Search

This paper reports two experiments using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to investigate whether word-level lexical stress involves the left superior temporal gyrus (STG) using a grammar classification task designed to elicit a typicality effect. Experiment 1 used text presented stimuli and, although was not able to elicit a typicality effect, found response times were significantly slower in the no TMS condition compared to when the, control, right PAR region was downregulated. In Experiment 2, speech was presented instead of text and accuracy and response times were similar across all three conditions. A lexical decision control task found evidence, from response time analysis, that the left STG and the right PAR were involved in word and nonword judgments. The discussion explores the findings relative to lexical stress and the role of cortical regions in word and response processing.

The rapid development of mobile phone technology has revolutionized our daily lives. The emerging “Internet of Things” allows the connection, monitoring, and operation of physical objects via embedded sensors, providing real-time data which can be used to inform decision-making or improve performance. This concept has contributed to the widespread adoption of wearable “smart” devices for health-care management and fitness tracking purposes. The miniaturization of wearable technology has great promise for use in the continuous monitoring of patient health outside the clinic, thus massively disrupting health-care delivery. Electrospinning (ES) permits the manufacture of objects with small overall footprints and nanoscale features. Nanomaterials fabricated by ES have a diverse range of properties, and the technique has significant potential for the production of portable sensors. This chapter reviews the research performed to date into the construction of sensors using ES, and explore their applications in the health-care setting.

CO2 separated from natural gas produced at the Sleipner and Gudrun fields is being injected into the Utsira Sand, with around 18 million tons currently stored. Time-lapse 3D seismics have been deployed to monitor development of the CO2 plume. The 2010 seismic survey resolved, for the first time in 3D, the topmost CO2 layer into distinct reflections from its top and base. Seismic velocity is diagnostic of CO2 layer properties and a forensic interpretative approach is adopted to determine spatial velocity variation in the topmost CO2 layer. Velocity is obtained by equating absolute layer thickness, derived by subtracting a constructed flat CO2 – water contact from the topographical relief of the reservoir top, to the temporal separation of the layer top and base reflections, with appropriate correction for wavelet interference effects. Layer velocities show a systematic and robust spatial variation between a northern area with a mean velocity of 1371 ± 122 ms−1 and a central area with a much higher mean velocity of 1638 ± 103 ms−1. Recent fluid flow simulations of the topmost CO2 layer have shown that incorporating a high permeability channel in the model reservoir significantly improves the history-match. This high permeability channel corresponds remarkably closely to the low seismic velocities mapped in the northern area, with higher layer velocities of the central area interpreted as more argillaceous, less permeable overbank deposits. The new velocity analysis therefore provides independent support for including deterministic permeability heterogeneity in predictive fluid flow modelling of Sleipner.

The use of water production as a pressure mitigation tool in the context of CO2 storage is widely studied but the impact it might have on the migration behaviour of a buoyant CO2 plume is less well reported. To investigate this further two different scenarios were modelled. In the first, a single water production well was used to draw CO2 along the strike of an open aquifer with a regional dip. Large rates of water production (5–10 times the volume of injected CO2) were required to achieve only small displacements of the CO2 plume. The second scenario investigated to what extent an induced hydraulic gradient might spill CO2 already stored in a structural trap. Here the effects were more pronounced with over 90% of the CO2 being spilled at a water cycling rate of 10 Mt per year (corresponding to a hydraulic gradient of 1.28 bar/km). The modelling was tested by the real case at Sleipner where CO2 migration in the Utsira Sand is potentially impacted by water production at the nearby Volve field. Simulations concluded that the CO2 plume at Sleipner should not be materially affected by water production from Volve and this is supported by the time-lapse seismics.

National techno-economic pathways to reduce carbon emissions are required for the United Kingdom to meet its decarbonisation obligations as mandated by the Paris Agreement. Analysis using energy systems models indicate that carbon capture and storage is a key technology for the UK to achieve its mitigation targets at lowest cost. There is potential to significantly improve upon the representation of the CO2 storage systems used in these models, but sensitivities of a given reservoir system to future development pathways must be evaluated. To investigate this we generate a range of numerical simulations of CO2 injection into the Bunter Sandstone of the UK Southern North Sea, considered to be one of the most important regional aquifers for CO2 storage. The scenarios investigate the sensitivity of CO2 storage to characteristics of regional development including number of injection sites and target rates of CO2 injection. This enables an evaluation of the impact of a range of deployment possibilities reflecting the range of scenarios that may be explored in an energy system analysis. The results show that limitations in achieving target injection rates are encountered at rates greater than 2 MtCO2/year-site due to local pressure buildup. The areal location of injection sites has minimal impact on the results because the Bunter Sandstone model has good regional connectivity. Rather, the depth of the site is the most important factor controlling limits on CO2 injection due to the relationship between the limiting pressure and the lithostatic pressure gradient. The potential for model simplification is explored by comparison of reservoir simulation with analytical models of average reservoir pressure and near-site pressure. The numerical simulations match average pressure buildup estimated with the “closed-box” analytical model of Zhou et al. (2008) over a 50 year injection period. The pressure buildup at individual sites is estimated using the Mathias et al. (2011) formulation and compared to the simulation response. Discrepancies in the match are mostly due to the interaction of signals from multiple injection sites and heterogeneous permeability in the numerical simulations. These issues should be the focus of further development of simplified models for CO2 storage in an energy systems analysis framework.

The oral vaccination of wild badgers (Meles meles) with live Bacillus Calmette–Guerin (BCG) is one of the tools being considered for the control of bovine tuberculosis (caused by Mycobacterium bovis) in the UK. The design of a product for oral vaccination requires that numerous, and often competing, conditions are met. These include the need for a highly palatable, but physically stable bait that will meet regulatory requirements, and one which is also compatible with the vaccine formulation; in this case live BCG. In collaboration with two commercial bait companies we have developed a highly attractive and palatable bait recipe designed specifically for European badgers (Meles meles) that meets these requirements. The palatability of different batches of bait was evaluated against a standardised palatable control bait using captive badgers. The physical properties of the bait are described e.g. firmness and colour. The microbial load in the bait was assessed against European and US Pharmacopoeias. The bait was combined with an edible vaccine carrier made of hydrogenated peanut oil in which BCG vaccine was stable during bait manufacture and cold storage, demonstrating

So-called ‘gas chimneys’ are likely to provide the main geological risk for out-of-reservoir CO2 migration in thick post-rift overburden successions such as typify the central and northern North Sea. Here we postulate that, in the North Sea, such chimneys formed in the geological past, with a likely peak activity at the end of the ice-age, and are currently rather dormant. With this postulate we set a bound on possible bulk migration rates considering both advective and diffusive flow and based on a hypothetical CO2 storage site at 800 m depth. Calculated migration velocities into the overburden, by either advection or diffusion, are very low, at less than one metre per thousand years. Consequently flux rates are also very low, several orders of magnitude below the leakage thresholds that have been suggested as ensuring effective mitigation performance. Time-lapse seismic reflection data from the Sleipner storage site, which is located beneath some small chimney features, show no evidence of CO2 migration into the overburden. This cannot prove the postulate, because the time interval spanned by the seismic surveys is just a few years, but it is nevertheless consistent with it.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) in subsurface reservoirs has been identified as a potentially cost-effective way to reduce CO 2 emissions to the atmosphere. Global emissions reductions on the gigatonne scale using CCS will require regional or basin-scale deployment of CO 2 storage in saline aquifers. Thus the evaluation of both the dynamic and ultimate CO 2 storage capacity of formations is important for policy makers to determine the viability of CCS as a pillar of the greenhouse gas mitigation strategy in a particular region. We use a reservoir simulation model representing the large-scale Bunter Sandstone in the UK Southern North Sea to evaluate the dynamics and sensitivities of regional CO 2 plume transport and storage. At the basin-scale, we predict hydrogeological changes in the storage reservoir in response to multiple regional carbon sequestration development scenarios. We test the sensitivity of injection capacity to a range of target CO 2 injection rates and fluctuations in CO 2 supply. Model sensitivities varying the target injection rates indicate that in the absence of pressure management up to 3.7 Gt of CO 2 can be stored in the Bunter region over 50 years given the pressure constraints set to avoid fracturing the formation. Long-term (approx. 1000 years), our results show that up to 16 Gt of CO 2 can be stored in the Bunter region without pressure management. With pressure management, the estimate rises to 32 Gt. However, consideration must be given to the additional operational and economic requirements of pressure management using brine production.

Few studies have explored the phonological, morphological and orthographic spellings skills of children with specific language impairment (SLI) simultaneously. Fifteen children with SLI (mean age = 113.07 months, SD = 8.61) completed language and spelling tasks alongside chronological-age controls and spelling-age controls. While the children with SLI showed a deficit in phonological spelling, they performed comparably to spelling-age controls on morphological spelling skills, and there were no differences between the three groups in producing orthographically legal spellings. The results also highlighted the potential importance of adequate non-word repetition skills in relation to effective spelling skills, and demonstrated that not all children with spoken language impairments show marked spelling difficulties. Findings are discussed in relation to theory, educational assessment and practice. Learning outcomes: As a result of this activity, readers will describe components of spoken language that predict children's morphological and phonological spelling performance. As a result of this activity, readers will describe how the spelling skills of children with SLI compare to age-matched and spelling age-matched control children. Readers will be able to interpret the variability in spelling performance seen in children with SLI.

This study investigated the relationship between measures of reading and writing, and explored whether cognitive measures known to be related to reading ability were also associated with writing performance in middle childhood. Sixty-Four children, aged between 8 years 9 months and 11 years 9 months, took part in a battery of writing, reading, and cognitive ability tasks. Reading fluency emerged as having a strong relationship to written language performance, after controlling for age and verbal reasoning. While children with reading difficulties were weak at spelling accuracy, they were otherwise found to produce written compositions of similar quality to typical readers. Boys produced less written text than girls, but did not demonstrate weaker written language abilities. Collectively the results demonstrate that writing skills can be separated into transcription and composition processes, and highlight the need for further research on the relationship between reading fluency and children's writing.

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the development of a Jovian meteorology and assesses its impact on the evolution of comparative meteorology. The Jovian vortex theories conflict with the geophysical fluid dynamics view for the zonal circulation, which requires that quasi-geostrophic eddies be turbulent, not coherent, to drive the jets. The sublayer heating on Earth produces small-scale moist convection that drives the lapse rate toward the moist adiabat. Jupiter's internal heat may also produce this effect, as there may be water clouds in the lower troposphere. Both atmospheres could thus be stable for the large-scale processes. This stability could be enhanced by the baroclinic instabilities produced by differential heating. Above the tropopause, the stability is increased by the absorption of solar radiation by ozone on Earth and by methane and dust on Jupiter. Process and comparative models have given some indication of how a predictive Jovian circulation model could be assembled. It is found that in mid-latitudes Jupiter is analogous to a more rapidly rotating Earth.