Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) offer the possibilities to design solar cells with a large flexibility in shape, color, and transparency. DSC research groups have been established around the worl ...

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Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

In recent years, numerous large-scale seawater desalination plants have been built in water-stressed countries to augment available water resources, and construction of new desalination plants is expected to increase in the near future. Despite major advancements in desalination technologies, seawater desalination is still more energy intensive compared to conventional technologies for the treatment of fresh water. There are also concerns about the potential environmental impacts of large-scale seawater desalination plants. Here, we review the possible reductions in energy demand by state-of-the-art seawater desalination technologies, the potential role of advanced materials and innovative technologies in improving performance, and the sustainability of desalination as a technological solution to global water shortages.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/333/6043/712.full.pdf

The Future of Seawater Desalination: Energy, Technology, and the Environment

Despite continuing debate about the amyloid β‐protein (or Aβ hypothesis, new lines of evidence from laboratories and clinics worldwide support the concept that an imbalance between production and clearance of Aβ42 and related Aβ peptides is a very early, often initiating factor in Alzheimer9s disease (AD). Confirmation that presenilin is the catalytic site of γ‐secretase has provided a linchpin: all dominant mutations causing early‐onset AD occur either in the substrate (amyloid precursor protein, APP) or the protease (presenilin) of the reaction that generates Aβ. Duplication of the wild‐type APP gene in Down9s syndrome leads to Aβ deposits in the teens, followed by microgliosis, astrocytosis, and neurofibrillary tangles typical of AD. Apolipoprotein E4, which predisposes to AD in > 40% of cases, has been found to impair Aβ clearance from the brain. Soluble oligomers of Aβ42 isolated from AD patients9 brains can decrease synapse number, inhibit long‐term potentiation, and enhance long‐term synaptic depression in rodent hippocampus, and injecting them into healthy rats impairs memory. The human oligomers also induce hyperphosphorylation of tau at AD‐relevant epitopes and cause neuritic dystrophy in cultured neurons. Crossing human APP with human tau transgenic mice enhances tau‐positive neurotoxicity. In humans, new studies show that low cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Aβ42 and amyloid‐PET positivity precede other AD manifestations by many years. Most importantly, recent trials of three different Aβ antibodies (solanezumab, crenezumab, and aducanumab) have suggested a slowing of cognitive decline in post hoc analyses of mild AD subjects. Although many factors contribute to AD pathogenesis, Aβ dyshomeostasis has emerged as the most extensively validated and compelling therapeutic target.

https://www.embopress.org/doi/pdf/10.15252/emmm.201606210

The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease at 25 years

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Technical Paper Climate Change and Water draws together and evaluates the information in IPCC Assessment and Special Reports concerning the impacts of climate change on hydrological processes and regimes, and on freshwater resources – their availability, quality, use and management. It takes into account current and projected regional key vulnerabilities, prospects for adaptation, and the relationships between climate change mitigation and water. Its objectives are:

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Climate change and water.

Phenology, the study of annually recurring life cycle events such as the timing of migrations and flowering, can provide particularly sensitive indicators of climate change. Changes in phenology may be important to ecosystem function because the level of response to climate change may vary across functional groups and multiple trophic levels. The decoupling of phenological relationships will have important ramifications for trophic interactions, altering food-web structures and leading to eventual ecosystem-level changes. Temperate marine environments may be particularly vulnerable to these changes because the recruitment success of higher trophic levels is highly dependent on synchronization with pulsed planktonic production. Using long-term data of 66 plankton taxa during the period from 1958 to 2002, we investigated whether climate warming signals are emergent across all trophic levels and functional groups within an ecological community. Here we show that not only is the marine pelagic community responding to climate changes, but also that the level of response differs throughout the community and the seasonal cycle, leading to a mismatch between trophic levels and functional groups.

Impact of climate change on marine pelagic phenology and trophic mismatch.

Electricity generation provides 18,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year, around 40% of humanity's total energy use. In doing so it produces more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, the largest sectoral contribution of humanity's fossil-fuel derived emissions. Yet there is a wide range of technologies - from solar and wind to nuclear and geothermal - that can generate electricity without net carbon emissions from fuel. The easiest way to cut the carbon released by electricity generation is to increase efficiency. But there are limits to such gains, and there is the familiar paradox that greater efficiency can lead to greater consumption. So a global response to climate change must involve a move to carbon-free sources of electricity. This requires fresh thinking about the price of carbon, and in some cases new technologies; it also means new transmission systems and smarter grids. But above all, the various sources of carbon-free generation need to be scaled up to power an increasingly demanding world. In this special feature, Nature's News team looks at how much carbon-free energy might ultimately be available - and which sources make most sense.

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Energy alternatives: Electricity without carbon

Many researchers believe that quantitative metrics determine who gets hired and who gets promoted at their institutions. With an exclusive poll and interviews, Nature probes to what extent metrics are really used that way.

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Metrics: Do metrics matter?

C limate change may be hitting home. Rises in global average temperature are remote from most people's experience , but two studies in this week's Nature 1,2 conclude that climate warming is already causing extreme weather events that affect the lives of millions. The research directly links rising greenhouse-gas levels with the growing intensity of rain and snow in the Northern Hemisphere, and the increased risk of flooding in the United Kingdom. Insurers will take note, as will those developing policies for adapting to climate change. \" This has immense importance not just as a further justification for emissions reduction, but also for adaptation planning, \" says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate-policy researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the studies. There is no doubt that humans are altering the climate, but the implications for regional weather are less clear. No computer simulation can conclusively attribute a given snowstorm or flood to global warming. But with a combination of climate models, weather observations and a good dose of probability theory, scientists may be able to determine how climate warming changes the odds. An earlier study 3 , for example, found that global warming has at least doubled the likelihood of extreme events such as the 2003 European heatwave. More-localized weather extremes have been harder to attribute to climate change until now. \" Climate models have improved a lot since ten years ago, when we basically couldn't say anything about rainfall, \" says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate researcher at the University of Edin-burgh, UK. In the first of the latest studies 1 , Hegerl and her colleagues compared data from weather stations in the Northern Hemisphere with precipitation simulations from eight climate models (see page 378). \" We can now say with some confidence that the increased rainfall intensity in the latter half of the twentieth century cannot be explained by our estimates of internal climate variability, \" she says. The second study 2 links climate change to a specific event: damaging floods in 2000 in England and Wales. By running thousands of high-resolution seasonal forecast simulations with or without the effect of greenhouse gases, and his colleagues found that anthropogenic climate change may have almost doubled the risk of the extremely wet weather that caused the floods (see page 382). The rise in extreme precipitation in some Northern Hemisphere areas has been recognized for more than …

Increased flood risk linked to global warming

Like any other field, research on climate change has some fundamental gaps, although not the ones typically claimed by sceptics. Quirin Schiermeier takes a hard look at some of the biggest problem areas.

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The real holes in climate science

Climate change, growing populations and political concerns are prompting governments and investors from California to China to take a fresh look at desalination. Quirin Schiermeier wades in.

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Quirin Schiermeier

Papers

Energy alternatives: Electricity without carbon

Metrics: Do metrics matter?

Increased flood risk linked to global warming

The real holes in climate science

Water: Purification with a pinch of salt