Obstacle Avoidance,Visual Detection Performance,and Eye-Scanning Behavior of Glaucoma Patients in a Driving Simulator: A Preliminary Study

The objective of this study was to evaluate differences in driving performance, visual detection performance, and eye-scanning behavior between glaucoma patients and control participants without glaucoma. Glaucoma patients (n = 23) and control participants (n = 12) completed four 5-min driving sessions in a simulator. The participants were instructed to maintain the car in the right lane of a two-lane highway while their speed was automatically maintained at 100 km/h. Additional tasks per session were: Session 1: none, Session 2: verbalization of projected letters, Session 3: avoidance of static obstacles, and Session 4: combined letter verbalization and avoidance of static obstacles. Eye-scanning behavior was recorded with an eye-tracker. Results showed no statistically significant differences between patients and control participants for lane keeping, obstacle avoidance, and eye-scanning behavior. Steering activity, number of missed letters, and letter reaction time were significantly higher for glaucoma patients than for control participants. In conclusion, glaucoma patients were able to avoid objects and maintain a nominal lane keeping performance, but applied more steering input than control participants, and were more likely than control participants to miss peripherally projected stimuli. The eye-tracking results suggest that glaucoma patients did not use extra visual search to compensate for their visual field loss. Limitations of the study, such as small sample size, are discussed.     

Temperature increase and fluctuation induce phytoplankton biodiversity loss – Evidence from a multi‐seasonal mesocosm experiment

Global climate change scenarios predict lake water temperatures to increase up to 4°C and extreme weather events, including heat waves and large temperature fluctuations, to occur more frequently. Such changes may result in a reorganization of the plankton community structure, causing shifts in diversity and structure toward a community dominated by fewer species that are more adapted to endure warmer and irregular temperature conditions. We designed a long‐term (8 months) mesocosm experiment to explore how ambient water temperature (C: control), induced increased temperature (T: +4°C), and temperature fluctuations (F: ±4°C relative to T) change phytoplankton phenology, taxonomical diversity, and community structure, and how such changes affected zooplankton abundance and composition. Synthesis. Our results show that T and F relative to C significantly decreased phytoplankton diversity. Moreover, there was a clear effect of the temperature treatments (T and F) on phytoplankton size structure that resulted in a significantly lower growth of large species (i.e., large Chlorophyta) compared to C. Decreased diversity and evenness in the T and F treatments pushed the community toward the dominance of only a few phytoplankton taxa (mainly Cyanobacteria and Chlorophyta) that are better adapted to endure warmer and more irregular temperature conditions. The observed shift toward Cyanobacteria dominance may affect trophic energy transfer along the aquatic food web.     

PINK1 Phosphorylates MIC60/Mitofilin to Control Structural Plasticity of Mitochondrial Crista Junctions

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Coated Lithium Powder (CLiP) Electrodes for Lithium‐Metal Batteries

Safety issues caused by the metallic lithium inside a battery represent one of the main reasons for the lack of commercial availability of rechargeable lithium‐metal batteries. The advantage of anodes based on coated lithium powder (CLiP), compared to plain lithium foil, include the suppression of dendrite formation, as the local current density during stripping/plating is reduced due to the higher surface area. Another performance and safety advantage of lithium powder is the precisely controlled mass loading of the lithium anode during electrode preparation, giving the opportunity to avoid Li excess in the cell. As an additional benefit, the coating makes electrode manufacturing safer and eases handling. Here, electrodes based on coated lithium powder electrodes (CLiP) are introduced for application in lithium‐metal batteries. These electrodes are compared to lithium foil electrodes with respect to cycling stability, coulombic efficiency of lithium stripping/plating, overpotential, and morphology changes during cycling.     

Characterization of 24 porcine (dA-dC)n-(dT-dG)n microsatellites: genotyping of unrelated animals from four breeds and linkage studies

Twenty-four PCR primer pairs were designed for the detection of porcine microsatellites. Polymorphism was investigated in 76 unrelated animals from four different breeds: Duroc, Landrace, Hampshire, and Yorkshire. Compared with human microsatellites, a general lower heterozygosity was detected; however, for each microsatellite a significant variation between breeds in number of alleles and heterozygosity was seen. Mean heterozygosity was found to be significantly higher (P<0.01%) in the Yorkshire breed than in the other three breeds. Linkage analyses with the CEPH linkage packet were performed in a backcross family comprising 45 animals, of which 43 had informative meioses. Ten of the microsatellites could be assigned to six different linkage groups, demonstrating that linkage mapping with microsatellites can be carried out with great efficiency in a relatively small number of animals. Four of the linkage groups represent Chromosomes (Chrs) 4, 6, 7, and 8 respectively, while two linkage groups are unassigned.The nucleotide sequence data reported in this paper have been submitted to GenBank and have been assigned the accession numbers listed in Table 1.     

Specific Distribution of R Factors in Serratia marcescens Strains Isolated from Hospital Infections

Serratia marcescens strains from three hospitals in the city of New York were tested for antibiotic susceptibility patterns and the presence of transmissible antibiotic resistance factors. There appears to be a pattern characteristic for each hospital with regard to the sensitivity to nalidixic acid, tetracycline, chloramphenicol, and sulfonamides, whereas the resistance to ampicillin, cephalothin, and streptomycin is similar in the strains isolated from all three hospitals. In one hospital, a single type of R factor was found which transfers resistance to streptomycin, kanamycin, ampicillin, and sulfonamides, whereas strains isolated from a second hospital transfer only ampicillin resistance. No R factors could be detected in multiply resistant Serratia strains isolated in a third hospital. The presence of a single type of R factor probably reflects the relative ecological isolation of S. marcescens and could be useful for epidemiological studies of hospital infections with Serratia.     

How much heat can we grow in our cities? Modelling UK urban biofuel production potential

Biofuel provides a globally significant opportunity to reduce fossil fuel dependence; however, its sustainability can only be meaningfully explored for individual cases. It depends on multiple considerations including: life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, air quality impacts, food versus fuel trade‐offs, biodiversity impacts of land use change and socio‐economic impacts of energy transitions. One solution that may address many of these issues is local production of biofuel on non‐agricultural land. Urban areas drive global change, for example, they are responsible for 70% of global energy use, but are largely ignored in their resource production potential; however, underused urban greenspaces could be utilized for biofuel production near the point of consumption. This could avoid food versus fuel land conflicts in agricultural land and long‐distance transport costs, provide ecosystem service benefits to urban dwellers and increase the sustainability and resilience of cities and towns. Here, we use a Geographic Information System to identify urban greenspaces suitable for biofuel production, using exclusion criteria, in 10 UK cities. We then model production potential of three different biofuels: Miscanthus grass, short rotation coppice (SRC) willow and SRC poplar, within the greenspaces identified and extrapolate up to a UK‐scale. We demonstrate that approximately 10% of urban greenspace (3% of built‐up land) is potentially suitable for biofuel production. We estimate the potential of this to meet energy demand through heat generation, electricity and combined heat and power (CHP) operations. Our findings show that, if fully utilized, urban biofuel production could meet nearly a fifth of demand for biomass in CHP systems in the United Kingdom's climate compatible energy scenarios by 2030, with potentially similar implications for other comparable countries and regions.     

Climate change decreases the cooling effect from postfire albedo in boreal North America

Fire is a primary disturbance in boreal forests and generates both positive and negative climate forcings. The influence of fire on surface albedo is a predominantly negative forcing in boreal forests, and one of the strongest overall, due to increased snow exposure in the winter and spring months. Albedo forcings are spatially and temporally heterogeneous and depend on a variety of factors related to soils, topography, climate, land cover/vegetation type, successional dynamics, time since fire, season, and fire severity. However, how these variables interact to influence albedo is not well understood, and quantifying these relationships and predicting postfire albedo becomes increasingly important as the climate changes and management frameworks evolve to consider climate impacts. Here we developed a MODIS‐derived ‘blue sky’ albedo product and a novel machine learning modeling framework to predict fire‐driven changes in albedo under historical and future climate scenarios across boreal North America. Converted to radiative forcing (RF), we estimated that fires generate an annual mean cooling of ?1.77 ± 1.35 W/m² from albedo under historical climate conditions (1971–2000) integrated over 70 years postfire. Increasing postfire albedo along a south–north climatic gradient was offset by a nearly opposite gradient in solar insolation, such that large‐scale spatial patterns in RF were minimal. Our models suggest that climate change will lead to decreases in mean annual postfire albedo, and hence a decreasing strength of the negative RF, a trend dominated by decreased snow cover in spring months. Considering the range of future climate scenarios and model uncertainties, we estimate that for fires burning in the current era (2016) the cooling effect from long‐term postfire albedo will be reduced by 15%–28% due to climate change.