Modeling Carbon Budgets and Acidification in the Mediterranean Sea Ecosystem Under Contemporary and Future Climate

We simulate and analyze the effects of a high CO2 emission scenario on the Mediterranean Sea biogeochemical state at the end of the XXI century, with a focus on carbon cycling, budgets and fluxes, within and between the Mediterranean sub-basins, and on ocean acidification. As a result of the overall warming of surface water and exchanges at the boundaries, the model results project an increment in both the plankton primary production and the system total respiration. However, productivity increases less than respiration, so these changes yield to a decreament in the concentrations of total living carbon, chlorophyll, particulate organic carbon and oxygen in the epipelagic layer, and to an increment in the DIC pool all over the basin. In terms of mass budgets, the large increment in the dissolution of atmospheric CO2 results in an increment of most carbon fluxes, including the horizontal exchanges between eastern and western sub-basins, in a reduction of the organic carbon component, and in an increament of the inorganic one. The eastern sub-basin accumulates more than 85% of the absorbed atmospheric CO2. A clear ocean acidification signal is observed all over the basin, quantitatively similar to those projected in most oceans, and well detectable also down to the mesopelagic and bathypelagic layers.

Tradeoff in the supply and demand for CO 2 dominates the divergence of net photosynthesis rates of functional plants in alpine ecosystems

As regional heterogeneity on the Qinghai Tibetan Plateau (QTP), the “greening rate” between alpine steppe in the west and alpine meadow ecosystems in the east is difference during the past several decades. To investigate the difference, the net photosynthetic rate (An) and the supply (mesophyll conductance ( g), stomatal conductance ( g)) and demand (the maximum rates of Rubisco carboxylase activity ( V) and photosynthetic electron transport ( J)) for CO of three plants functional types (PFTs) were measured. Other functional traits and influencing factors were compared among ecosystems along the altitudinal gradients of QTP. The An of the PFTs was simulated under potential future conditions. At high altitudes, grass was found to maintain a relatively stable An by decreasing V, J, and g, while slightly increasing g, compared with that at a low altitude. The An of sedge and shrubs increased with rising V, J and g and g values, resulting in a large increment in the An at low altitudes. Grass seemed to be less sensitive to the environment by reducing the supply of and holding onto CO , while sedge and shrub increased both. Grass and sedge should be divided into two PFTs rather than remaining as one based on their opposite physiological and morphological functions in response to climate change. The ecosystem at 3600 m was transitional. C was likely to be a more dominant factor than T in affecting the An of grass. The order of rising An in PFTs was shrub > sedge > grass and the An of alpine meadow was found to increase more under the two future climate scenarios.

Host Utilization Algorithm to Reduce Energy Consumption in Cloud Computing

The utilization of distributed computing server farm is developing quickly to fulfill the large increment required for systems administration, High-Performance Computing(HPC) as well as stockpiling assets for executing business and logical applications. The process of Virtual Machine (VM) solidification is inclusive of VMs getting relocated in order to make use of less physical servers. As a result, it enables the shut down or lowpower mode of more number of servers which enhances the vitality utilization effectiveness, working expense and CO2 discharge. An urgent advance in VM union is have over-burden discovery, which endeavors to foresee whether a physical server is going to be oversubscribed with VMs. On the contrary to usual studies which performed utilization of CPU being the standalone indicator for host overload, a multiple correlation host overload detection algorithm was proposed in the recent study by considering a lot of factors in this regard. A higher load balance model was introduced in this text for the general public cloud, supported by the concept of cloud partitioning, in addition to a switch mechanism used to strategize differently under different scenarios. The IP address is generally shared by a true server and carbo balance. In this regard, the load balancer considers the interface developed with IP address which accepts request packets and the packets are directed to the selected servers. With an aim to improve the efficiency in public cloud environment, the algorithm employed the sport theory in the load balancing strategy.

Composition dependence of thermo-dynamical and thermo-mechanical properties in SeTeSnGe chalcogenide glasses (ChGs)

In this endeavor, we have synthesized novel quaternary glassy Se78-xTe20Sn2Gex (0 ≤ x ≤ 6) alloys by the well-known rapid cooling of melt under quenching technique, to study the effect of Germanium on thermodynamic and thermo-mechanical properties. In particular, we employed Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) technique for the investigation of thermodynamic parameters (e.g., specific heat Cp and enthalpy ΔH) in the glass-transition-region (GTR). Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) experiment was run under non-isothermal conditions. The thermo-mechanical parameters i.e., micro-hardness, micro-void volume, the energy of creation of micro-void, elasticity, density, compactness, and molar volume are also calculated. It was observed that there is a large increment in Cp values in the GTR. Further analysis shows that the Cp values above the GTR (i.e., Cp = Cpe equilibrium specific heat) and below the GTR (i.e., Cp = Cpg glass specific heat) are vastly composition dependent. The increment in specific heat value after Ge incorporation is explained in terms of molar volume.

Student Movement in Portugal Throughout the ’60s: Actors’ Representations of a Period of Social and Cultural Experimentation

The Portuguese university student movement was very active during the so-called «long ’60s» (also the final phase of Estado Novo) and took on a major role in the opposition to the regime. While the wide range of events and international mobilizations resulting from a large increment in youth activism was an important source of inspiration to the Portuguese students, it is equally certain that specific elements in the national context contributed to the characteristics that the movement came to assume. Specifically, we are referring to the regime’s authoritarianism and to the intense repression it unleashed, as well as to the resistance to the colonial war. At the same time, the strong moral, cultural, and artistic conservatism of that period is questioned, which led to the development of alternative behaviours and cultural practices, echoing those of the «May 1968» (Bebiano, 2003). The research underlying this work aims to capture the representations constructed by some of the actors who lived this moment of experimentation, who were then young university students; and to reflect on the contribution of these forms of social participation for the construction of a democratic society in the ’70s. In addition to the necessary literature review, we resort to a set of interviews with people who attended the University of Lisbon in the transition from the ’60s to the ’70s. Therefore, we will take as an example the Lisbon university setting.

PREPARATION OF CHITOSAN-TPP NANOPARTICLES: THE INFLUENCE OF CHITOSAN POLYMERIC PROPERTIES AND FORMULATION VARIABLES

Objective: The aim of this work was to prepare chitosan nanoparticles (CS NPs) using sodium tripolyphosphate (TPP) as crosslinker and to study the effect of chitosan polymeric properties and experimental conditions on the properties and stability of NPs.Methods: CS NPs were prepared by ionic gelation method, using TPP as a crosslinker. The particle size (PS), polydispersity index (PDI), zeta potential (ZP) and the morphologies of the NPs were studied. CS NPs prepared by varying the concentration of TPP, Chitosan molecular weight and its degree of deacetylation, the stirring speed, the rate of TPP addition and the freeze-drying method to study the effect of these variables on the NPs. The stability of the CS NPs was evaluated by storing aqueous suspensions of NPs and comparing the PS, PDI and ZP at the beginning and the end of the experiment.Results: This study shows that the PS, ZP and dispersity of the NPs depend on the chitosan polymeric properties and experimental conditions. The NPs sizes range between 145.73 and 724.23 nm. They all carried positive charges ranging between+4.32 and+43.67 mV. Most of the NPs have the same sizes after freeze-drying, but showed higher monodispersity and ZP, indicating higher stability. After twenty days of studying the stability, the NPs that had low ZP showed a large increment in size in comparison to the highly charged NPs.Conclusion: In conclusion, the polymeric properties and formulation variables in the ionic gelation method have a great influence on the CS NPs formed.

Design for Stuck-at Fault Testability in MCT based Reversible Circuits

Testability leads to a large increment in operating costs from their original circuits which drastically increases the power consumption in logic circuits. This paper presents a new design for testability methodology for the detection of stuck-at faults in multiple controlled Toffoli based reversible circuits. The circuit is modified in such a manner that the applied test vector reaches all the levels without any change in values on the wires of the circuit. An (n+1) dimensional general test set containing only two test vectors is presented, which provide full coverage of single and multiple stuck-at faults in the circuit. The work is further extended to locate the occurrence of stuck-at faults in the circuit. Deterministic approaches are described and the modification methodology is experimented on a set of benchmarks. The present work achieved a reduction up to $50.58\%$ in operating costs as compared to the existing work implemented on the same platform.

A Mesh Adaptive Procedure for Large Increment Method

A posteriorih-version mesh adaptive procedure is presented in the framework of large increment method (LIM) for elastic problems. In this mesh adaptive strategy, the classical Zienkiewicz–Zhu (ZZ) error estimator is adopted and a first class h-adaptive mesh refinement procedure is implemented. A major advantage of the proposed mesh adaptive procedure is that the numerical results from the previous mesh can be utilized to obtain the initial solution for the new mesh. Two-dimensional (2D) examples show that this initial solution is much closer to the real solution than the minimum norm solution used in the original LIM and the revised method can converge faster than the original method.