The potential of Heat as a service as a route to decarbonisation for Scotland

To reach its target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2045, Scotland needs to decarbonise heat and improve the energy efficiency of its buildings. This evidence review examines the potential of Heat as a Service (HaaS) to support this aim by providing a route to the decarbonisation of heat in domestic properties in Scotland. Heat as a Service is a term which covers a range of services that enable people to achieve a warm home in a variety of ways. These include services which provide or enable finance to purchase and install heating equipment; maintenance of heating equipment; energy efficiency upgrades of building fabric; paying for the amount of heat delivered to the home; paying for the temperature the home is heated to; paying flat-rate tariffs for the home to be heated; or combinations of these. Although, to date, there is not much evidence as to what has been tried or how effective it has been in delivering substantial emissions reductions, the limited evidence we found suggests that some HaaS offers potential to: help get Scotland to net zero by accelerating the uptake of low-carbon heating systems and improving energy efficiency across the domestic energy market; improve outcomes for consumers, especially the more vulnerable, by helping target financial support and providing better cost certainty; and support businesses in developing new, sustainable, business models and creating new jobs. The report outlines HaaS business models that have been tried across Europe, and categorises them in terms of the outcomes they offer consumers. It looks into the potential benefits of HaaS for Scotland, and some of the current barriers. Through case studies, it explores in more detail how different business models might work and be adapted to Scotland, and makes six recommendations as to how the Scottish Government could take HaaS forward

Integrated Urban Sensing: A Geo-sensor Network for Public Health Monitoring and Beyond

Pervasive environmental monitoring implies a wide range of technical, but also socio-political challenges, and this applies especially to the sensitive context of the city. In this paper, we elucidate issues for bringing out pervasive urban sensor networks and associated concerns relating to fine-grained information provision. We present the Common Scents project, which is based on the Live Geography approach, and show how it can overcome these challenges. As opposed to hitherto sensing networks, which are mostly built up in monolithic and closed systems, the Common Scents approach aims to establish an open, standards based and modular infrastructure. This ensures interoperability, portability and flexibility, which are crucial prerequisites for pervasive urban sensing. The implementation – a real-time data integration and analysis system for air quality assessment – has been realised on top of the CitySense sensor network in the City of Cambridge, MA US together with the city’s Public Health Department responding to concrete needs of the city and its inhabitants. The second pilot using mobile sensors mounted on bicycles has been deployed in Copenhagen, Denmark. Preliminary results show highly fine-grained variability of pollutant dispersion in urban environments.Singapore-MIT Alliance. Center for Environmental Sensing and MonitoringSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology CenterEuropean Commission (FP7 GENESIS project)Bundesministerium für Wissenschaft und ForschungResearch Studio iSPAC

Fab@Home Model 3: A More Robust, Cost Effective and Accessible Open Hardware Fabrication Platform

Solid Freeform Fabrication is transitioning from an industrial process and research endeavor towards a ubiquitous technology in the lives of every designer and innovator. In order to speed this transition Fab@Home Model 3 was created with the goal of expanding the user base of SFF technology by lowering the skill and price barriers to entry while enabling technology developers to leverage their core competencies more efficiently. The result is a device, which is modular with respect to tool heads, fabrication processes, and electronics controls, costs under $1000, and requires only a simple tool set to assemble.Mechanical Engineerin

Tropical forcing of increased Southern Ocean climate variability revealed by a 140-year subantarctic temperate reconstruction

Occupying 14% of the world’s surface, the Southern Ocean plays a fundamental role in global climate, ocean circulation, carbon cycling and Antarctic ice-sheet stability. Unfortunately, high interannual variability and a dearth of instrumental observations before the 1950s limits our understanding of how marine-atmosphere-ice domains interact on multi-decadal timescales and the impact of anthropogenic forcing. Here we integrate climate-sensitive tree growth with ocean and atmospheric observations on southwest Pacific subantarctic islands that lie at the boundary of polar and subtropical climates (52–54˚S). Our annually-resolved temperature reconstruction captures regional change since the 1870s and demonstrates a significant increase in variability from the mid-twentieth century, a phenomenon predating the observational record. Climate reanalysis and modelling shows a parallel change in tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures that generate an atmospheric Rossby wave train which propagates across a large part of the Southern Hemisphere during the austral spring and summer

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Mariposa Folk Festival At Toronto Islands July 9, 10, 11, 1971

Item consists of the Mariposa Folk Festival Program for 1971, which was held at the Toronto Islands, Toronto, Ontario from 9-11 July, 1971. Featuring the work "Painting of Kicking Bear" by Michael Soles on the cover, and an illustration and inscription from the work "Mountain Wolf Woman, The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian" on the back cover, the festival program was published by Herbert Wise of Music Sales Corporation, edited by Peter Greenwood, with art direction by Ulrich Boege, advertising by Mel Weinberger and staff photography by Elaine Lipson. The program features an illustrated festival schedule of performances and workshops, an alphabetical listing of festival performers and artisans and collages and illustrations by Uli Boege. The 1971 program also features nine feature articles, including "Helo The World, An Autobiography" by David Gahr, "Yurts" by William Coperthwaite, "Macrobiotics" by Carole Getzoff, "Integral Yoga" by Aikya, "Brownie McGhee" by Brownie McGhee and Happy Traum, "Blues" by Peter Greenwood, "The Art of The Luthier" by Michael Gurian, "About 2000 Words" by Tony Glover and "The Guitar Owner's Bible" by Matt Umanov.We acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Culture Online Program. | Nous tenons à souligner le soutien financier du ministère du Patrimoine canadien par le biais du Programme de culture canadienne en ligne

Pleistocene Glacial History of the New Zealand Subantarctic Islands

The New Zealand subantarctic islands of Auckland and Campbell, situated between the subtropical front and the Antarctic Convergence in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean, provide valuable terrestrial records from a globally important climatic region. Whilst the islands show clear evidence of past glaciation, the timing and mechanisms behind Pleistocene environmental and climate changes remain uncertain. Here we present a multidisciplinary study of the islands-including marine and terrestrial geomorphological surveys, extensive analyses of sedimentary sequences, a comprehensive dating programme, and glacier flow line modelling-to investigate multiple phases of glaciation across the islands. We find evidence that the Auckland Islands hosted a small ice cap 384 000±26 000 years ago (384±26 ka), most likely during Marine Isotope Stage 10, a period when the subtropical front was reportedly north of its present-day latitude by several degrees, and consistent with hemispheric-wide glacial expansion. Flow line modelling constrained by field evidence suggests a more restricted glacial period prior to the LGM that formed substantial valley glaciers on the Campbell and Auckland Islands around 72-62 ka. Despite previous interpretations that suggest the maximum glacial extent occurred in the form of valley glaciation at the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; ∼ 21 ka), our combined approach suggests minimal LGM glaciation across the New Zealand subantarctic islands and that no glaciers were present during the Antarctic Cold Reversal (ACR; ∼ 15-13 ka). Instead, modelling implies that despite a regional mean annual air temperature depression of ∼ 5 °C during the LGM, a combination of high seasonality and low precipitation left the islands incapable of sustaining significant glaciation. We suggest that northwards expansion of winter sea ice during the LGM and subsequent ACR led to precipitation starvation across the middle to high latitudes of the Southern Ocean, resulting in restricted glaciation of the subantarctic islands

Response to Comment on A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago

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