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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.

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.

Earth observation (EO) data are useful tools to analyse geomorphological processes, among which slow-moving landslides triggered by rainfall. EO data are also used to evaluate climate change and to assess its impact on geomorphological processes and geo-hydrological phenomena. The latter is the topic of the Project OT4Clima (Innovative Earth Observation technologies to study Climate Change and its impact on the environment) joined by CNR-IRPI within a consortium that includes other CNR institutes, universities and private companies. The OT4CLIMA project moves from the awareness that the impacts of climate change on the environment need to be better observed, understood, and modelled, especially at a regional scale, in order to put in place appropriate and effective risk mitigation strategies. Within the project, the CNR-IRPI group works on the development of rigorous methods and procedures for evaluating the impact of climate and its change on landslides, in particular on those characterized by a slow cinematic, at a regional scale. The test site is represented by four catchments located in the Basilicata region, southern Italy, namely the basins of the Bradano, Basento, Agri, and Sinni rivers. Long-term rainfall series gathered from 22 rain gauges located in the four catchments are analysed to evaluate the presence of temporal trends. To this aim, non-parametric and statistical tests are applied to the series. Historical landslide information is gathered from the analysis of the IFFI (Inventario dei Fenomeni Franosi in Italia) database, the Idrogeo platform (https://idrogeo.isprambiente.it/app/) and the AVI (Aree Vulnerate in Italia) catalogue. Only some types of landslide movements are considered, namely rotational-translational slides, slow slides/flows, complex movements. Moreover, Copernicus Sentinel-1 images are employed to detect the spatial and temporal distribution of slow earth surface deformations. The obtained results are used for checking the completeness of the landslide inventories. More in detail, the deformation maps of the test site are obtained by means of the application of the SBAS (Small BAseline Subset) technique to three datasets of Sentinel-1 images: t146 ascending orbit and t51 and t124 descending orbits, for the period 2015-2020. Then, a comparative analysis of rainfall data with displacement series is carried out with the aim of identifying clusters of satellite measurements with homogeneous behaviour likely correlated to variations in the rainfall regime. In particular, only the points with a mean velocity in the observation higher than 0.1 cm/year are considered to be moving. Moreover, only the displacement series of points located in areas mapped as landslides - as for the historical inventories - and sited within the influence regions of each rain gauge in the study area are analysed. A 10-km circular buffer centred in the stations are used to define the influence region of each station. The displacement series are analysed and compared to the rainfall series to search for correlations and to evaluate the effects of climate drivers on slow moving landslides.

Devon County Council

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.