Concepts for a multi-criteria sustainability assessment of a new more biobased economy in rural production landscapes

This study presents a new approach to model the biophysical potentials for increased biomass harvest in Denmark, and a multi-criteria sustainability assessment of the socio-economic and environmental effects of different scenarios for such increased production and new biobased economy in rural landscapes. Thereby the results serve as input to the ongoing productivism – post-productivism debate related to rural spaces in Europe. Empirical results from a case study of large scale conversion to biorefenery technologies, aiming to increase the total Danish harvest of biomass by 10 million tonnes via the conversion to new types of crop production and land management, is used as an example, and will be related to the common conceptual model presented by the workshop convenors, and a so called “Traffic-light” multi-criteria sustainability assessment scheme introduced and exemplified in the present paper. The aim is to contextualize how the problems in relation to the concrete scenario results can be considered with the landscape as the meeting basis, and used as input for a discussion of innovative models for future farming systems, landscape research and management

Four methods for determining the composition of trace radioactive surface contamination of low-radioactivity metal

Four methods for determining the composition of low-level uranium- and thorium-chain surface contamination are presented. One method is the observation of Cherenkov light production in water. In two additional methods a position-sensitive proportional counter surrounding the surface is used to make both a measurement of the energy spectrum of alpha particle emissions and also coincidence measurements to derive the thorium-chain content based on the presence of short-lived isotopes in that decay chain. The fourth method is a radiochemical technique in which the surface is eluted with a weak acid, the eluate is concentrated, added to liquid scintillator and assayed by recording beta-alpha coincidences. These methods were used to characterize two `hotspots' on the outer surface of one of the He-3 proportional counters in the Neutral Current Detection array of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory experiment. The methods have similar sensitivities, of order tens of ng, to both thorium- and uranium-chain contamination.Comment: 22 pages, 19 figure

Thermodynamics of Large-N_f QCD at Finite Chemical Potential

We extend the previously obtained results for the thermodynamic potential of hot QCD in the limit of large number of fermions to non-vanishing chemical potential. We give exact results for the thermal pressure in the entire range of temperature and chemical potential for which the presence of a Landau pole is negligible numerically. In addition we compute linear and non-linear quark susceptibilities at zero chemical potential, and the entropy at small temperatures. We compare with the available perturbative results and determine their range of applicability. Our numerical accuracy is sufficiently high to check and verify existing results, including the recent perturbative results by Vuorinen on quark number susceptibilities and the older results by Freedman and McLerran on the pressure at zero temperature and high chemical potential. We also obtain a number of perturbative coefficients at sixth order in the coupling that have not yet been calculated analytically. In the case of both non-zero temperature and non-zero chemical potential, we investigate the range of validity of a scaling behaviour noticed recently in lattice calculations by Fodor, Katz, and Szabo at moderately large chemical potential and find that it breaks down rather abruptly at $\mu_q \gtrsim \pi T$, which points to a presumably generic obstruction for extrapolating data from small to large chemical potential. At sufficiently small temperatures $T \ll \mu_q$, we find dominating non-Fermi-liquid contributions to the interaction part of the entropy, which exhibits strong nonlinearity in the temperature and an excess over the free-theory value.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, JHEP style; v2: several updates, rewritten and extended sect. 3.4 covering now "Entropy at small temperatures and non-Fermi-liquid behaviour"; v3: additional remarks at the end of sect. 3.4; v4: minor corrections and additions (version to appear in JHEP

Resummations of free energy at high temperature

We discuss resummation strategies for free energy in quantum field theories at nonzero temperatures T. We point out that resummations should be performed for the short- and long-distance parts separately in order to avoid spurious interference effects and double-counting. We then discuss and perform Pade resummations of these two parts for QCD at high T. The resummed results are almost invariant under variation of the renormalization and factorization scales. We perform the analysis also in the case of the massless scalar $\phi^4$ theory.Comment: 16 pages, revtex4, 15 eps-figures; minor typographic errors corrected; the version as it appears in Phys.Rev.

The calibration of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory using uniformly distributed radioactive sources

The production and analysis of distributed sources of 24Na and 222Rn in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) are described. These unique sources provided accurate calibrations of the response to neutrons, produced through photodisintegration of the deuterons in the heavy water target, and to low energy betas and gammas. The application of these sources in determining the neutron detection efficiency and response of the 3He proportional counter array, and the characteristics of background Cherenkov light from trace amounts of natural radioactivity is described.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figure

Approximately self-consistent resummations for the thermodynamics of the quark-gluon plasma. I. Entropy and density

We propose a gauge-invariant and manifestly UV finite resummation of the physics of hard thermal/dense loops (HTL/HDL) in the thermodynamics of the quark-gluon plasma. The starting point is a simple, effectively one-loop expression for the entropy or the quark density which is derived from the fully self-consistent two-loop skeleton approximation to the free energy, but subject to further approximations, whose quality is tested in a scalar toy model. In contrast to the direct HTL/HDL-resummation of the one-loop free energy, in our approach both the leading-order (LO) and the next-to-leading order (NLO) effects of interactions are correctly reproduced and arise from kinematical regimes where the HTL/HDL are justifiable approximations. The LO effects are entirely due to the (asymptotic) thermal masses of the hard particles. The NLO ones receive contributions both from soft excitations, as described by the HTL/HDL propagators, and from corrections to the dispersion relation of the hard excitations, as given by HTL/HDL perturbation theory. The numerical evaluations of our final expressions show very good agreement with lattice data for zero-density QCD, for temperatures above twice the transition temperature.Comment: 62 pages REVTEX, 14 figures; v2: numerous clarifications, sect. 2C shortened, new material in sect. 3C; v3: more clarifications, one appendix removed, alternative implementation of the NLO effects, corrected eq. (5.16

Repositioning of the global epicentre of non-optimal cholesterol

High blood cholesterol is typically considered a feature of wealthy western countries1,2. However, dietary and behavioural determinants of blood cholesterol are changing rapidly throughout the world3 and countries are using lipid-lowering medications at varying rates. These changes can have distinct effects on the levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol and non-HDL cholesterol, which have different effects on human health4,5. However, the trends of HDL and non-HDL cholesterol levels over time have not been previously reported in a global analysis. Here we pooled 1,127 population-based studies that measured blood lipids in 102.6 million individuals aged 18 years and older to estimate trends from 1980 to 2018 in mean total, non-HDL and HDL cholesterol levels for 200 countries. Globally, there was little change in total or non-HDL cholesterol from 1980 to 2018. This was a net effect of increases in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreases in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe. As a result, countries with the highest level of non-HDL cholesterol—which is a marker of cardiovascular risk—changed from those in western Europe such as Belgium, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Malta in 1980 to those in Asia and the Pacific, such as Tokelau, Malaysia, The Philippines and Thailand. In 2017, high non-HDL cholesterol was responsible for an estimated 3.9 million (95% credible interval 3.7 million–4.2 million) worldwide deaths, half of which occurred in east, southeast and south Asia. The global repositioning of lipid-related risk, with non-optimal cholesterol shifting from a distinct feature of high-income countries in northwestern Europe, north America and Australasia to one that affects countries in east and southeast Asia and Oceania should motivate the use of population-based policies and personal interventions to improve nutrition and enhance access to treatment throughout the world.</p

Open data from the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO

The global network of gravitational-wave observatories now includes five detectors, namely LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston, Virgo, KAGRA, and GEO 600. These detectors collected data during their third observing run, O3, composed of three phases: O3a starting in 2019 April and lasting six months, O3b starting in 2019 November and lasting five months, and O3GK starting in 2020 April and lasting two weeks. In this paper we describe these data and various other science products that can be freely accessed through the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center at https://gwosc.org. The main data set, consisting of the gravitational-wave strain time series that contains the astrophysical signals, is released together with supporting data useful for their analysis and documentation, tutorials, as well as analysis software packages

A century of trends in adult human height

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.5-22.7) and 16.5 cm (13.3-19.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8-144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries