/g in Case 1 and 4.7 and 49.1 \u3bcg/g in Case 2. Data emerging from the autopsy findings, histopathological exams as well as the toxicological results aided in establishing that the deaths were due to poisoning, however, the manner of death in each were different: homicide in Case 1 and suicide in Case 2

A SOLAR-POWERED WHITE LED-BASED UV-VIS SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC SYSTEM MANAGED BY PC FOR AIR POLLUTION DETECTION IN FARAWAY AND UNFRIENDLY LOCATIONS

This research work regards the design and realization of an absorption spectrophotometer based on a LED light source in place of the usually employed Xenon lamp. The advantage of the use of LED technology resides in several factors such as the reducing of the analyte temperature variations and thus noise generation, which occur if a Xenon light source is used, beside of the high luminous efficiency, reliability, operating duration, lower maintenance and a lower power consumption. This last factor allows to supply the entire designed apparatus using a solar panel thus making the system easly portable for use even in places where the electricity network is absent. An optical filtering system was realized in order to detect the analyte absorption for each wavelength range selected by the optical filters. A PC-interfaced PIC-based control unit used to manage the different functionalities required by the spectophotometer was realized and tested. The control unit acquires and processes, via the developed firmware, the raw data provided by different sensors employed in the system. The sensors are used to monitor analyte temperature and humidity values, to control the analyte pressure and to acquire the luminous intensity value of the light beam before and after passing through the analyte. Finally, the realized electronic control unit actuates different mechanical sections (stepper motor, solenoid valve), sincronyzing and controlling the data exchange between hardware sections, microcontroller and the PC

Risk Control for Synchronizing a New Economic Model

Risk analysis in control problems is a critical but often overlooked issue in this research area. The main goal of this analysis is to assess the reliability of designed controllers and their impact on applied systems. The chaotic behavior of fractional-order economical systems has been extensively investigated in previous studies, leading to advancements in such systems. However, this chaotic behavior poses unpredictable risks to the economic system. This paper specifically investigates the reliability and risk analysis of chaotic fractional-order systems synchronization. Furthermore, we present a technique as a new mechanism to evaluate controller performance in the presence of obvious effects. Through a series of simulation studies, the reliability and risk associated with the proposed controllers are illustrated. Ultimately, we show that the suggested technique effectively reduces the risks associated with designed controllers

Autism Spectrum Disorder and Narcolepsy: A Possible Connection That Deserves to Be Investigated.

Narcolepsy in childhood-adolescence is characterized by a high occurrence of psychiatric comorbidities. The most frequent psychiatric disorders reported in these patients are attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, anxiety disorder, and schizophrenia. However, narcolepsy can be associated also with introversion, sorrowfulness, feelings of inferiority, impaired affectivity modulation, emotional lability, irritability, aggressiveness, and poor attention, that have been pooled by some authors under a definition of "narcoleptic personality." Some aspects of this "narcoleptic personality," and in particular introversion, impaired affectivity modulation, irritability, and poor attention, partially overlap with the clinical features of the individuals with autism spectrum disorder, considering also those that are not regarded as core autism symptoms. Till now, in literature the number of cases affected by both narcolepsy and autism spectrum disorder (seven patients) has been clearly too small to demonstrate the presence of a pathogenetic link between these two conditions, but this possible connection has not yet been adequately investigated, despite the presence of several points in common. The finding of a connection between narcolepsy and autism spectrum disorder could boost the study of possible etiopathogenetic mechanisms shared between these two apparently so distant disorders. Basing on the literature data summarized in this paper, in the diagnostic work-up of a child with narcolepsy it is essential to evaluate also the social-communicative behavior using standardized tools in order to detect the real recurrence of clinical features suggesting an autism spectrum disorder. At the same time, it appears necessary to screen in the individuals with autism spectrum disorder for the possible presence of evoking symptoms of narcolepsy