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Forty-nine schools (N = 5,680 fifth and sixth grade students) were assigned to pre test/treatment, pretest/no treatment, no pretest/treatment, and no pretest/no treat ment conditions in the context of an alcohol misuse prevention study. At the first posttest, five months after the pretest and two months after the intervention, the effects of the pretest and of the intervention were examined. The analyses showed that failure to correct for the design effect due to clustering within schools resulted in the overestimation of the significance of treatment and pretest effects. After correction for the design effect, a significant treatment effect in the hypothesized direction was found with respect to students' awareness of the content of the curriculum. As hypo thesized, significant treatment effects on the alcohol use and misuse measures had not yet developed but are expected to occur at subsequent posttest occasions. Significant pretest effects were found for indices measuring trouble with peers resulting from students' alcohol use, students' internal health locus of control, and their perceptions of adults as a locus of control for their health. Two of the three pretest effects were in the direction that would be hypothesized if the pretest were providing the same impe tus as the intervention. Implications of these findings for school-based substance abuse prevention programs are discussed.

Abstract Flexible thermoelectric power generators fabricated by evaporating thin films on flexible fiber substrates are demonstrated to be feasible candidates for waste heat recovery. An open circuit voltage of 19.6 μV K per thermocouple junction is measured for Ni–Ag thin films, and a maximum power of 2 nW for 7 couples at ΔT = 6.6 K is measured. Heat transfer analysis is used to project performance for several other material systems, with a predicted power output of 1 μW per couple for Bi2Te3/Sb2Te3-based fiber coatings with a hot junction temperature of 100 °C. Considering the performance of woven thermoelectric cloths or fiber composites, relevant properties and dimensions of individual thermoelectric fibers are optimized.

Abstract Rapid economic growth and accelerating urbanization in the past three decades have accelerated the exhaustion of China’s mineral resources. China is the world’s largest consumer and importer of nickel resources; therefore, a growing domestic demand will increase China’s import dependence and in turn make it potentially vulnerable to supply shortages. One hundred years from 1950 to 2050 were examined for China’s nickel utilization. Identified domestic nickel resources can only sustain China’s industries until 2017, but nickel will reach peak utilization around the year of 2020–2022. Given the 5% annual increase in applications and the growing importation of minerals in China, the carrying duration of nickel resources until 2020 will require a nickel-recycling rate of more than 90%. To sustain China’s nickel utilization, future strategies should foster three solutions: maintaining a high level of imports, adjusting the landscape of nickel applications, and shifting from virgin mining of geological minerals to urban mining of anthropogenic resources.

Abstract Together with the evolution of the daylight introduction into building facade systems, energy consumption assessment becomes more and more crucial to evaluate the synthetic performance. Traditional method for evaluating the shading effect was not sufficient to consider the dynamic lighting and energy performance of window configurations due to the varying sun position. In this paper, the field measurements combined with lighting and energy simulations were carried out to explore the optimization of window configurations and characteristics. The shading factors for complex configurations were inspected by field measurements conducted within a lighting sphere, as well as a scaled physical model. It resulted that the complex configurations provided higher energy performance and enough light transmission. Furthermore a new method which integrated the shading factor and solar heat gain coefficient was proposed to investigate the dynamic shading effect of different window configurations. The following energy analysis on a full size building was conducted in e-Quest for energy consumption evaluation. It predicted the considerable potential energy conservation for windows with dynamic solar heat gain coefficient, which encourages the architects to introduce the novel independent design proposal for windows.

An anaerobic sequencing batch reactor (ASBR), seeded with a biomass inoculum that previously had not been exposed to the macrolide antimicrobial tylosin (mixture of Tylosin A, B, C, and D), was operated for 3 months with swine waste without Tylosin A and for 9 months with swine waste containing Tylosin A at an average concentration of 1.6 mg/L. When swine waste with tylosin was fed to the ASBR, methane production and volatile solids removal did not appear to be inhibited and a methane yield of 0.47 L methane per gram volatile solids fed to the ASBR was observed. Throughout the operating period, Tylosin A levels in ASBR biomass and effluent were below the detection limit of 0.01 mg/L. However, during the first 3 months of operation, the levels of macrolide-lincosamide-streptogramin B (MLSB)-resistant bacteria in the ASBR biomass increased substantially as determined by hybridizations with oligonucleotide probes designed to target MLSB-resistant bacteria. Since no Tylosin A was present in the swine waste during the initial 3 months, the presence of MLSB-resistant bacteria in the swine waste was likely the reason for the increase in resistance. Subsequently, the levels of MLSB-resistant bacteria in ASBR biomass stabilized with an average of 44.9% for the 9 months of operation with swine waste containing Tylosin A. The level of MLSB-resistant bacteria in the swine waste fed to the ASBR during this period averaged 18.0%. The results indicate that anaerobic treatment of a waste stream containing tylosin was effective (based on reactor performance) and that the level of resistant bacteria in the ASBR was substantially higher than in the waste stream fed to this system.

Abstract Governments and privately-held utilities will have to drastically reduce their carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. Such reductions will require transitioning electrical infrastructure to rely on cleaner fuels and power-generation technologies. Despite the myriad factors influencing both the process and eventual outcome of these transitions, it is typically transitions' cost and individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for them that dominate both strategic planning and political discourse. Studies used to calculate the public's WTP however often rely on vague policy options, ignore important social and environmental attributes, and fail to provide individuals means for engaging tradeoffs. Here we report on three studies that provided individuals multiple choice tasks for evaluating real-world portfolio options across key social and environmental attributes. Our results show that individuals placed high importance on minimizing costs, yet also consistently ranked strategies highest that reduced both greenhouse gas (GHG) and air particulate emissions, even when those portfolios require considerable cost increases. When provided an opportunity to construct their own portfolios, participants again constructed costly portfolios that significantly reduced both GHG emissions and air pollution. Using multiple choice tasks, we demonstrated individuals’ WTP for low-emission energy strategies to be higher than previous studies relying on contingent valuation suggest.

The field of heterogeneous photocatalysis has almost exclusively focused on semiconductor photocatalysts. Herein, we show that plasmonic metallic nanostructures represent a new family of photocatalysts. We demonstrate that these photocatalysts exhibit fundamentally different behaviour compared with semiconductors. First, we show that photocatalytic reaction rates on excited plasmonic metallic nanostructures exhibit a super-linear power law dependence on light intensity (rate ∝ intensity(n), with n > 1), at significantly lower intensity than required for super-linear behaviour on extended metal surfaces. We also demonstrate that, in sharp contrast to semiconductor photocatalysts, photocatalytic quantum efficiencies on plasmonic metallic nanostructures increase with light intensity and operating temperature. These unique characteristics of plasmonic metallic nanostructures suggest that this new family of photocatalysts could prove useful for many heterogeneous catalytic processes that cannot be activated using conventional thermal processes on metals or photocatalytic processes on semiconductors.

Although ethanol is frequently used in combination with other psychoactive drugs, the behavioral and pharmacological reasons for this form of polydrug abuse have not been well described.Rhesus monkeys with indwelling intravenous catheters produced intravenous injections of ethanol (50, 100, or 200 mg/kg/inj), flunitrazepam (0.001-0.03 mg/kg/inj), cocaine (0.01 or 0.03 mg/kg/inj), or combinations of ethanol and these drugs or gammahydroxybutyrate (GHB) (1.0 or 3.2 mg/kg/inj) by lever pressing according to a fixed-ratio schedule. The response requirement for each drug or drug combination was increased across sessions (10, 32, 100, 320, or 1,000). The dependent variables were rates of responding maintained by the drug or drug combination and the elasticity of drug demand when consumption was expressed as a function of price.Elasticity (P (max)) values for each drug varied among the monkeys but retained the same rank order for the monkeys, suggesting a fundamental difference in the animals' apparent sensitivities to the reinforcing effects of the drugs. Combining ethanol with the other drugs did not increase their reinforcing effectiveness. GHB (ineffective in previous studies) did not modify ethanol's reinforcing effects; demand functions for the combination of ethanol and flunitrazepam were slightly less elastic than for ethanol alone, but no different from that for flunitrazepam alone; adding ethanol to cocaine detracted from the reinforcing effectiveness of cocaine.The hypothesis that use of ethanol in combination with sedative and stimulant drugs is due to an ability of ethanol to enhance the reinforcing effects of these drugs is not supported.