Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants have the potential to reduce the consumption of nonrenewable resources and greenhouse gas emissions in electricity production. In CSP systems, a field of heliostats focuses solar radiation on a central receiver, and energy is then transferred to a thermal power plant at high temperature. However,...
Waste heat driven ammonia/water Kalina cycles have shown promise for improving the efficiency of electricity production from low-temperature reservoirs (T < 150 °C). However, there has been limited application of these systems to utilize widely available, disperse, waste heat streams for smaller scale power production (1–10 kWe). Factors limiting increased deployment of these...
A novel thermal management approach is explored, which uses supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) as a working fluid to manage extreme heat fluxes in electronics cooling applications. In the pseudocritical region, sCO2 has extremely high volumetric thermal capacity, which can enable operation with low pumping requirements, and without the potential for...
Oregon's wine grape industry uses yield targets to achieve quality in Pinot Noir vineyards, and this practice has led to increases in cost of production. A multiapproach study was conducted to investigate how vineyard target yields are set, why yield thresholds exist, and who influences decisions related to vineyard target...
Delimiting species boundaries among closely related lineages often requires a range of independent data sets and analytical approaches. Similar to other organismal groups, robust species circumscriptions in fungi are increasingly investigated within an empirical framework. Here we attempt to delimit species boundaries in a closely related Glade of lichen-forming fungi...
Forest policymakers and managers have long sought ways to evaluate the capability of forest landscapes to jointly produce timber, habitat, and other ecosystem services in response to forest management. Currently, carbon is of particular interest as policies for increasing carbon storage on federal lands are being proposed. However, a challenge...
All ecosystems are subjected to chronic disturbances, such as harvest, pollution, and climate change. The capacity to forecast how species respond to such press perturbations is limited by our imprecise knowledge of pairwise species interaction strengths and the many direct and indirect pathways along which perturbations can propagate between species....
Thiamin diphosphate (ThDP), also known as vitamin B1, serves as an enzymatic cofactor in glucose metabolism, the Krebs cycle, and branched-chain amino acid biosynthesis in all living organisms. Unlike plants and microorganisms, humans are not able to synthesize ThDP de novo and must obtain it from their diet. Staple crops...
Coastal wetland plants are adapted to varying degrees of inundation. However, functional relationships between inundation and productivity are poorly characterized for most species. Determining species-specific tolerances to inundation is necessary to evaluate sea-level rise (SLR) effects on future marsh plant community composition, quantify organic matter inputs to marsh accretion, and...
Koi herpesvirus (KHV) is highly pathogenic to Cyprinus carpio. KHV can also become latent in recovered fish and reactivate from latency under stressful conditions. Understanding KHV latency is important for development of strategies against herpesvirus latent infection. Our previous studies found KHV ORF6 mRNA is detectable during latent infection. In...