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Abstracts The Indian summer monsoon (ISM) precipitation pattern over Indian subcontinent is looked through various high resolution speleothem oxygen (δ18O) isotope records from Mid to Late Holocene. The six cave locations distributed from central to northern India describing regional climatic conditions due to stalagmite deposition are considered. The stalagmite deposition reflects precipitation patterns by temporal variations of δ18O values. Oxygen isotope values reflect cumulative precipitation that is basically interpreted by averaged latitudinal site of inter tropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Under the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project Phase III (PMIP3) simulation, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Mk3L version 1.0 – Part 2 (CSIRO-Mk3L-1-2) model output shows ITCZ movement from Bay of Bengal (BoB) to Arabian Sea (AS) during Mid to Late Holocene which resulted due to solar insolation changes. It reflects precipitation shift from BoB to AS as well as to core monsoon zone (CMZ) to the western Himalayas. The past millennium epoch, which consists little ice age (LIA) and middle warm period (MWP), shows large variations in 850 hPa geopotential height leading to high anomalous precipitation variability all over India during ISM. The high fluctuation in δ18O values during Mid Holocene over northern India led to drought conditions due to which Indus valley civilization vanished. The present study shows that the Himalayas received higher precipitation during late Holocene. That is basically governed by western disturbances (WD) as well as ISM. Present study summarizes that the mean annual precipitation cycle for entire epoch was roughly similar, but spatial distribution of precipitation during various epoch was quite divergent from Mid to Late Holocene. The onset of ISM was also similar but, withdrawal was comparatively unalike. Wherever, peaks of seasonal precipitation were alike over Indian subcontinent region, spatial distribution of precipitation were unlike.

The present study explored the synthesis of Kaolin-nano scale zero-valent iron composite (K-nZVI) by using chemical reduction method. Sorption characteristics of the K-nZVI for the removal of Cu(II) ions was studied in batch conditions. The physical and chemical structure of the K-nZVI composite was characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-XRF), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller studies (BET). The effect of pH, the initial metal ion concentration, and contact time on adsorption of Cu(II) onto K-nZVI was investigated. The K-nZVI exhibited good sorption performances over the initial pH range from 2.5 to 6.5. The kinetics data was studied by applying two sorption kinetic models (Pseudo-first and Pseudo-second-order) equations. The pseudo-second-order model was relatively suitable for describing the adsorption process. The equilibrium adsorption data is well fitted to Langmuir adsorption models. The maximum adsorption capacities of K-nZVI sorbent as obtained from Langmuir adsorption isotherm is found to be 178–200 mg g−1 for Cu(II). Sorption isotherm models (Langmuir and Freundlich) were applied to the experimental data. The adsorption kinetics was well represented by the pseudo second order rate equation, and the adsorption isotherms were better fitted by the Langmuir equation. The thermodynamic studies showed that the adsorption reaction of Cu(II) is endothermic processes. TheK-nVZI having number of features including easy preparation, environmentally friendly nature, low-cost and good sorption performance enable K-nZVI application in industrial purpose specifically in the field of industrial water treatment.

International audience; Magnitudes of differential stress in the lithosphere, especially in the crust, are still disputed. Earthquake-based stress drop estimates indicate median values ca. 180 MPa, corresponding to a friction angle of ca. 10° to maintain the topographic relief between lowland and plateau for >10 Ma. The relative contribution of crustal strength to total lithospheric strength varies considerably laterally. In the region between lowland and plateau and inside the plateau the depth-integrated crustal strength is approximately equal to the depth-integrated strength of the mantle lithosphere. Simple analytical formulae predicting the lateral variation of depth-integrated stresses agree with numerically calculated stress fields, which show both the accuracy of the numerical results and the applicability of simple, rheology-independent, analytical predictions to highly variable, rheology-dependent stress fields. Our results indicate that (1) crustal strength can be locally equal to mantle lithosphere strength and that (2) crustal stresses must be at least one order of magnitude larger than median stress drops in order to support the plateau relief over a duration of ca. 10 Ma.

Hydropower projects are site specific which require huge investment and have long gestation periods. These characteristics expose hydropower projects to various uncertainties and risks such as economic, environmental, social, geological, regulatory, political, technological, financial, climate, natural, and safety. These risk factors, if not managed in time, lead to schedule and cost overruns which ultimately cause delays in the availability of power that too at a higher cost and in extreme cases lead to project failures. Sustainability has also become a critical and unavoidable issue in hydropower development due to associated environmental and social impacts. Sustainable development is related to techno-economic development along with preserving the environment. Hence, to assure this equity and manage the critical risks more efficiently, there arises a strong need for comprehensive risk management in hydropower projects. This paper presents a systematic review of risk management in hydropower projects with a specific focus on sustainable development. The paper discusses various risk assessment techniques and recommends sensitivity analysis as a primary method to evaluate the significant risk factors. The construction phase of hydropower projects is identified as the most critical phase associated with uncertainties and involves considerable cost. Thus, the review highlights the need for incorporation of risk analysis in the cost estimation process and the provision for finance with sufficient margin on the ex-ante base cost to account for uncertainties, especially for developing countries. For future research, the use of fuzzy hybridized with artificial neural network and genetic algorithm is suggested for risk assessment of hydropower projects.

This study uses integrated hydrometeorological simulations over the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACT) River Basin in the southeastern United States to understand the impact of climate change on probable maximum precipitation.

2016 in the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration with the IPAT model, and empirically explored the spatial structure pattern and association effect of CO2 across the area leveraged by the social network analysis. The findings revealed the following: (1) The spatial structure of CO2 emission in the area is a complex network pattern, and in the sample period, the CO2 emission association relations increased steadily and the network stabilization remains strengthened Urban agglomeration, an established urban spatial pattern, contributes to the spatial association and dependence of city-level CO2 emission distribution while boosting regional economic growth. Exploring this spatial association and dependence is conducive to the implementation of effective and coordinated policies for regional level CO2 reduction. This study calculated CO2 emissions from 2005&ndash (2) the centrality of the cities in this area can be categorized into three classes: Chengdu and Chongqing are defined as the first class, the second class covers Deyang, Mianyang, Yibin, and Nanchong, and the third class includes Zigong, Suining, Meishan, and Guangan&mdash and (4) the higher density of the global network of CO2 emission considerably reduces regional emission intensity and narrows the differences among regions. Individual networks with higher centrality are also found to have lower emission intensity. (3) the network is divided into four subgroups: the area around Chengdu, south Sichuan, northeast Sichuan, and west Chongqing where the spillover effect of CO2 is greatest the number of cities in this class is on the rise

Melatonin (Mel), a powerful antioxidant that has the ability to regulate physiological and biochemical processes in plants under abiotic stresses. However, its roles in pesticide detoxification is poorly understood. Herein, selecting leaf spraying insecticide imidacloprid (IMD) as the model, we demonstrated the detoxification mechanism underlying root pretreatment of Mel on IMD in cucumber. IMD treatment affected the primary light conversion efficiency of photosystem II (Fv/Fm), reduced the quantum yield, and increased hydrogen peroxide and superoxide anions contents as well as the levels of membrane lipid peroxidation, indicating that excessive IMD treatment induces oxidative stress. Nonetheless, by increasing the appropriate levels of exogenous Mel, the photosynthesis of cucumber under IMD treatment reached the control levels, effectively removing reactive oxygen species. Furthermore, the content and ratio of ascorbate (AsA) and glutathione (GSH) were decreased under IMD treatment; Mel treatment enhanced the AsA/DHA and GSH/GSSG ratios, as well as the activities of MDHAR, DHAR and GR, suggesting that Mel could alleviate oxidative stress of cucumber treated with IMD by regulating the ascorbic acid-glutathione cycle. Importantly, IMD degradation rate and glutathione S-transferase (GST) activity increased after Mel treatment. The levels of transcripts encoding antioxidant enzymes GPX and GST (GST1,2 and 3) were also increased, indicating that Mel accelerated IMD degradation. These results suggest that Mel plays an important role in the detoxification of IMD by promoting GST activity and transcription and the AsA-GSH cycle, thus providing an approach for plants to reduce IMD residue through the plant's own detoxification mechanism.

and (2) improvement and scale-up of the enhanced screening tool, in close collaboration with the research partners. In addition to enabling a better understanding about their own internal processes and activities, the evaluation of the potential of 108 SMEs for eco-innovation provided them with detailed insights about how to reach the potential benefits with industrial symbiosis and green business models. Differently from the identified existing tools, the screening tool proposed in this research aims at supporting companies to understand what their potential for eco-innovation is, combining wider eco-innovation and industrial symbiosis opportunities and green business models, supplemented with a readiness evaluation to explore the existing potential. Despite the high business, innovation and sustainability potential linked with eco-innovation and industrial symbiosis, limited implementation can be observed in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In order to enhance the implementation of these concepts in SMEs, the main goal of this paper is to propose a screening tool to identify and evaluate SMEs&rsquo potential for eco-innovation, with a special focus on industrial symbiosis and green business models aspects. In order to accomplish this goal, an action research was developed in two cycles: (1) development and testing of the screening prototype

Transfer learning facilitates the training of task-specific classifiers using pre-trained models as feature extractors. We present a family of transferable adversarial attacks against such classifiers, generated without access to the classification head; we call these headless attacks. We first demonstrate successful transfer attacks against a victim network using only its feature extractor. This motivates the introduction of a label-blind adversarial attack. This transfer attack method does not require any information about the class-label space of the victim. Our attack lowers the accuracy of a ResNet18 trained on CIFAR10 by over 40%. ICASSP 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) ISBN:978-1-5090-6632-2 ISBN:978-1-5090-6631-5

Since its discovery in 2008, the Andromeda galaxy nova M31N 2008-12a has been observed in eruption every single year. This unprecedented frequency indicates an extreme object, with a massive white dwarf and a high accretion rate, which is the most promising candidate for the single-degenerate progenitor of a type-Ia supernova known to date. The previous three eruptions of M31N 2008-12a have displayed remarkably homogeneous multi-wavelength properties: (i) From a faint peak, the optical light curve declined rapidly by two magnitudes in less than two days; (ii) Early spectra showed initial high velocities that slowed down significantly within days and displayed clear He/N lines throughout; (iii) The supersoft X-ray source (SSS) phase of the nova began extremely early, six days after eruption, and only lasted for about two weeks. In contrast, the peculiar 2016 eruption was clearly different. Here we report (i) the considerable delay in the 2016 eruption date, (ii) the significantly shorter SSS phase, and (iii) the brighter optical peak magnitude (with a hitherto unobserved cusp shape). Early theoretical models suggest that these three different effects can be consistently understood as caused by a lower quiescence mass-accretion rate. The corresponding higher ignition mass caused a brighter peak in the free-free emission model. The less-massive accretion disk experienced greater disruption, consequently delaying re-establishment of effective accretion. Without the early refueling, the SSS phase was shortened. Observing the next few eruptions will determine whether the properties of the 2016 outburst make it a genuine outlier in the evolution of M31N 2008-12a. 42 pages (28 pages main paper + appendix), 16 figures, 10 tables; accepted for publication in ApJ