A Computational Approach to Simulating the Performance of a 24-Hour Solar-Fuel Cell-Hydrogen Electric Power Plant

World energy demand has risen from about 375 exajoules (EJ) in 1990 to around 600 EJ today. The Energy Information Administration predicts that by the year 2035, this figure will rise to around 800 EJ. This places large stresses on the electric generation infrastructure. Increasingly this demand is being met by renewable energy sources. There are several reasons this is the case. The prices of renewables are dropping quickly and reaching grid parity in more regions. Utilizing renewable energy generation can help achieve energy security: adverse weather or military conflicts are less likely to impact supply routes when energy is produced closer to home. Furthermore, renewable energy technologies are attractive because they do not adversely affect the environment by releasing greenhouse gases which contribute to global warming. One major problem with the deployment of renewable technologies is their intermittent nature. In order to achieve good market penetration it is likely that some sort of energy storage needs to be employed. Several types exist such as thermal storage, pumped storage, batteries and chemicals. Chemical energy derived from renewables is attractive because it has long storage lifetimes, is easily transportable and can be produced from abundant feedstocks; as in the case of generating hydrogen from water electrolysis. Hydrogen produced from solar energy shows promise because of the abundant feedstock (water) and energy supply (the sun). One way that hydrogen can be used to buffer the intermittent nature of solar energy is by using photovoltaic modules to produce electricity which is used to electrolyze water with a regenerative fuel cell and then storing the hydrogen gas. Small-scale solar-fuel cell-hydrogen power plants have been constructed and tested, but often suffer from poor equipment reliability or improper equipment sizing. More study on the effects of component sizing on the system performance of these power plants must be performed. In this research, a computer program is developed which can simulate the long-term behavior of a solar-fuel cell-hydrogen power plant given any sizing of system components: the number and type of photovoltaic modules, the total power of the regenerative fuel cells and the hydrogen storage capacity. Taking into account the details of the system components, location of the plant, meteorological data and the demand load, this program predicts the behavior of such a power plant for any time period. In particular the program can be used to simulate time periods that eliminate the effect of the plant start-up. In essence this is done by running the program for several years to remove the effects of the initial conditions. The biggest initial condition that affects short term results is the amount of hydrogen in storage at the beginning of the simulation. Another important aspect of this program is that the simulation is done on an hourly basis. This computer program outputs important parameters such as how much of the electricity demand was met, how much excess electricity was produced, the amount of solar resource available, the power output of the photovoltaic array, the power into or out of the regenerative fuel cell, and the amount of hydrogen in storage. From these outputs, the proper sizing of a solar-fuel cell-hydrogen power plant can be determined for any size load from residential to utility-scale

Do the burdens to being public affect the investment and innovation of newly public firms?

We examine how the regulatory burdens to being public affect the investment and innovation of newly public firms. To do so, we exploit the Jumpstart our Business Start-up (JOBS) Act, which eliminates certain disclosure, auditing, and governance requirements for a subset of newly public firms. Firms treated with these reduced burdens invest more and more efficiently after going public relative to untreated firms. These findings are concentrated in innovative investments, are accompanied by treated firms being less prone to cater to short-term earnings benchmarks, and are non-existent in dual class firms. We conclude that one reason the burdens to being public affect investment and innovation is because they divert resources away from long-run value increasing investments

Catagorized comparison of Pacific university patients

Catagorized comparison of Pacific university patient

Healthy Food Labels Tailored to a High-Risk, Minority Population More Effectively Promote Healthy Choices than Generic Labels

The decades-long increase in obesity in the US has led to a number of policies aimed at improving diets, which are thought to play a significant role in obesity. Many of these policies seek to influence individuals’ behaviors. Front-of-package labels providing salient, easily interpretable information to consumers have exhibited promise in helping people identify and choose healthier foods. However, behavioral economics may offer an opportunity to enhance label effectiveness. Tailoring labels to high-risk communities, including minority and rural populations, which have higher rates of diet-related diseases than the overall population, may increase the label’s effectiveness. We conducted a choice experiment with supermarket shoppers on a rural American Indian reservation to test labels tailored to the local population relative to a generic label, which had previously been identified as highly effective in the general population. Results show that while the generic label continues to be quite effective in encouraging healthier choices, the label that is tailored to the local community is more effective, resulting in a marked increase in the premium shoppers were willing to pay for a healthy item. Tailoring healthy food labeling systems using insights from behavioral economics may increase their effectiveness

Matrix-Element Corrections to Parton Shower Algorithms

We discuss two ways in which parton shower algorithms can be supplemented by matrix-element corrections to ensure the correct hard limit: by using complementary phase-space regions, or by modifying the shower itself. In the former case, existing algorithms are self-consistent only if the total correction is small. In the latter case, existing algorithms are never self-consistent, a problem that is particularly severe for angular-ordered parton shower algorithms. We show how to construct self-consistent algorithms in both cases. The postscript file for this paper can also be obtained by anonymous ftp from thep.lu.se in the file pub/Preprints/lu_tp_94_17.psComment: 11 pages, LU TP 94-1

The development of a 14-day non-viral engineered CAR T-cell process

Immunotherapy utilizing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells is a promising strategy for the treatment of several types of cancer. Many preclinical and clinical studies engineer CAR T cells through a viral vector, presenting the potential for genotoxicity or insertional mutagenesis. We propose a 14-day non-viral process where we introduce the gene of interest via electroporation; integration can be achieved with the Sleeping Beauty transposon system. Minicircle (MC) DNA constructs containing the CAR, a surface marker (EGFRt), and a double mutant of dihydrofolate reductase (DHFRdm) are electroporated into previously frozen, unstimulated CD4/CD8 T cells with an RNA construct coding for the Sleeping Beauty transposase. After electroporation, cells are bead-stimulated with CD3/CD28 without the use of feeder cells throughout the process. CAR+ cells expressing DHFRdm are rendered insensitive to an FDA-approved small molecule drug, methotrexate (MTX), which allows for chemical selection of the cells of interest while avoiding a magnetic bead sort. The entire process is completed in 2 weeks with a media formulation that contains a serum-free replacement. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Retail-based healthy food point-of-decision prompts (PDPs) increase healthy food choices in a rural, low-income, minority community

This study examines the potential for point-of-decision prompts (PDPs) to promote healthier food choices among shoppers in a rural, low-income, minority community. We hypothesized that a narrowly defined PDP (focused on fresh produce) would be easier for shoppers to remember than a broadly defined PDP (focused on any healthy items), resulting in a higher proportion of healthy items purchased. PDPs were placed at the entrance to a supermarket in Mission, South Dakota, United States of America, on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation for alternating time periods, July 9–10, 2017. Sales records from 653 transactions were retrieved from the supermarket, comprising periods in which PDPs were in place and control periods. We examined the proportion of selected items and proportion of total expenditures that were a) any healthy foods and b) fresh fruits and vegetables. Data were analyzed in 2018. The narrowly defined prompt consistently resulted in a higher proportion of items and expenditures on healthy foods than either the broad prompt or the control condition. Shoppers in the narrow prompt condition purchased and spent significantly more on any healthy foods and fresh produce than shoppers in the control condition. While shoppers in the narrow prompt condition purchased more healthy foods and fresh produce than shoppers in the broad prompt condition, the differences were not statistically significant. Shoppers exposed to the narrow PDP consistently purchased more healthy foods than shoppers in a control group, while shoppers in the broad PDP did not, highlighting the importance of considering cognitive processes when designing health promotion messages

Collider events on a quantum computer

An intuitive definition of the partonic flavor of a jet in quantum chromodynamics is often only well-defined in the deep ultraviolet, where the strong force becomes a free theory and a jet consists of a single parton. However, measurements are performed in the infrared, where a jet consists of numerous particles and requires an algorithmic procedure to define their phase space boundaries. To connect these two regimes, we introduce a novel and simple partonic jet flavor definition in the infrared. We define the jet flavor to be the net flavor of the partons that lie exactly along the direction of the Winner-Take-All recombination scheme axis of the jet, which is safe to all orders under emissions of soft particles, but is not collinear safe. Collinear divergences can be absorbed into a perturbative fragmentation function that describes the evolution of the jet flavor from the ultraviolet to the infrared. The evolution equations are linear and a small modification to traditional DGLAP and we solve them to leading-logarithmic accuracy. The evolution equations exhibit fixed points in the deep infrared, we demonstrate quantitative agreement with parton shower simulations, and we present various infrared and collinear safe observables that are sensitive to this flavor definition

Morphological phylogeny of Megachilini and the evolution of leaf-cutter behavior in bees (Hymenoptera: Megachilidae): Evolution of leaf-cutter behavior in bees

A unique feature among bees is the ability of some species of Megachile Latreille s.l. to cut and process fresh leaves for nest construction. The presence of a razor between the female mandibular teeth (interdental laminae) to facilitate leaf-cutting (LC) is a morphological novelty that might have triggered a subsequent diversification in this group. However, we have a limited understanding of the phylogeny of this group despite the large number of described species and the origins and patterns of variations of this mandibular structure are unknown. Herein, using a cladistic analysis of adult external morphological characters, we explored the relationships of all genera of Megachilini and the more than 50 subgenera of Megachile s.l. We coded 272 characters for 8 outgroups and 114 ingroup species. Depending on the weighting scheme (equal or implied weighting), our parsimony analyses suggested the monophyly of Megachile s.l. and that either Noteriades Cockerell or the clade Coelioxys Latreille + Radoszkowskiana Popov is the extant sister group of all other Megachilini. In addition, we conducted Bayesian total-evidence tip-dating analyses to examine other possible hypotheses of relationships and patterns of variation of the interdental lamina. Our analyses suggest that interdental laminae developed asynchronicaly from two different structures in the mandible, and differ in their phenotypic plasticity. Character correlation tests using phylogenetic pairwise comparisons indicated that the presence of interdental lamina is not associated with head size, mandible size and shape, and pubescence on the adductor interspace. We discuss the implications of our findings for the classification of Megachilini and the development of novel evolutionary, ecological, and functional hypotheses on this behavior. New taxa established are Pseudoheriadini Gonzalez & Engel, new tribe, Ochreriadini Gonzalez & Engel, new tribe, Cremnomegachile Gonzalez & Engel, new genus, Rozenapis Gonzalez & Engel, new genus, and Saucrochile Gonzalez & Engel, new genus, along with the following new combinations: Cremnomegachile dolichosoma (Benoist), new combination, Rozenapis ignita (Smith), new combination, and Saucrochile heriadiformis (Smith), new combination