Brazil's economic strategy has shifted hesitatingly during the last several decades from one of producer protection to trade competitiveness. Exploiting the variations these shifts have afforded, we use a sequence of decennial agricultural censuses to examine Brazilian policy implications for agricultural competitiveness and efficiency. Total factor productivity is decomposed into...
Effective storage and release of low-to-moderate temperature thermal energy (e.g. solar thermal or geothermal) could be transformational for applications such as space heating/cooling, domestic hot water, or off-grid cooking. Good candidates for thermal energy storage in this temperature range include latent heat storage (LHS) systems and thermochemical energy storage (TCES)...
A case study of new particle formation in the region downwind of a mesoscale convective system stretching across much of the central United States is presented. Airborne measurements were made of condensation nuclei (CN), cloud particle surface area, water vapor, and other gases. CN concentrations were greatly enhanced above and...
Managing multiple ecosystem services (ESs) across landscapes presents a central challenge for ecosystem-based management, because services often exhibit spatiotemporal variation and weak associations with co-occurring ESs. Further focus on the mechanistic relationships among ESs and their underlying biophysical processes provides greater insight into the causes of variation and covariation among...
A temperature spectrum if heterogeneous freezing nuclei concentrations in continental air in the upper troposphere was determined based on airborne measurements. Numerical model simulations incorporating ice formation by heterogeneous and homogeneous freezing of deliquesced soluble aerosol particles were performed to investigate the effect of the heterogeneous freezing nuclei were predicted...
Broadband absorption spectroscopy, by way of FTIR, was used to investigate the vapor cloud of a single millimeter sized liquid droplet suspended by a syringe as it evaporates at standard conditions. Single beam data were collected every 8 seconds resulting in a time-resolved record. Species concentrations were tracked using their...
Vegetation carbon uptake and respiration constitute the largest carbon cycle of the planet with an annual turnover
in the order of 120 GT. Currently, neither ecosystem carbon uptake (through photosynthesis) nor ecosystem
carbon release (through respiration) can be measured directly during the daytime. Instead, flux-tower measurements
rely on nighttime respiration...
Nitrobacter hamburgensis X14 is a facultative lithoautotroph that conserves energy from the
oxidation of nitrite (NO
2 ) and fixes carbon dioxide (CO2) as its sole source of carbon. The
availability of the N. hamburgensis X14 genome sequence initiated a re-examination of its
mixotrophic and organotrophic potential, as genes encoding...
Parasites and pathogens influence the size and stability of wildlife populations, yet many population models ignore
the population-level effects of pathogens. Standard survival analysis methods (e.g., accelerated failure time models)
are used to assess how survival rates are influenced by disease. However, they assume that each individual is equally
susceptible...
The present article establishes connections between the structure of the deterministic Navier-Stokes equations and the structure of (similarity) equations that govern self-similar solutions as expected values of certain naturally associated stochastic cascades. A principle result is that explosion criteria for the stochastic cascades involved in the probabilistic representations of solutions...