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A report about NOAA's budget for the year 2012. NOAA aims to detect changes in the earth's environment and protect ocean and coastal ecosystems and resources.

Available online 13 October 2023 ; Rising demand for protein-rich foods can impact N₂O emissions from croplands. Recent research has pointed to the role of modified plant vasculature in grain protein increase. Here we highlight how discovering the mechanistic role of plant vasculature in protein improvement and nitrogen-use efficiency could reduce global N₂O emissions. ; Luqman B. Safdar, Ian D. Fisk, and M. John Foulkes

The desire to reduce fuel consumption and gas emissions, along with increasing demands on electrical energy is driving the evolution of vehicle power system architectures well beyond the conventional single alternator and battery. Amongst the different power system architectures available, are mild-hybrid electric architectures. Such architectures may offer flexibility in balancing the trade-offs associated with minimising fuel consumption, and greater capacity to meet electric energy demands. They allow for a wide range of energy management strategies to be investigated. Such strategies are able to accommodate for the need to reduce fuel consumption, undesirable gas emissions, and the need to meet the increased dependence on electrical energy. The strategies can be implemented by vehicle power management systems running energy management algorithms. Such systems are becoming more common in commercial vehicles, however, they are not commonly found in current military vehicles. This thesis focusses on evaluating the impacts caused to vehicle acceleration, fuel consumption, the time to fully charge/discharge the vehicle battery pack, and the electrical conversion efficiency, when introducing energy management strategies into a baseline mild-hybrid electric combat vehicle under different military stationary and moving scenarios. The scenarios were selected because current vehicle manufacturers and academia have primarily focussed on investigating energy management strategies in urban environments. In comparison, a study involving military scenarios allows a new application domain to be investigated. The thesis describes the mild-hybrid electric combat vehicle baseline, and presents the results of comparing the baseline against one that has been extended to include additional energy management strategies under different military scenarios. ; Thesis (MPhil) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2018

The world population is expected to reach an estimated 9.2 billion by 2050. Therefore, food production globally has to increase by 70% in order to feed the world, while total arable land, which has reached its maximal utilization, may even decrease. Moreover, climate change adds yet another challenge to global food security. In order to feed the world in 2050, biotechnological advances in modern agriculture are essential. Plant genetic engineering, which has created a new wave of global crop production after the first green revolution, will continue to play an important role in modern agriculture to meet these challenges. Plastid genetic engineering, with several unique advantages including transgene containment, has made significant progress in the last two decades in various biotechnology applications including development of crops with high levels of resistance to insects, bacterial, fungal and viral diseases, different types of herbicides, drought, salt and cold tolerance, cytoplasmic male sterility, metabolic engineering, phytoremediation of toxic metals and production of many vaccine antigens, biopharmaceuticals and biofuels. However, useful traits should be engineered via chloroplast genomes of several major crops. This review provides insight into the current state of the art of plastid engineering in relation to agricultural production, especially for engineering agronomic traits. Understanding the bottleneck of this technology and challenges for improvement of major crops in a changing climate are discussed.

The effect of polar solvents and polar cosolvent mixtures on the transport properties of benzocaine in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) was studied. Methanol, ethanol, n-propanol, and n-butanol, as well as aqueous cosolvent mixtures of each n-alkanol, were used as vehicles for benzocaine. A constant activity gradient was maintained in all diffusion studies, with the membrane exposed to saturated donor suspensions of drug, and sink conditions maintained in the receiver. In spite of the constant activity gradient, steady-state benzocaine flux was substantially enhanced with increasing n-alkanol volume fraction and reached a maximum for the pure n-alkanol in each case. At any given composition, the degree of benzocaine flux enhancement generally increased with n-alkanol carbon number. In terms of the appropriate Fick's first law expression for this system, these observations were attributed to simultaneous changes in benzocaine concentration within the PDMS membrane, the diffusion coefficient of benzocaine in PDMS, fillerless membrane volume fraction, tortuosity, and the membrane thickness. These parameters were in turn correlated with the cosolvent composition in contact with the membrane. Both membrane solubility and diffusion coefficient were found to increase substantially, but decreases in tortuosity and increases in fillerless membrane volume fraction and membrane thickness were minor.

Shipping list no.: 88-266-P. ; Distributed to some depository llibraries in microfiche. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

Separate abstracts have been prepared for 44 individual presentations. (ACR)

Calculational methods and results are discussed for the coupled energy and momentum equations of turbulent natural circulation flow and low Prandtl number forced convection flow. The objective of this paper is to develop a calculational method for the study of the thermal-hydraulic behavior of coolant flowing in a liquid metal fast breeder reactor channel under natural circulation conditions. The two-equation turbulence model is used to evaluate the turbulent momentum transport property. Because the analogy between momentum transfer and heat transfer does not generally hold for low Prandtl number fluid and natural circulation flow conditions, the turbulent thermal conductivity is calculated independently using equations similar to the two-equation turbulence model. The numerical technique used in the calculation is the finite element method.