Open-source software to help cities plant in pursuit of clean air
2021-07-08
(Press-News.org) Software to help towns and cities use street-planting to reduce citizens' exposure to air pollution has been developed by researchers at the University of Birmingham.
Street planting, or 'green infrastructure', is an essential part of the urban realm, but there is a misconception that plants remove or 'soak up' a lot of pollution. Instead, planting at this scale primarily serves to redistribute pollution by changing air currents within streets and beside open roads.
Because of this, not only the position and amount of planting within a street, but also the layout and orientation of that street, are critical to its impacts on local air quality.
The software - the Green Infrastructure for Roadside Air Quality or 'GI4RAQ' Platform - has been designed by experts in the University of Birmingham's Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) and School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, in partnership with practitioner organisations, including: Transport for London, Greater London Authority and Birmingham City Council. It is the result of three years' collaboration, funded principally through three Innovation grants from the Natural Environment Research Council.
Free to use and open-source, the software enables practitioners to estimate the changes in pollutant concentrations (throughout the cross-section of a street) resulting from different planting schemes. It focusses on key pollutants from road transport: NO2 (nitrogen dioxide) and PM2.5 (fine particulate matter). Its calculations draw on wind data from monitoring stations across the UK, and determine how background wind conditions interact with the local urban form and planting specified by the user.
The software's performance and underlying science are documented in a paper published last month in the open-access journal, Forests.
Lead researcher, Dr James Levine says: "In reducing our exposure to pollution from nearby vehicles, strategic planting can complement essential emission reductions in reducing health impacts. But it's not as simple as thinking that any planting will do good - if indiscriminate, it's just as likely to have a negative impact. There are many good reasons to invest in green infrastructure but, if planting in the name of improving air quality, we must ensure it delivers genuine benefits. By estimating the benefits at planning, we can ensure good schemes are robust to cost-cutting and fully realised."
Informed by their work with Dr Levine, Transport for London is currently exploring a potential 'healthy and resilient streets' scheme with the Greater London Authority. Dr Levine is also in discussion with The Mersey Forest and Liverpool City Council regarding a scheme in central Liverpool.
Paul Nolan OBE, Director of the Mersey Forest, commented: "The GI4RAQ Platform bridges the gap between academic researchers and organisations like The Mersey Forest, cutting through the often-mixed messages regarding the impacts of vegetation on urban air quality, in support of projects delivering genuine, lasting benefits."
INFORMATION:
The GI4RAQ team is led by Dr Levine and includes: doctoral student Ms Helen Pearce, who wrote the open-source air quality code (https://github.com/GI4RAQ/GI4RAQ-open); Prof Rob MacKenzie (Director of BIFoR) and Dr Xiaoming Cai; Tommy Morrison, Chris Thompson and Matt Sadler of Wild Ilk Design Studio, who developed the web interface; all with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council through grants, NE/S00940X/1, NE/S013814/1, NE/S00582X/1 and NE/S003487/1, and studentship grant, NE/R011265/1.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-07-08
Astronomers have designed and trained a computer program which can classify tens of thousands of galaxies in just a few seconds, a task that usually takes months to accomplish.
In research published today, astrophysicists from Australia have used machine learning to speed up a process that is often done manually by astronomers and citizen scientists around the world.
"Galaxies come in different shapes and sizes" said lead author Mitchell Cavanagh, a PhD candidate based at The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
"Classifying the shapes of galaxies is an important step in understanding their formation and evolution, and can even shed light on the nature of the Universe itself."
Mr Cavanagh said that ...
2021-07-08
Most common bone and joint (orthopaedic) procedures, such hip replacements and shoulder repair surgery, are not backed up by high quality evidence, mainly because of a lack of definitive trials, suggests an analysis of data published by The BMJ today.
Yet despite the lack of strong supporting evidence, some of these procedures are still recommended by national guidelines in certain situations, the findings show.
Musculoskeletal conditions affect around 1 in 4 UK adults and account for over 25% of all NHS surgical interventions at a cost of £4.76 billion each year.
National ...
2021-07-08
Muscle relaxant drugs are largely ineffective for low back pain, despite being widely prescribed for this condition, suggests an analysis of the latest evidence published by The BMJ today.
The findings show that muscle relaxants might reduce pain in the short term, but the effect is too small to be considered clinically meaningful, and there is an increased risk of side effects.
But the researchers stress that the certainty of evidence is low and say large trials are urgently needed to resolve uncertainties around the use of these drugs for back pain.
Low back pain is a global public health problem and muscle relaxants (a broad class of drugs that include ...
2021-07-08
Mandatory covid-19 vaccination for care home workers is unnecessary, disproportionate and misguided, warn experts
And is based on unreliable data
In The BMJ today, experts argue that mandatory vaccination is "unnecessary, disproportionate, and misguided."
The government decision to remove the right of care home staff in England to choose whether or not to be vaccinated against covid-19 is a profound departure from public health norms. The intended next step is a rapid and massive expansion of compulsory vaccination to legally require covid-19 and flu vaccination of all frontline health and social care workers, subject to consultation.
But Lydia Hayes, Professor of Law at Kent ...
2021-07-08
An estimated 8.4 billion people could be at risk from malaria and dengue by the end of the century if emissions keep rising at current levels, according to a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health.
The research team estimates that this worst-case scenario would mean the population at risk of the diseases might increase by up to 4.7 additional billion people (relative to the period 1970-1999), particularly in lowlands and urban areas, if temperatures rise by about 3.7°C 1 by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels.
The study was led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) with partners from Umeå University, Sweden; Abdus Salam ...
2021-07-08
LOS ANGELES - A new prognostic tool developed by researchers from the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and five other institutions helps predict which men with advanced metastatic prostate cancer will respond favorably to a novel targeted therapy.
The tool, described in a study published today in Lancet Oncology, analyzes a wide spectrum of imaging and clinical data and is intended to assist physicians considering treating patients with Lutetium-177 prostate-specific membrane antigen, or LuPSMA.
LuPSMA, which binds to PSMA proteins and delivers targeted radiation to prostate cancer tissue, offers a new option to men with PSMA-positive metastatic cancer that is castration-resistant, meaning it has stopped ...
2021-07-07
The protein actin is ubiquitous and essential for life. In mammals, every cell expresses two of its forms, beta-actin and gamma-nonmuscle-actin. Despite having distinct roles, the two forms are nearly identical, sharing 99% of their amino acid sequence.
Research by Anna Kashina of Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and colleagues has shown that, contrary to scientific dogma, it's not the slight differences in amino acid sequence that govern these proteins' discrete functions in the cell. Rather, their nucleotide sequences--the "letters" that make up their DNA coding sequence, which differ by roughly 13% between the two forms--are responsible for their individual roles in organisms' ...
2021-07-07
Researchers have produced vaccine-like immune responses to a dangerous bacterium by colonizing 26 healthy volunteers with a related, but harmless, commensal bacterial species. The first-in-human, controlled infection study showed the strategy was safe, as no side effects were reported and the volunteers didn't transmit the commensal bacteria to bedroom-sharers over the 90-day study. Neisseria lactamica is a member of the microbiome that usually resides in the upper airways of children but can also safely colonize the airways of adults. Some researchers theorize that these bacteria ...
2021-07-07
By 2050, faster adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and faster generation of renewable energy will result in 99% less fossil fuel consumed and 93% less CO2 emissions from passenger and freight vehicles on O?ahu. That's under the most ambitious scenario in an article published in World Electric Vehicle Journal, by University of Hawai?i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) faculty member Katherine McKenzie.
McKenzie, based at the Hawai?i Natural Energy Institute in SOEST, created mathematical models of four scenarios based on projections for the switch to electric passenger and freight ...
2021-07-07
Five years ago, researchers at Northwestern University made international headlines when they discovered that human eggs, when fertilized by sperm, release billions of zinc ions, dubbed "zinc sparks."
Now, Northwestern has teamed up with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Michigan State University (MSU) to reveal that these same sparks fly from highly specialized metal-loaded compartments at the egg surface when frog eggs are fertilized. This means that the early chemistry of conception has evolutionary roots going back at least 300 million years, to the last common ancestor between frogs and people.
"This work may help inform our understanding of the interplay of dietary zinc status and human fertility." -- Thomas O'Halloran, professor, Michigan State ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Open-source software to help cities plant in pursuit of clean air
