Suchergebnisse

Environmental compensation includes a range of activities intended to counterbalance such negative impacts of development projects that remain in the environment after all preventive and corrective measures have been fully implemented. Sweden, being a member state of the European Union (EU), must implement environmental compensation under EU directives such as the Habitat Directive. However, like in other countries, implementation is not yet widespread in Sweden, and new practices and guidelines remain to be developed both nationally and at European level. This need is all the more urgent considering that the European Commission estimates that, within the EU, about 100,000 hectares of land is converted from its natural state each year. The aim of this paper is to describe current environmental-compensation practices in Swedish road and railway projects and to discuss issues of vital importance to the development of compensation policy, such as what to compensate for, how much, and how. A national inventory was performed, for the first time in Sweden, to identify compensation measures in road and railway projects. Data were collected from a national mailing list including 141 officials at county administrative boards (CABs), internal e-mail correspondence within the Swedish Transport Administration and databases of court decisions. The inventory focused on compensation measures ordered by virtue of the Swedish Environmental Code. In addition, two case studies were carried .

6 pags., 5 figs. ; In phase-change memory devices, a material is cycled between glassy and crystalline states. The highly temperature-dependent kinetics of its crystallization process enables application in memory technology, but the transition has not been resolved on an atomic scale. Using femtosecond x-ray diffraction and ab initio computer simulations, we determined the time-dependent pair-correlation function of phase-change materials throughout the melt-quenching and crystallization process. We found a liquid–liquid phase transition in the phase-change materials AgInSbTe and GeSb at 660 and 610 kelvin, respectively. The transition is predominantly caused by the onset of Peierls distortions, the amplitude of which correlates with an increase of the apparent activation energy of diffusivity. This reveals a relationship between atomic structure and kinetics, enabling a systematic optimization of the memory-switching kinetics. ; F.Q., A.K., M.N., and K.S.T. gratefully acknowledge financial support from the German Research Council through the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1242 project 278162697 ("Non-Equilibrium Dynamics of Condensed Matter in the Time Domain"), project C01 ("Structural Dynamics in Impulsively Excited Nanostructures"), and individual grant So408/9-1, as well as the European Union (7th Framework Programme, grant no. 280555 GO FAST). M.J.S., R.M., and M.W. acknowledge financial support from the German Research Council through the Collaborative Research Center SFB 917 ("Nanoswitches") and individual grant Ma-5339/2-1. M.J.S., I.R., and R.M. also acknowledge the computational resources granted by JARA-HPC from RWTH Aachen University under project nos. JARA0150 and JARA0183. M.T., A.M.L., and D.A.R. were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, through the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under contract no. DE-AC02-76SF00515. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. J.L. acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council. J.S. acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through research grant UDiSON (TEC2017-82464-R). P.Z. gratefully acknowledges funding by the Humboldt Foundation

There is growing understanding that the environment plays an important role both in the transmission of antibiotic resistant pathogens and in their evolution. Accordingly, researchers and stakeholders world-wide seek to further explore the mechanisms and drivers involved, quantify risks and identify suitable interventions. There is a clear value in establishing research needs and coordinating efforts within and across nations in order to best tackle this global challenge. At an international workshop in late September 2017, scientists from 14 countries with expertise on the environmental dimensions of antibiotic resistance gathered to define critical knowledge gaps. Four key areas were identified where research is urgently needed: 1) the relative contributions of different sources of antibiotics and antibiotic resistant bacteria into the environment; 2) the role of the environment, and particularly anthropogenic inputs, in the evolution of resistance; 3) the overall human and animal health impacts caused by exposure to environmental resistant bacteria; and 4) the efficacy and feasibility of different technological, social, economic and behavioral interventions to mitigate environmental antibiotic resistance. ; The workshop was organized and supported by the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR), the Swedish Research Council (SRC) and the Centre for Antibiotic Resistance Research at University of Gothenburg, Sweden (CARe). This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement JPI-EC-AMR No 681055. ; publishedVersion