Despite a large increase in the area of selectively logged tropical forest worldwide, the carbon stored in deadwood across a tropical forest degradation gradient at the landscape scale remains poorly documented. Many carbon stock studies have either focused exclusively on live standing biomass or have been carried out in primary forests that are unaffected by logging, despite the fact that coarse woody debris (deadwood with ≥10 cm diameter) can contain significant portions of a forest's carbon stock.

Demand-side management (DSM) is a key aspect of many future energy system scenarios. DSM refers to a range of technologies and interventions designed to create greater efficiency and flexibility on the demand-side of the energy system. Examples include the provision of more information to users to support efficient behaviour and new ‘smart’ technologies that can be automatically controlled. Key stated outcomes of implementing DSM are benefits for consumers, such as cost savings and greater control over energy use.

Climate change includes not only changes in mean climate but also in weather extremes. For a few prominent heatwaves and heavy precipitation events a human contribution to their occurrence has been demonstrated. Here we apply a similar framework but estimate what fraction of all globally occurring heavy precipitation and hot extremes is attributable to warming.

The present study evaluated bamboo (Dendrocalamus strictus) based resource conservation in the Yamuna ravines at Central Soil and Water Conservation Research and Training Institute, Research Centre, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. Ravine lands are highly degraded dry lands and 3.97 m ha area is affected by ravines in India. One ravine micro watershed of 2.8 ha area was planted with two rows of bamboo in staggered manner as vegetative barrier for the analysis of hydrological and economic aspect of bamboo plantation.

All of the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) assume that future emissions of aerosols and aerosol precursors will decline sharply. There is considerable evidence that historically increasing aerosols have substantially affected tropical precipitation, but the effects of projected aerosol declines have received little attention.

This paper briefly reviews the history of Reusable Launch Vehicle development and recommended reuse techniques based on the lessons learned from those efforts. The paper considers a range of techniques for recovery and reuse of launch vehicles. Launch vehicle component cost and weight by major element are also discussed as a method of determining cost/benefit of reuse. Of particular interest are non-propulsive approaches as economic alternatives to propulsive approaches.

Debates on emissions and climate change are dominated by inter-country inequalities, usually ignoring within-country inequalities. In this paper, we address the question of carbon space sharing in India across different classes after economic reforms were introduced in 1991. We establish using household consumption surveys that the elites in India are major polluters both in an absolute sense as well as in per capita terms. We find that inter-class component of emissions now explains 28.5% of total inequality compared to a mere 2.5% in 1994 at the onset of market-oriented reforms.

In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted — rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.

The comparison of observed global mean surface air temperature (GMT) change to the mean change simulated by climate models has received much public and scientific attention. For a given global warming signal produced by a climate model ensemble, there exists an envelope of GMT values representing the range of possible unforced states of the climate system (the Envelope of Unforced Noise; EUN). Typically, the EUN is derived from climate models themselves, but climate models might not accurately simulate the correct characteristics of unforced GMT variability.

Ebola virus and Marburg virus cause serious disease outbreaks with high case fatality rates. We aimed to assess the safety and immunogenicity of two investigational DNA vaccines, one (EBO vaccine) encoding Ebola virus Zaire and Sudan glycoproteins and one (MAR) encoding Marburg virus glycoprotein.