There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

The planetary boundaries framework defines a safe operating space for humanity based on the intrinsic biophysical processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system. Here, we revise and update the planetary boundary framework, with a focus on the underpinning biophysical science, based on targeted input from expert research communities and on more general scientific advances over the past 5 years. Several of the boundaries now have a two-tier approach, reflecting the importance of cross-scale interactions and the regional-level heterogeneity of the processes that underpin the boundaries. Two core boundaries—climate change and biosphere integrity—have been identified, each of which has the potential on its own to drive the Earth system into a new state should they be substantially and persistently transgressed.

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Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet

THE major active ingredient of marijuana, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabi-nol (Δ9-THC), has been used as a psychoactive agent for thousands of years. Marijuana, and Δ9-THC, also exert a wide range of other effects including analgesia, anti-inflammation, immunosuppression, anticonvulsion, alleviation of intraocular pressure in glaucoma, and attenuation of vomiting1. The clinical application of cannabinoids has, however, been limited by their psychoactive effects, and this has led to interest in the biochemical bases of their action. Progress stemmed initially from the synthesis of potent derivatives of δ9-THC4,5, and more recently from the cloning of a gene encoding a G-protein-coupled receptor for cannabinoids6. This receptor is expressed in the brain but not in the periphery, except for a low level in testes. It has been proposed that the non-psychoactive effects of cannabinoids are either mediated centrally or through direct interaction with other, non-receptor proteins1,7,8. Here we report the cloning of a receptor for cannabinoids that is not expressed in the brain but rather in macrophages in the marginal zone of spleen.

Molecular characterization of a peripheral receptor for cannabinoids

This paper contrasts the natural and anthropogenic controls on the conversion of unreactive N2 to more reactive forms of nitrogen (Nr). A variety of data sets are used to construct global N budgets for 1860 and the early 1990s and to make projections for the global N budget in 2050. Regional N budgets for Asia, North America, and other major regions for the early 1990s, as well as the marine N budget, are presented to highlight the dominant fluxes of nitrogen in each region. Important findings are that human activities increasingly dominate the N budget at the global and at most regional scales, the terrestrial and open ocean N budgets are essentially dis- connected, and the fixed forms of N are accumulating in most environmental reservoirs. The largest uncertainties in our understanding of the N budget at most scales are the rates of natural biological nitrogen fixation, the amount of Nr storage in most environmental reservoirs, and the production rates of N2 by denitrification.

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Nitrogen cycles: past, present, and future

Relationships between wind speed and gas transfer, combined with knowledge of the partial pressure difference of CO2 across the air-sea interface are frequently used to determine the CO2 flux between the ocean and the atmosphere. Little attention has been paid to the influence of variability in wind speed on the calculated gas transfer velocities and the possibility of chemical enhancement of CO2 exchange at low wind speeds over the ocean. The effect of these parameters is illustrated using a quadratic dependence of gas exchange on wind speed which is fit through gas transfer velocities over the ocean determined by the natural-14C disequilibrium and the bomb-14C inventory methods. Some of the variability between different data sets can be accounted for by the suggested mechanisms, but much of the variation appears due to other causes. Possible causes for the large difference between two frequently used relationships between gas transfer and wind speed are discussed. To determine fluxes of gases other than CO2 across the air-water interface, the relevant expressions for gas transfer, and the temperature and salinity dependence of the Schmidt number and solubility of several gases of environmental interest are included in an appendix.

Relationship between wind speed and gas exchange over the ocean

It has been proposed that hydrogen bonding plays a role in promoting the electrospinnability of some materials. In this work, the significance of non-covalent interactions in the electrospinnability of aqueous sugar solutions (i.e. mono- and disaccharide) was investigated as a function of carbohydrate concentration. The electrospinnability of concentrated aqueous solutions of glucose, fructose and sucrose was studied by physicochemical and rheological characterization methods, and by subsequently examining the resulting morphology via scanning electron microscopy. The results on the electrospinning of concentrated saccharide solutions indicated the significance of non-covalent interactions on the electrospinning of these systems. Electrospinnability models based on critical concentration and visco-elasto capillary theories were compared with the experimental results. It is shown that visco-elasto capillary theory has the closest correlation with the experimental data. The electrospinnability of highly concentrated saccharide solutions appears to be directly related to the density and intermolecular bonding capacity of the solution.

The electrospinnability of visco-elastic sugar solutions

The origins of us

A new detector on the HERA positron-proton collider in Hamburg, Germany, has confirmed a long-standing puzzle about the toplike spin of protons and neutrons—and physicists are delighted. The puzzle is that the quarks that make up protons and neutrons don9t contribute nearly enough spin to explain the total. By confirming the shortfall, the new detector, called HERMES, has shown that its sophisticated spin-probing technology is working properly—and may eventually be able to track down the missing spin.

Subatomic Spin Still in Crisis

In this work, we use realistic isopycnal velocities with a 3‐D eddy diffusivity to advect and diffuse a tracer in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, beginning in the Southeast Pacific and progressing through Drake Passage. We prescribe a diapycnal diffusivity which takes one value in the SE Pacific west of 67°W and another value in Drake Passage east of that longitude, and optimize the diffusivities using a cost function to give a best fit to experimental data from the DIMES (Diapycnal and Isopycnal Mixing Experiment in the Southern Ocean) tracer, released near the boundary between the Upper and Lower Circumpolar Deep Water. We find that diapycnal diffusivity is enhanced 20‐fold in Drake Passage compared with the SE Pacific, consistent with previous estimates obtained using a simpler advection‐diffusion model with constant, but different, zonal velocities east and west of 67°W. Our result shows that diapycnal mixing in the ACC plays a significant role in transferring buoyancy within the Meridional Overturning Circulation.

/pdf/diapycnal-mixing-in-the-southern-ocean-diagnosed-using-the-5h9b0xe8j0.pdf

Andrew J. Watson

Papers

The electrospinnability of visco-elastic sugar solutions

The origins of us

Subatomic Spin Still in Crisis

Diapycnal mixing in the Southern Ocean diagnosed using the DIMES Tracer and Realistic Velocity Fields

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