Addressing global sustainability challenges associated with natural resource security and climate change requires new perspective on waste and resource management. Sustainability-driven business model innovations have a crucial role in transforming current, unsustainable, production and consumption patterns by slowing product replacement and closing material cycles. This study identifies best prac

To highlight the thermal management of the cooling system in an advanced engine, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of turbulent hydrocarbon fuel flow in a rectangular channel are numerically explored in detail. The severe condition of deteriorated behavior is investigated in the heat transfer process. Considering buoyancy force effects, a three-dimensional numerical model is established a

Relocating Beijing's manufacturing industry, a key measure in the strategy for decentralizing Beijing's non-capital functions, may inadvertently increase environmental pressures in the receiving cities. This study develops a quantitative method to comprehensively identify the environmental effects caused by regional industrial relocations. First, a set of relocated industries is selected by consid

Presents theory, algorithms and validation results for system identification of continuous-time state-space models from finite input-output sample sequences. The algorithms developed are methods of subspace model identification and stochastic realization adapted to the continuous-time context. The resulting model can be decomposed into an input-output model and a stochastic innovations model. Usin

This paper presents theory and algorithms for validation in system identification of state-space models from finite input-output sequences in a subspace model identification framework. Similar to the case of prediction-error identification, it is shown that the resulting model can be decomposed into an input-output model and a stochastic innovations model. Using the Riccati equation, we have desig

In agro-ecosystems, environmental monitoring is fundamental to detect and survey changes related to land use change and management practices. Butterflies and moths have often been suggested as suitable indicators for monitoring environmental effects on biodiversity in farmlands. Here, we estimated the required sample size and monitoring effort necessary to run a Lepidoptera survey in European farm

Background: Inadequate stores or intakes of essential minerals in pregnancy, or too high exposure to both toxic and essential elements, can have adverse effects on mother and child. The main aims of this study were to 1) describe the concentrations and patterns of essential and toxic elements measured in maternal whole blood during pregnancy; 2) identify dietary, lifestyle and sociodemographic det

The response of a position-sensitive Li-glass scintillator detector to α-particles from a collimated 241 Am source scanned across the face of the detector has been measured. Scintillation light was read out by an 8 × 8 pixel multi-anode photomultiplier and the signal amplitude for each pixel has been recorded for every position on a scan. The pixel signal is strongly dependent on position and in

An important resource partitioning strategy allowing dung beetles to coexist in the same habitat, while utilising the same food, is species’ separation of activity times. After establishing the diel activity period of three closely related, co-occurring dung beetles, we examined their eye and wing morphology. Absolute and relative eye size, and facet size were greater in the nocturnal Escarabaeus

Background: Many translational MR biomarkers derive from measurements of the water proton longitudinal relaxation rate R 1 , but evidence for between-site reproducibility of R 1 in small-animal MRI is lacking. Objective: To assess R 1 repeatability and multi-site reproducibility in phantoms for preclinical MRI. Methods: R 1 was measured by saturation recovery in 2% agarose phantoms with five