Marine and Coastal Environment

Oceans and seas cover 70 per cent of the Earth's surface. They are a major and distinct source of natural resources, offering us food from fisheries and aquaculture, and opportunities to exploit both renewable energy sources such as wind, wave and tidal power and existing supplies of minerals and fossil fuels. At the same time, the marine environment contains a unique and diverse range of species and habitats, with half of the UK's biodiversity found in our surrounding waters.

The marine and coastal waters around Scotland are vitally important to the sustainable future of the country. Our coasts and seas provide food from fisheries, energy and mineral resources, routes and harbours for shipping, tourism and recreational opportunities and sites of cultural and historical interest, which meet many of our economic and social needs particularly in remote rural areas. At the same time, they contain distinctive and important habitats and support a diverse range of species which we need to protect, conserve and enhance. The Scottish Government, therefore, is committed to ensuring the sustainable use of our coasts and seas and the resources that they contain.

Our aim is to secure a vision of clean, healthy, safe, productive and biologically diverse marine and coastal environments, managed to meet the long term needs of nature and people. Good progress has been made in approaching this vision by tackling the problems facing our oceans and seas, but we must do more nationally and internationally to tackle the threats that remain.

Blood plasma

Blood plasma is the liquid component of blood, in which the blood cells are suspended. It makes up about 55% of total blood volume. It is composed of mostly water (90% by volume), and contains dissolved proteins, glucose, clotting factors, mineral ions, hormones and carbon dioxide (plasma being the main medium for excretory product transportation). Blood plasma is prepared simply by spinning a tube of fresh blood in a centrifuge until the blood cells fall to the bottom of the tube. The blood plasma is then poured or drawn off. Blood serum is blood plasma without fibrinogen or the other clotting factors.

Inner planet Mercury

Mercury (0.4 AU) is the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest planet (0.055 Earth masses). Mercury has no natural satellites, and its only known geological features besides impact craters are lobed ridges or rupes, probably produced by a period of contraction early in its history. Mercury's almost negligible atmosphere consists of atoms blasted off its surface by the solar wind. Its relatively large iron core and thin mantle have not yet been adequately explained. Hypotheses include that its outer layers were stripped off by a giant impact, and that it was prevented from fully accreting by the young Sun's energy.

OpenGL 2.0

OpenGL 2.0 was conceived by 3Dlabs to address concerns that OpenGL was stagnating and lacked a strong direction. 3Dlabs proposed a number of major additions to the standard. Most of these were, at the time, rejected by the ARB or otherwise never came to fruition in the form that 3Dlabs proposed. However, their proposal for a C-style shading language was eventually completed, resulting in the current formulation of GLSL (the OpenGL Shading Language, also slang). Like the assembly-like shading languages that it was replacing, it allowed the programmer to replace the fixed-function vertex and fragment pipe with shaders, though this time written in a C-like language.

The design of GLSL was notable for making relatively few concessions to the limitations of the hardware then available; this hearkened back to the earlier tradition of OpenGL setting an ambitious, forward-looking target for 3D accelerators rather than merely tracking the state of currently available hardware. The final OpenGL 2.0 specification includes support for GLSL.

Acquired brain injury

A neurological condition, Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) is damage to the brain acquired after birth. It usually affects cognitive, physical, emotional, social or independent functioning and can result from traumatic brain injury (i.e. accidents, falls, assaults, etc.) and nontraumatic brain injury (i.e. stroke, brain tumours, infection, poisoning, hypoxia, ischemia or substance abuse). Most definitions of ABI exclude neurodegenerative disorders. Acquired brain injury is not to be confused with intellectual disability. People with a brain injury may have difficulty controlling, coordinating and communicating their thoughts and actions but they usually retain their intellectual abilities. Brain injury has dramatically varied effects and no two people can expect the same outcome or resulting difficulties. The brain controls every part of human life: physically, intellectually, behaviorally, socially and emotionally. When the brain is damaged, some other part of a person's life will also be adversely affected. Even a mild injury can sometimes result in a serious disability that will interfere with a person’s daily functioning and personal activities for the rest of their life. While the outcome of the injury depends largely on the nature and severity of the injury itself, appropriate treatment will play a vital role in determining the level of recovery.

Random wire antenna

A random-length wire antenna is a type of radio frequency antenna typically chosen more for convenience than any particular design criteria. This antenna sometimes is called the zig-zag antenna, as it may be strung back and forth between trees just to get enough wire into the air. For example, an antenna for 3mhz might be 20m - 40m long.

Usually, it is a long (at least one quarter wavelength) wire with one end connected to the radio and the other in free space, arranged in any way most convenient for the space available. Folding (to fit in space available) will reduce effectiveness and make theoretical analysis extremely difficult. (The added length helps more than the folding typically hurts.) If used for transmitting, a random wire antenna usually will also require an antenna tuner, as it might have a random impedance that varies nonlinearly with frequency.

Typically this antenna is constructed from a number 12 or 14 AWG (1.6 to 2.0 mm diameter) wire of nearly any length. Such an antenna can be used for transmitting on practically any frequency with a properly tuned matching network.Although random wire antennas can be made from nearly any length of wire, one-quarter wavelength works best, and one half wavelength will work poorly with most tuners.

The antenna is fed directly from output of the matching network or a tuned circuit, without a feed line. Since the antenna is located very close to the transmitter, RF feedback can be an issue. RF feedback can be minimized by selecting a wire length that causes the low feed-point impedance at a current loop to occur at the transmitter. Alternately, a remote tuner can be fed with feedline, and the tuner located on the antenna.

The ground for a random wire antenna may be chosen by experimentation. Grounds could be returned to the transmitter, a nearby cold water pipe or a wire that's approximately one-quarter wavelength long.

Transaction types

A number of transaction types may be performed, including the following:

• Sale: where the cardholder pays for goods or service

• Refund: where a merchant refunds an earlier payment made by a cardholder

• Withdrawal: the cardholder withdraws funds from their account, e.g. from an ATM. The term Cash Advance may also be used, typically when the funds are advanced by a merchant rather than at an ATM

• Deposit: where a cardholder deposits funds to their own account (typically at an ATM)

• Cashback: where a cardholder withdraws funds from their own account at the same time as making a purchase

• Inter-account transfer: transferring funds between linked accounts belonging to the same cardholder

• Payment: transferring funds to a third party account

• Enquiry: a transaction without financial impact, for instance balance enquiry, available funds enquiry, linked accounts enquiry, or request for a statement of recent transactions on the account

• E top-up: where a cardholder can use a device (typically POS or ATM) to add funds (top-up) their pre-pay mobile phone

• Mini-statement: where a cardholder uses a device (typically an ATM) to obtain details of recent transactions on their account

• Administrative: this covers a variety of non-financial transactions including PIN change

Bluetooth 1.1

• Ratified as IEEE Standard 802.15.1-2002.

• Many errors found in the 1.0B specifications were fixed.

• Added support for non-encrypted channels.

• Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI).

Lorenz

In the 1930s German radio engineers developed a new system, called the "Ultrakurzwellen-Landefunkfeuer" (LFF), or simply "Leitstrahl" (guiding beam) but referred to outside Germany as Lorenz, the name of the company manufacturing the equipments. In Lorenz two signals were broadcast on the same frequencies from highly directional antennas with beams a few degrees wide. One was pointed slightly to the left of the other, with a small angle in the middle where they overlapped. The signals were chosen as dots and dashes, timed so that when the aircraft was in the small area in the middle the sound was continuous. Planes would fly into the beams by listening to the signal to identify which side of middle they were on, and then corrected until they were in the center.

Originally developed as a night and bad-weather landing system, in the late 1930s they also started developing long-range versions for night bombing. In this case a second set of signals were broadcast at right angles to the first, and indicated the point at which to drop the bombs. The system was highly accurate and a battle of the beams broke out when United Kingdom intelligence services attempted, and then succeeded, in rendering the system useless.

In the post-war era similar systems were widely deployed, notably in the United States where a system of long range "airways" was created spanning the country with stations about 200 miles (320km) apart. The signals were chosen as the A and N letters from morse code, dot-dash and dash-dot respectively. However, new developments soon rendered these systems obsolete.

Definition of sense

There is no firm agreement among neurologists as to the number of senses because of differing definitions of what constitutes a sense. One definition states that an exteroceptive sense is a faculty by which outside stimuli are perceived.The traditional five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste: a classification attributed to Aristotle.Humans also have at least six additional senses (a total of eleven including interoceptive senses) that include: nociception (pain), equilibrioception (balance), proprioception & kinesthesia (joint motion and acceleration), sense of time, thermoception (temperature differences), and in some a weak magnetoception (direction)

One commonly recognized catagorisation for human senses is as follows: chemoreception; photoreception; mechanoreception; and thermoception. Indeed, all human senses fit into one of these four categories.

Palaeobiogeography

Paleobiogeography goes one step further to include paleogeographic data and considerations of plate tectonics. Using molecular analyses and corroborated by fossils, it has been possible to demonstrate that perching birds evolved first in the region of Australia or the adjacent Antarctic (which at that time lay somewhat further north and had a temperate climate). From there, they spread to the other Gondwanan continents and Southeast Asia - the part of Laurasia then closest to their origin of dispersal - in the late Paleogene, before achieving a global distribution in the early Neogene . Not knowing the fact that at the time of dispersal, the Indian Ocean was much narrower than it is today, and that South America was closer to the Antarctic, one would be hard pressed to explain the presence of many "ancient" lineages of perching birds in Africa, as well as the mainly South American distribution of the suboscines.

Generalized anxiety disorder

Generalized anxiety disorder is a common chronic disorder that affects twice as many women as men and can lead to considerable impairment (Brawman-Mintzer & Lydiard, 1996, 1997). As the name implies, generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by long-lasting anxiety that is not focused on any particular object or situation. In other words it is unspecific or free-floating. People with this disorder feel afraid of something but are unable to articulate the specific fear. They fret constantly and have a hard time controlling their worries. Because of persistent muscle tension and autonomic fear reactions, they may develop headaches, heart palpitations, dizziness, insomnia and chest pain. These physical symptoms, combined with the intense, long-term anxiety, make it difficult to cope with normal daily activities.

Interrupts

Interrupts are central to operating systems as they allow the operating system to deal with the unexpected activities of running programs and the world outside the computer.

Interrupt-based programming is one of the most basic forms of time-sharing, being directly supported by most CPUs. Interrupts provide a computer with a way of automatically running specific code in response to events. Even very basic computers support hardware interrupts, and allow the programmer to specify code which may be run when that event takes place.
When an interrupt is received, the computer's hardware automatically suspends whatever program is currently running by pushing the current state on a stack, and its registers and program counter are also saved. This is analogous to placing a bookmark in a book when someone is interrupted by a phone call. This task requires no operating system as such, but only that the interrupt be configured at an earlier time.

In modern operating systems, interrupts are handled by the operating system's kernel. Interrupts may come from either the computer's hardware, or from the running program. When a hardware device triggers an interrupt, the operating system's kernel decides how to deal with this event, generally by running some processing code, or ignoring it. The processing of hardware interrupts is a task that is usually delegated to software called device drivers, which may be either part of the operating system's kernel, part of another program, or both. Device drivers may then relay information to a running program by various means.

A program may also trigger an interrupt to the operating system, which are very similar in function. If a program wishes to access hardware for example, it may interrupt the operating system's kernel, which causes control to be passed back to the kernel. The kernel may then process the request which may contain instructions to be passed onto hardware, or to a device driver. When a program wishes to allocate more memory, launch or communicate with another program, or signal that it no longer needs the CPU, it does so through interrupts.

Ecophysiology of plants

Plant ecophysiology is an experimental science that seeks to describe the physiological mechanisms underlying ecological observations. In other words, ecophysiologists, or physiological ecologists, address ecological questions about the controls over the growth, reproduction, survival, abundance, and geographical distribution of plants, as these processes are affected by interactions between plants with their physical, chemical, and biotic environment. These ecophysiological patterns and mechanisms can help us understand the functional significance of specific plant traits and their evolutionary heritage. The questions addressed by ecophysiologists are derived from a higher level of integration, i.e. from “ecology” in its broadest sense, including questions originating from agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and environmental sciences. However, the ecophysiological explanations often require mechanistic understanding at a lower level of integration (physiology, biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology). It is, therefore, quintessential for an ecophysiologist to have an appreciation of both ecological questions and biophysical, biochemical, and molecular methods and processes. In addition, many societal issues, often pertaining to agriculture, environmental change, or nature conservation, benefit from an ecophysiological perspective. A modern ecophysiologist thus requires a good understanding of both the molecular aspects of plant processes and the functioning of the intact plant in its environmental context.

In many cases, animals are able to escape unfavourable and changing environmental factors such as heat, cold, drought, or floods, while generally plants are unable to move away and therefor must endure the adverse conditions or perish. Some plants have an impressive array of genes which aid in adapting to changing conditions. It is hypothesized that this large number of genes can be partly explained by plant species' need to adapt to a wider range of conditions.

JPEG file format

In computing, JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg) is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10 to 1 compression with little perceivable loss in image quality.

In addition to being a compression method, JPEG is often considered to be a file format. JPEG/Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with JPEG/JFIF, it is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web. These format variations are often not distinguished, and are simply called JPEG.

The compression method is usually lossy compression, meaning that some visual quality is lost in the process and cannot be restored. There are variations on the standard baseline JPEG that are lossless, however these are not yet widely supported.

Movement of proteins

Each type of protein is usually sent to a particular part of the cell. An important part of cell biology is the investigation of molecular mechanisms by which proteins are moved to different places inside cells or secreted from cells.

Most proteins are synthesized by ribosomes in the cytoplasm. This process is also known as protein biosynthesis or simply protein translation. Some proteins, such as those to be incorporated in membranes (known as membrane proteins), are transported into the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) during synthesis. This process can be followed by transportation and processing in the Golgi apparatus. From the Golgi, membrane proteins can move to the plasma membrane, to other subcellular compartments, or they can be secreted from the cell. The ER and Golgi can be thought of as the "membrane protein synthesis compartment" and the "membrane protein processing compartment", respectively. There is a semi-constant flux of proteins through these compartments. ER and Golgi-resident proteins associate with other proteins but remain in their respective compartments. Other proteins "flow" through the ER and Golgi to the plasma membrane. Motor proteins transport membrane protein-containing vesicles along cytoskeletal tracks to distant parts of cells such as axon terminals.

Some proteins that are made in the cytoplasm contain structural features that target them for transport into mitochondria or the nucleus. Some mitochondrial proteins are made inside mitochondria and are coded for by mitochondrial DNA. In plants, chloroplasts also make some cell proteins.

Extracellular and cell surface proteins destined to be degraded can move back into intracellular compartments upon being incorporated into endocytosed vesicles. Some of these vesicles fuse with lysosomes where the proteins are broken down to their individual amino acids. The degradation of some membrane proteins begins while still at the cell surface when they are cleaved by secretases. Proteins that function in the cytoplasm are often degraded by proteasomes.

Theoretical implications technology

The process of technological evolution culminates with the ability to achieve all the material values technologically possible and desirable by mental effort.

An economic implication of the above idea is that intellectual labour, will become increasingly more important relative to physical labour. Contracts and agreements around information will become increasingly more common at the marketplace. Expansion and creation of new kinds of institutes that works with information such as for example universities, book stores, patent-trading companies, etc. is considered an indication that a civilization is in technological evolution.

Interestingly, this highlights the importance underlining the debate over intellectual property in conjunction with decentralized distribution systems such as todays internet. Where the price of information distribution is going towards zero with ever more efficient tools to distribute information is being invented. Growing amounts of information being distributed to an increasingly larger customer base as times goes by. With growing disintermediation in said markets and growing concerns over the protection of intellectual property rights it is not clear what form markets for information will take with the evolution of the information age.

Syllabaries

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables. A glyph in a syllabary typically represents a consonant followed by a vowel, or just a vowel alone, though in some scripts more complex syllables (such as consonant-vowel-consonant, or consonant-consonant-vowel) may have dedicated glyphs. Phonetically related syllables are not so indicated in the script. For instance, the syllable "ka" may look nothing like the syllable "ki", nor will syllables with the same vowels be similar.

Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, such as Japanese. Other languages that use syllabic writing include the Linear B script for Mycenaean Greek; Cherokee; Ndjuka, an English-based creole language of Surinam; and the Vai script of Liberia. Most logographic systems have a strong syllabic component. Ethiopic, though technically an alphabet, has fused consonants and vowels together to the point that it's learned as if it were a syllabary.

Selective breeding

Selective breeding in domesticated animals is the process of a breeder developing a cultivated breed over time, and selecting qualities within individuals of the breed that will be best to pass on to the next generation. The term is synonymous with "Artificial selection". Breeding techniques such as inbreeding, linebreeding and outcrossing are utilized by breeders in the maintenance and improvement of their chosen breeds.

Charles Darwin discussed how selective breeding had been successful in producing change over time in his book, Origin of Species. The first chapter of the book discusses selective breeding and domestication of such animals as pigeons, dogs and cattle. Selective breeding was used by Darwin as a springboard to introduce the theory of natural selection, and to support it.

Nuclear fusion

In physics and nuclear chemistry, nuclear fusion is the process by which multiple atomic particles join together to form a heavier nucleus. It is accompanied by the release or absorption of energy. Iron and nickel nuclei have the largest binding energies per nucleon of all nuclei. The fusion of two nuclei lighter than iron generally releases energy while the fusion of nuclei heavier than iron absorbs energy; vice-versa for the reverse process, nuclear fission.

Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars. Artificial fusion in human enterprises has also been achieved, although not yet completely controlled. Building upon the nuclear transmutation experiments of Ernest Rutherford done a few years earlier, fusion of light nuclei (hydrogen isotopes) was first observed by Mark Oliphant in 1932, and the steps of the main cycle of nuclear fusion in stars were subsequently worked out by Hans Bethe throughout the remainder of that decade. Research into fusion for military purposes began in the early 1940s, as part of the Manhattan Project, but was not successful until 1952. Research into controlled fusion for civilian purposes began in the 1950s, and continues to this day.