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Indigenous Australian landowners are increasingly seeking to develop agricultural production on their lands to improve the welfare and economic opportunities of their communities. This can require substantial capital input and, in the absence of enough government funding, Indigenous groups are turning to private investors. Development literature has explored private sector-led and 'financialized' approaches to development at a macro level as something that is done to communities; however, less research has examined how remote communities themselves seek to develop their natural assets through partnerships with businesses and with global finance. This article examines the work being done to prepare land for external investment. It provides an example of emergent assetization processes being undertaken outside the financial sector, driven by social outcomes seemingly beyond the domain of shareholder value. Paradoxically, individuals engaged in these asset-making processes may oppose the withdrawal of direct funding for community development associated with a financialization of development, yet they are left with few options but to further these efforts by seeking private finance themselves - facilitating financialization for development. This interaction of structural effects and local agency complicates narratives of financialization as they are commonly presented and has important implications for Indigenous economic development in Northern Australia.

Marine algae are promising third-generation feedstocks for bioethanol production as they are fast growing, require minimal inputs, and do not compete for land. However, marine algae have complex cell walls which necessitate pretreatment prior to fermentation, and this represents a major component of the cost of bioethanol production. Standard pretreatment processes using acids are costly and generate hazardous waste streams. This study aims to develop an economic and environmentally friendly pretreatment process using ozonolysis for the marine algae Kappaphycus alvarezii and Gelidium amansii. Acid and ozone pretreatments were compared across the pretreatment, enzyme hydrolysis, and fermentation stages of bioethanol production. Acid pretreatment outperformed ozonolysis over the pretreatment and enzyme hydrolysis stages. However, it also generated as by-products the compounds 5-hydroxymethyl furfural (5-HMF) and levulinic acid (LA), which inhibited ethanol fermentation and reduced the efficiency of the process overall. Ozone pretreatment did not produce these inhibitory compounds, and as such outperformed acid pretreatment across the process as a whole. These results indicate the potential of ozonolysis as an economic and environmentally friendly pretreatment for the production of bioethanol from marine algae.

Research on the financialisation of land and agribusiness has highlighted major shifts in agri-food systems globally. Yet these accounts tend to focus on the activities of financial actors,...

The crystallisation of a range of as-produced poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate) copolymer blends from a mixed culture polyhydroxyalkanoate production process, with low (15%), high (82%) and intermediate (62% and 50%) average 3-hydroxyvalerate (3HV) contents, was studied at different temperatures using polarised optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry and X-ray crystallography. The low-3HV content material had narrow compositional distribution and crystallised in the typical highly regular banded spherulite morphology, while the other materials displayed varying degrees of interpenetrating crystallisation of separate crystal phases comprising either the 3HV or 3-hydroxybutyrate (3HB) crystal lattice structure. Because of the differing and competing crystallisation kinetics of these phases coupled with diffusion effects, there was a very strong influence of crystallisation temperature on the resulting morphology. Thus manipulation of the final material properties of such copolymeric materials is dependent on understanding these effects and controlling their processing and crystallisation temperatures and conditions.

Background Prenatal alcohol exposure is recognized for altering DNA methylation profiles of brain cells during development, and to be part of the molecular basis underpinning Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) etiology. However, we have negligible information on the effects of alcohol exposure during pre-implantation, the early embryonic window marked with dynamic DNA methylation reprogramming, and on how this may rewire the brain developmental program. Results Using a pre-clinical in vivo mouse model, we show that a binge-like alcohol exposure during pre-implantation at the 8-cell stage leads to surge in morphological brain defects and adverse developmental outcomes during fetal life. Genome-wide DNA methylation analyses of fetal forebrains uncovered sex-specific alterations, including partial loss of DNA methylation maintenance at imprinting control regions, and abnormal de novo DNA methylation profiles in various biological pathways (e.g., neural/brain development). Conclusion These findings support that alcohol-induced DNA methylation programming deviations during pre-implantation could contribute to the manifestation of neurodevelopmental phenotypes associated with FASD.

A major obstacle preventing the large scale production of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) has been the lack of a reliable, low cost, large volume feedstock. The abundance and relatively low price of methane therefore marks it as a substrate of interest. This paper presents a techno-economic assessment of the production of poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) from methane. ASPEN Plus was used for process design and simulation. The design and economic evaluation is presented for production of 100,000 t/a PHB through methanotrophic fermentation and acetone-water solvent extraction. Production costs were estimated at $4.1–$6.8/kg PHA, which compares against a median price of $7.5/kg from other studies. Raw material costs are reduced from 30 to 50% of production for sugar feedstocks, to 22% of production for methane. A feature of the work is the revelation that heat removal from the two-stage bioreactor process contributes 28% of the operating cost. Thermophilic methanotrophs could allow the use of cooling water instead of refrigerant, reducing production costs to $3.2–5.4/kg PHA; it is noted that PHB producing thermophilic methanotrophs are yet to be isolated. Energy consumption for air compression and biomass drying were also identified as significant capital and operating costs and therefore optimisation of bioreactor height and pressure and biomass moisture content should be considered in future research.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text., Background: Coronary artery disease (CAD) represents one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Given the healthcare risks and societal impacts associated with CAD, their clinical management would benefit from improved prevention and prediction tools. Polygenic risk scores (PRS) based on an individual’s genome sequence are emerging as potentially powerful biomarkers to predict the risk to develop CAD. Two recently derived genome-wide PRS have shown high specificity and sensitivity to identify CAD cases in European-ancestry participants from the UK Biobank. However, validation of the PRS predictive power and transferability in other populations is now required to support their clinical utility. Methods: We calculated both PRS (GPSCAD and metaGRSCAD) in French-Canadian individuals from 3 cohorts totaling 3639 prevalent CAD cases and 7382 controls and tested their power to predict prevalent, incident, and recurrent CAD. We also estimated the impact of the founder French-Canadian familial hypercholesterolemia deletion (LDLR delta >15 kb deletion) on CAD risk in one of these cohorts and used this estimate to calibrate the impact of the PRS. Results: Our results confirm the ability of both PRS to predict prevalent CAD comparable to the original reports (area under the curve=0.72–0.89). Furthermore, the PRS identified about 6% to 7% of individuals at CAD risk similar to carriers of the LDLR delta >15 kb mutation, consistent with previous estimates. However, the PRS did not perform as well in predicting an incident or recurrent CAD (area under the curve=0.56–0.60), maybe because of confounding because 76% of the participants were on statin treatment. This result suggests that additional work is warranted to better understand how ascertainment biases and study design impact PRS for CAD. Conclusions: Collectively, our results confirm that novel, genome-wide PRS is able to predict CAD in French Canadians; with further improvements, this is likely to pave the way towards more targeted strategies to predict and prevent CAD-related adverse events.

The Indonesian seaweed industry has rapidly expanded over the last twenty years and now contributes to the livelihoods of 267,000 coastal households. Policy makers need accurate information from which to base policy that improves the livelihoods of smallholder farmers without further straining natural resource limits. The sustained growth of the sector necessitates means for reporting and monitoring the sector, particularly in the context of COVID-19. This paper uses newly available, high resolution, high frequency satellite data from April 2017 to December 2020 to identify seaweed farming plots and to map the seasonal changes in the industry. This is overlaid with data on environmental factors, prices, and official production statistics to reveal a range of insights into the industry which are obscured by official annual data, such as the seasonality of production and the change in activity since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper evaluates the usefulness of this data for monitoring the industry and informing strategic policy decisions.

Growing investments in food and farmland have raised concerns about the potential implications of the financialisation of the Australian agri-food sector. However, little is known about how these investments are negotiated in practice - what people and tools structure agricultural investments and drive their outcomes. Emerging research on this topic has largely focussed on private sector actors, with the state positioned as a structural driver which, through broad neoliberal policies, creates conditions which promote financialisation. Indeed, the 2015 White Paper on ‘Developing Northern Australia’ articulates a governance rationality that indicates the responsibility for allocation of economic resources should rest with financial investors. Yet excessive attention to this agenda risks underplaying the difficult, uncertain, work of government officials seeking to translate this into practice. This research explores the work of local Northern Territory government officials as they seek to translate two key aspects of the Developing the North program into practice: attracting finance capital, and moderating its activities. An appreciation for the difficult work of translation allows us to move beyond a view of the state as a merely passive actor in financialisation, to consider ways that individuals within government work actively to assemble patterns of financial investment.

Marine algae are promising alternative feedstocks for bioethanol production since they are fast growing and do not compete with food crops for land. However, the commercial viability of bioethanol production from marine algae is limited by the high cost of the pretreatment required to break down the cell wall and the high cost of nitrogen supplements used during fermentation. Development of alternative pretreatment and nutritional supplementation strategies is therefore crucial to the development of economically viable methods for producing these third generation biofuels. This research develops a novel method for fungal pretreatment of marine macroalgae. The method is both an effective pretreatment capable of breaking down the complex algae cell wall, and allows for fungal biomass to be recovered from the pretreatment stage and used as a nutrient supplement during fermentation. The study demonstrates that fungal pretreatment prior to enzyme hydrolysis increased sugar yields 2.3 fold compared to untreated algae, and nutrient supplementation using the recovered fungal biomass increased ethanol yields by up to 38.23%. This data suggests that the use of fungi for pretreatment and nutrient supplementation could greatly increase the economic viability of production of these third-generation biofuels.

This paper reviews the development of the Mission Adaptive Digital Composite Aerostructures Technologies (MADCAT) v0 demonstrator aircraft, utilizing a novel aerostructure concept that combines advanced composite materials manufacturing and fabrication technologies with a discrete construction approach to achieve high stiffness-to-density ratio ultra-light aerostructures that provide versatility and adaptability. This revolutionary aerostructure concept has the potential to change how future air vehicles are designed, built, and flown, with dramatic reductions in weight and manufacturing complexity the number of types of structural components needed to build air vehicles while enabling new mission objectives. We utilize the innovative digital composite materials and discrete construction technologies to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed aerostructure concept, by building and testing a scaled prototype UAV, MADCAT v0. This paper presents an overview of the design and development of the MADCAT v0 flight demonstrator.

This study represents the first detailed analysis of the thermal, morphological, and crystallization properties of the blend components within a range of mixed-culture polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), with 3-hydroxyvalerate content in the as-produced materials and in the fractions ranging from low (12 mol %) to high (91 mol %). Both coarse and fine fractionation of the as-produced copolymers confirmed that they were blends of nominally blocky and/or random copolymers of poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate), with very broad compositional distributions as governed by the PHA accumulation strategy. The crystallization kinetics and thermal properties of the fractions were found to be very significantly different from each other, consistent with the hypothesis that the overall mechanical properties were primarily controlled by the more rapidly crystallizing components. Two materials produced using an alternating feeding strategy demonstrated unique crystallization and thermal properties in their fractions, which are considered to have contributed to distinctly more elastic mechanical properties in these particular samples.

Poly[R-3-hydroxybutyrate-co-(R-3-hydroxyvalerate)] (PHBV) copolymers were produced from mixed cultures of biomass (activated sludge) fed with acetic acid (HAc) and propionic acid (HPr). Feeding was performed in such a way as to produce materials with a wide range of monomer compositions and microstructures. Solvent-cast thin films of these materials have recently been shown to exhibit a narrow range of mechanical properties similar to those of the homopolymer poly(R-3-hydroxybutyrate) (PHB) [1]. In this work, more detailed analyses of the thermal and crystallisation properties of these mixed-culture polyesters have revealed that they like comprise complex blends with broad compositional distribution of random and/or blocky copolymers of very different 3-hydroxyvalerate (3HV) contents and melting temperatures and thus have very different respective crystallisation kinetics. This blend complexity was confirmed by solvent fractionation of selected samples. The findings support the hypothesis that overall mechanical properties of these complex copolymer blend materials will be strongly influenced by the more rapidly crystallising components that form the matrix within which the slower crystallising components exist as microdomains. New opportunities in the material development of PHAs are likely to be found in establishing and exploiting such structure-function relationships.

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