Environmental benefits of circular food systems: The case of upcycled protein recovered using genome edited potato

Although essential in the human diet, large quantities of available protein are currently lost or under-utilized within the food system, including protein rich side streams from conventional potato starch production. By using the genome editing technique CRISPR-Cas9, conventional starch potato cultivars can be upgraded to facilitate high-value recovery of potato protein fit for human consumption. In turn, this could support the nessecary transition towards more circular food systems. The aim of this study was to assess what environmental benefits could be gained by shifting from conventional protein recovery practice to a novel approach using genome edited potato. Our results, using consequential life cycle assessment, showed that the novel protein recovery scenario provided substantial environmental savings for every ton potato starch produced, with a reduction in global warming impact, terrestrial acidification, land use and ecosystem damage of −720 kgCO2eq, −13 kgSO2eq, −760 m2a crop eq, and −1.1 × 10−5 species.yr respectively. The potential environmental benefits of using genome edited potato were maintained even when simulating reduced tuber yield, increased production inputs, and substitution of various protein sources. Although currently limited by EU legislation and technical maturity, high-value protein recovery from food side streams holds a promising potential to support sustainable production and circularity within the food system

Åkerböna som råvara för bioraffinaderier

Företaget Eco Etanol AB har utvecklat ett koncept där helgrödesensilerade ärt-eller åkerbönplantor processas i en stationär tröska för att separera bönan från grönmassan. Grönmassan valsas sedan för att utvinna en proteinrik pressvätska och en fiberrik halmrest, och bönorna mixas i vatten för att separera proteinet från stärkelsen. Denna process resulterar i tre fraktioner: protein, stärkelse och fiber. Dessa fraktioner kan förädlas till en mängd olika produkter. I denna studie antogs att halmen förädlas till bränslepellets medan proteinet i bönan och pressvätskan används som djurfoder och stärkelsen används för etanolproduktion. Konceptet som helhet kallas i denna studie för bioraffinaderiet. Klimatpåverkan av de tre produkterna studerades med hjälp av metoden livscykelanalys (LCA). Studien inkluderar odling, skörd och ensilering, transport från fält samt processande och förädling till färdiga försäljningsbara produkter, och slutar vid fabriksgrinden vilket innebär att distribution av varorna till slutanvändare eller användning av produkterna inte inkluderats. Studien inkluderar inte heller byggnader och övrig infrastruktur. Åkerbönans kvävelevererande och luckrande effekter i växtföljden har beaktats. De emissioner som uppkommer från odling och bioraffinaderi fördelas över de tre samprodukterna med hjälp av ekonomisk allokering. Det innebär att en produkt som har ett högt ekonomiskt värde får en högre miljöbelastning. Resultatet för respektive produkt jämfördes också med ett antal referensprodukter som har samma eller liknande funktion som de studerade produkterna. Referensprodukterna var för proteinfoder: värmebehandlat rapsmjöl ExPro ®, sojamjöl och drank, för etanol: etanol producerad från vete och sockerbetor samt bensin, för briketter: skogsflis, flis av gallringsvirke och pellets. Datainsamlingen bygger delvis på uppgifter från företaget Ecoetanol at Sweden AB bland annat vad det gäller skörd, tröskans kapacitet och energibehov samt näringsanalyser som beställts av Ecoetanol at Sweden AB och utförts av Eurofins Food & Agro Testing Sweden AB. Eftersom prototypen för bioraffinaderiet inte var färdigställd när denna studie genomfördes så baserades en stor del av beräkningen på data från litteraturen och delvis också på egna antaganden t.ex. vad gäller kapaciteten på bioraffinaderiet. Resultatet visade att dieselanvändning vid odling samt lustgasemissioner från åkermark har störst påverkan under livscykeln, båda respektive ca 30 % av den sammanlagda påverkan på klimatet. Energianvändning och insatsmedel i bioraffinaderiet hade relativt begränsad påverkan på klimatprofilen. Viktigt att notera är att egenproducerade briketter antogs användas för processens värmebehov, vilket täcker en betydande del av processens energibehov. Klimatpåverkan för proteinfodret, etanolen och briketterna samt referensprodukterna presenteras i tabell 1. Proteinfodrets klimatpåverkan uppskattades till ca 0,16 kg CO2ekv per kg torrsubstans (TS) proteinfoder, ca 50-68 % lägre än de undersökta referensprodukterna. Klimatpåverkan per liter etanol (21,2 MJ) uppskattades till ca 0,43 kg CO2ekv, ca 76 % lägre än bensin, men 2,5 % högre än veteetanol och ca 84 % högre än etanol gjord på sockerbetor. Klimatpåverkan per kWh briketter uppskattades till ca 16 g CO2ekv, vilket var nästan 1,4 gånger högre än flis från gallringsvirke och 19 % högre än pellets och 90 % högre än skogsflis.Årligen antogs ca 490 m3 etanol, ca 1000 ton proteinfoder och ca 5 600 MWh bränslebriketter produceras i bioraffinaderiet. Klimatpåverkan av den sammanlagda produktionen uppskattades till 462 ton CO2ekv per år. Detta kan jämföras mot referensprodukter med låg klimatpåverkan dvs. samma mängd produkter av sockerbetsetanol, flis från gallring och drank som ger upphov till ca 477 ton CO2ekv per år, eller referensprodukter med hög klimatpåverkan dvs. samma mängd produkter av bensin, sojamjöl och pellets vilket ger upphov till ca 1 440 ton CO2ekv per år. Ett antal känslighetsanalyser genomfördes. Störst påverkan på produkternas klimatpåverkan (+21%) gav en sänkning av skörden till normskörd samt förändrade antaganden vad gäller lustgasemissioner från kvävet i rot och skörderester (+27%). Jämförelsen mellan bioraffinaderiets årliga produktion och samma mängd referensprodukter påverkades mest om markkolsförändringar inkluderades i analysen av sojan. Det gav 73 % reduktion i klimatpåverkan för bioraffinaderiet jämfört med referensprodukter med hög klimatpåverkan. I grundanalysen var motsvarande reduktion 68 %. Sammanfattningsvis: att investera och driva det studerade bioraffinaderiet kan ge stora klimatvinster, men bara om det är miljöbelastande produkter som ersätts på marknaden. Om produkter med hög klimatpåverkan (fossila bränslen och sojamjöl) kan ersättas kan en minskning på ca 68 % uppnås. Om bioraffinaderiets produkter istället ersätter andra produkter som redan har en låg klimatpåverkan (bioetanol och drank) uteblir i princip vinsten (minskning med endast 3 %). Det är således viktigt att investeringen leder till en expansion av marknaden för produkter med låg klimatbelastning, och inte bara en inbördes omfördelning

"I didn't have to look her in the eyes"-participants' experiences of the therapeutic relationship in internet-based psychodynamic therapy for adolescent depression

Objective: To explore young people’s perceptions of the relationship with the therapist in internet-based psychodynamic treatment for adolescent depression. Method: As a part of a randomized controlled trial, 18 adolescents aged 15–19 were interviewed after participating in treatment. Interviews followed a semi-structured interview schedule and were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: The findings are reported around four main themes: “a meaningful and significant relationship with someone who cared”, “a helping relationship with someone who guided and motivated me through therapy”; “a relationship made safer and more open by the fact that we didn’t have to meet” and “a nonsignificant relationship with someone I didn’t really know and who didn’t know me”. Conclusion: Even when contact is entirely text-based, it is possible to form a close and significant relationship with a therapist in internet-based psychodynamic treatment. Clinicians need to monitor the relationship and seek to repair ruptures when they emerge. Trial registration:ISRCTN.org identifier: ISRCTN16206254

HW-SW Implementation of a Decoupled FPU for ARM-based Cortex-M1 SoCs in FPGAs

Nowadays industrial monoprocessor and multipro- cessor systems make use of hardware floating-point units (FPUs) to provide software acceleration and better precision due to the necessity to compute complex software applications. This paper presents the design of an IEEE-754 compliant FPU, targeted to be used with ARM Cortex-M1 processor on FPGA SoCs. We face the design of an AMBA-based decoupled FPU in order to avoid changing of the Cortex-M1 ARMv6-M architecture and the ARM compiler, but as well to eventually share it among different processors in our Cortex-M1 MPSoC design. Our HW- SW implementation can be easily integrated to enable hardware- assisted floating-point operations transparently from the software application. This work reports synthesis results of our Cortex-M1 SoC architecture, as well as our FPU in Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, which exhibit competitive numbers compared to the equivalent Xilinx FPU IP core. Additionally, single and double precision tests have been performed under different scenarios showing best case speedups between 8.8x and 53.2x depending on the FP operation when are compared to FP software emulation libraries

QoS-Driven Reconfigurable Parallel Computing for NoC-Based Clustered MPSoCs

Reconfigurable parallel computing is required to provide high-performance embedded computing, hide hardware complexity, boost software development, and manage multiple workloads when multiple applications are running simultaneously on the emerging network-on-chip (NoC)-based multiprocessor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs) platforms. In these type of systems, the overall system performance may be affected due to congestion, and therefore parallel programming stacks must be assisted by quality-of-service (QoS) support to meet application requirements and to deal with application dynamism. In this paper, we present a hardware-software QoS-driven reconfigurable parallel computing framework, i.e., the NoC services, the runtime QoS middleware API and our ocMPI library and its tracing support which has been tailored for a distributed-shared memory ARM clustered NoC-based MPSoC platform. The experimental results show the efficiency of our software stack under a broad range of parallel kernels and benchmarks, in terms of low-latency interprocess communication, good application scalability, and most important, they demonstrate the ability to enable runtime reconfiguration to manage workloads in message-passing parallel applications

Potential for using guest attendance forecasting in Swedish public catering to reduce overcatering

Food waste is a significant problem within public catering establishments, caused mainly by serving waste arising from overcatering. Overcatering means that public catering establishments rarely run out of food but surplus ends up as food waste. The challenge is to find a solution that minimizes food waste while ensuring that sufficient food can be provided. A key element in this balancing act is to forecast accurately the number of meals needed and cook that amount. This study examined conventional forecasting methods (last-value forecasting, moving-average models) and more complex models (prophet model, neural network model) and calculated associated margins for all models. The best-performing model for each catering establishment was then used to evaluate the optimal number of portions based on stochastic inventory theory. Data used in the forecasting models are number of portions registered at 21 schools in the period 2010–2019. The past year was used for testing the models against real observations. The current business as usual scenario results in a mean average percentage error of 20–40%, whereas the best forecasting case around 2–3%. Irrespective of forecasting method, meal planning needed some safety margin in place for days when demand exceeded the forecast level. Conventional forecasting methods were simple to use and provided the best results in seven cases, but the neural network model performed best for 11 out of 21 kitchens studied. Forecasting can be one option on the road to achieve a more sustainable public catering sector

Attityd till och användande av ny teknik : Med Near Field Communication som exempel

Utgångspunkten för denna uppsats är en förstudie om den trådlösa tekniken Near Field Communication (NFC), som vi författare genomförde via en enkät. Några av svaren på enkäten som berörde ämnet riskbeteende fick oss att undra varför respondenter svarade som de gjorde på vissa frågor, då detta kunde innebära att de tog en risk med personlig information. Detta ledde till att vi ville ta reda på varför och till vilken gräns personer är villiga att ta risker med ny teknik, men även vilka variabler som spelar in i deras beslut att använda eller inte använda ny teknik. Vårt tillvägagångssätt är en litteraturstudie för att förstå vad som menas med användbarhet, riskbeteende och pålitlighet samt hur dessa hänger ihop. Efter att vi bildat oss en uppfattning om dessa och fördjupat oss lite mer inom ämnena, så genomförde vi intervjuer för att se hur den information vi forskat fram förhöll sig till våra respondenter. Urvalet av de personer som intervjuades har varit ”bekvämlighetsurval”, alltså personer i vår närhet.  Resultatet pekar på att det finns en hel del förarbete att genomföra innan man lanserar ny teknik. Dessutom har upplevd pålitlighet till företaget stor betydelse. För att många personer ska ta till sig ny teknik krävs det information och en del tillit till företaget i fråga, detta för att personen ens ska börja använda tekniken

Optimal measures in order to reduce total emissions from non-road mobile machinery in a national and economic perspective

In this report future annual emissions amounts of gaseous pollutants, particulate matter (PM10) and noise from the non-road mobile machinery sector in Sweden were estimated. The estimates over future emissions amounts were conducted for each year from 2006 to 2020. Special focus has been taken to the impact of European and national legislations, the age distribution of different types and sizes of machinery and measures to reduce the annual emissions. Besides different measures to reduce emissions, corresponding costs were also estimated. The study comprises fuel consumption and emissions of CO2, carbon monoxide (CO), hydrocarbons (HC), nitrogen oxides (NOx), particulate matter (PM), and noise from non-road mobile machinery equipped with diesel engines with a rated engine power of 37 to 560 kW. Non-road mobile machinery for example includes tractors, wheel loaders, excavators, articulate haulers, mobile cranes, combined harvesters, forestry machinery and trucks. The current report was a supplementary study to a report describing a methodology for estimating annual fuel consumption and emissions from the non-road mobile machinery sector in Sweden for year 2006. Inventory data of the year 2006 study was obtained from the Swedish machinery testing institute’s machinery inspection operation, statistics of sale returns from trade organisations and the Swedish motor-vehicle register. The number of machinery and annual fuel consumption and emissions amounts for year 2006 is presented in table S1. Besides estimates of annual fuel consumption and emissions amounts, emissions of noise was also derived both at a national level and for a specific construction site. For the case study the results showed that it was possible to reduce the average noise level with more than 3 dB(A) compared with the base scenario just by choosing the machinery fulfilling the strictest noise limits, i.e. Stage II which was mandatory for most machinery from 2006. Other measures simulated included various types of retrofit of noise reduction packages. The specific cost for the different measures to reduce average noise emissions from the specific construction site varied from 4 000 up to more than 500 000 SEK dB-1. For the estimate of future fuel consumption and emissions amounts various simulations were conducted, each with a different measure for reducing the annual amounts. Five main emission reduction measures or programs were studied: - Scrappage program - Alternative fuel program - Voluntary emission regulation program - Retrofit of aftertreatment program - Noise reduction program The impact on engine exhaust gas emissions and noise of the current European emission and noise regulations, Stage I to IV and Stage I to II for emissions and noise respectively were common for all simulations or programs. Besides the impact of European regulations, annual work was set to a fixed value for each type of machinery and year simulated, thus eliminating any potential changes of the state of the market. The result of the baseline scenario "Business as usual" (BAU), i.e. only taking account to the impact of European regulation, is presented in table S2 for four different years Both fuel consumption and emissions of CO2 remains fairly constant as an effect of the assumption that the annual work was set at a fixed value. However, emissions of especially NOx and PM showed a major reduction due to the tighter and tighter regulations. All programs simulated were able to reduce the emissions compared with the BAU scenario with exceptions for emissions of nitrogen oxides, which increased in some of the alternative fuel programs. Both the absolute reduction and cost varied significantly between and within the various programs. Reduction of NOx varied from an accumulated increase in emissions of 25 000 tonne to an accumulated reduction of 22 000 tonne for the studied period from 2006 to 2020. At the same time the accumulated cost for the programs varied from a few hundred million SEK to more than 60 000 million SEK. In table S3, specific reduction cost for each pollutant in SEK kg-1 for eight typical emission reduction programs are presented. The results showed that the most economically favourable alternative for reducing emissions from non-road mobile machinery was the voluntary emissions regulation program, i.e. early introduction of machinery fulfilling coming emission limits. Another important result was that the introduction of alternative fuels as a mean of emissions reduction was associated with rather high costs compared to the actual reduction in emissions. For emissions of nitrogen oxides the specific reduction cost varied from almost 100 SEK kg-1 up to a few hundreds of SEK kg-1 except for the alternative fuel programs, which resulted in a considerable higher cost

P53 expression and apoptosis in the lens after ultraviolet radiation exposure. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci.

PURPOSE. To localize p53 protein and active caspase-3 in the albino rat lens and to compare p53 mRNA and active caspase-3 expression in ultraviolet radiation (UVR) 300 nm exposed lenses and their contralateral nonexposed controls. METHODS. Ten Sprague-Dawley albino rats were unilaterally exposed to 8 kJ/m 2 UVR, and the contralateral eyes were left nonexposed. In total, four exposed lenses and their respective contralateral nonexposed lenses were analyzed by immunohistochemistry to localize p53 and active caspase-3. In addition, six exposed and contralateral nonexposed lenses were analyzed by real-time RT-PCR. Quantified p53 and caspase-3 expression were compared between the in vivo UVR 300 nm exposed lenses and the contralateral nonexposed lenses. RESULTS. All lenses exposed to UVR developed cataract. Immunohistochemistry showed that p53 and active caspase-3 were localized in the lens epithelial cells. Quantified p53 and caspase-3 expression were significantly higher in lenses exposed to UVR than in nonexposed lenses. CONCLUSIONS. p53 and caspase-3 expression increase in lens epithelial cells after UVR exposure. In the lens, apoptosis induced by UVR may be associated with increased p53 expression. (Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2007;48:4187-4191

Pharmacological intervention based on fecal calprotectin levels in patients with ulcerative colitis at high risk of a relapse: A prospective, randomized, controlled study

Abstract Background: Targeted therapy, using biomarkers to assess disease activity in ulcerative colitis (UC), has been proposed. Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate whether pharmacological intervention guided by fecal calprotectin (FC) prolongs remission in patients with UC. Methods: A total of 91 adults with UC in remission were randomized to an intervention group or a control group. Analysis of FC was performed monthly, during 18 months. A FC value of 300 mg/g was set as the cut-off for intervention, which was a dose escalation of the oral 5-aminosalicylate (5-ASA) agent. The primary study end-point was the number of patients to have relapsed by month 18. Results: There were relapses in 18 (35.3%) and 20 (50.0%) patients in the intervention and the control groups, respectively (p ¼ 0.23); and 28 (54.9%) patients in the intervention group and 28 (70.0%) patients in the control group had a FC > 300 mg/g, of which 8 (28.6%) and 16 (57.1%) relapsed, respectively (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Active intervention significantly reduced relapse rates, although no significant difference was reached between the groups overall. Thus, FC-levels might be used to identify patients with UC at risk for a flare, and a dose escalation of their 5-ASA agent is a therapeutic option for these patients