European achievements in soil remediation and brownfield redevelopment

With the aim of sharing best practices of soil restoration and management of contaminated sites among European countries and to raise awareness of the enormous efforts made to succeed in such difficult commitment, the experts of the EIONET Soil working group on contaminated sites and brownfields agreed to gather their country's interesting cases and successful stories of recovery of contaminated areas. This second edition of the monograph presents seventeen new cases from eight European countries and its Regions of how polluted sites and brownfields have been remediated like new methodologies of sustainable restoration of the subsoil, development of innovative technologies, and funding mechanisms etc. These stories have been compiled to present what national, regional or local governments are doing to improve the quality of the environment and the living conditions of their population. A second aim is the promotion of best practices among industry, consultancies and business operators.JRC.D.3-Land Resource

COVID-19 vaccine sentiment on Twitter

From 24 January to 31 July in 2021, we collected data that anyone can view on Twitter by using the free Twitter API. By using the keywords “vaccine”, “vaccination”, “vaccinated”, “vaxxer”, “vaxxers”, “#CovidVaccine”, “covid denier”, “pfizer”, “moderna”, “astra” and “zeneca”, “sinopharm”, “sputnik”, we collected 33K tweets published by popular Twitter accounts. For each tweet, the following variables were recorded: their author (user ID), the author's categorization (healthcare professional, news media source, other accounts with thousands of followers), the date of publication (to the precision of seconds), the vaccine mentioned, the language, and the general sentiment of the tweet text on a scale from 1 to 5. For multilingual sentiment analysis, we used an open-source BERT model from Huggingface (https://huggingface.co/nlptown/bert-base-multilingual-uncased-sentiment). When multiple vaccines are mentioned in a tweet, in our data, it is recorded as multiple tweets, one for each vaccine.To uphold the privacy policy for publishing Twitter data, the tweet texts, as well as the original user identifiers for the authors of the tweets, are not disclosed. Instead, we encoded the user information with random integers. To access the complete content of these tweets, researchers may utilize the Twitter search API by referencing the provided tweet identifiers.</p

Analysis of Quality of Backyard Compost and Its Potential Utilization as a Circular Bio-Waste Source

The use and quality analysis of household compost have become very important issues in recent years due to the increasing interest in local food production and safe, self-produced food. The phenomenon was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine period, which gave new impetus to the growth of small home gardens. However, the knowledge associated with making high-quality compost is often lacking in home gardeners. Therefore, the objective of this research was to find answers to the following questions: can the quality of backyard compost be considered safe in terms of toxicity and nutrient content? Can weed seed dispersion affect the usability of backyard compost? In general, can the circulation of organic matter be increased with the spread of home composting? In this study, 16 different house composts were analysed for stability, weed seed contamination, toxic elements, and nutrient content using analysis of variance. The results of the research showed that the quality properties of the composts (including their weed seed dispersion effect) were greatly influenced by the different techniques and raw materials used. The toxicity levels, as well as the content of macro and microelements, were within the parameters of safe-quality compost. The specific macronutrient (Ca, Mg) and micronutrient (Fe, Mn) contents of the tested composts have a similar and, in some cases, more favorable nutrient supply capacity in crop production than the frequently-used cow manure-based composts. With a plan of basic education on composting, there is potential to encourage farmyard composting.</jats:p

Analysis of Quality of Backyard Compost and Its Potential Utilization as a Circular Bio-Waste Source

The use and quality analysis of household compost have become very important issues in recent years due to the increasing interest in local food production and safe, self-produced food. The phenomenon was further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine period, which gave new impetus to the growth of small home gardens. However, the knowledge associated with making high-quality compost is often lacking in home gardeners. Therefore, the objective of this research was to find answers to the following questions: can the quality of backyard compost be considered safe in terms of toxicity and nutrient content? Can weed seed dispersion affect the usability of backyard compost? In general, can the circulation of organic matter be increased with the spread of home composting? In this study, 16 different house composts were analysed for stability, weed seed contamination, toxic elements, and nutrient content using analysis of variance. The results of the research showed that the quality properties of the composts (including their weed seed dispersion effect) were greatly influenced by the different techniques and raw materials used. The toxicity levels, as well as the content of macro and microelements, were within the parameters of safe-quality compost. The specific macronutrient (Ca, Mg) and micronutrient (Fe, Mn) contents of the tested composts have a similar and, in some cases, more favorable nutrient supply capacity in crop production than the frequently-used cow manure-based composts. With a plan of basic education on composting, there is potential to encourage farmyard composting

Circular representation of the functional connections of the right posterior cingulate cortex, SPN method.

<p>Connectivity data were calculated for sub-populations with the lowest and highest ASSQ scores. Key for the abbreviations is given in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060982#pone.0060982.s001" target="_blank">Table S1</a>.</p

Demographic data of the study population and summary of psychological evaluations.

<p>Data are given in mean ± standard deviation (range: minimum – maximum) format. ASSQ: Autism Spectrum Screening Questionnaire, SRS: Social Responsiveness Scale.</p

Functional network of the right posterior cingulate cortex, calculated for sub-populations with the lowest and highest ASSQ scores.

<p>Graph edges were depicted based on the strongest functional connectivity (threshold criteria for averaged networks: wavelet correlation coefficient >0.634; 95^th percentile strongest connection in high scorers; threshold criterion for the statistical parametric network (SPN) method: p<0.005). The nomenclature for brain region abbreviations is given in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060982#pone.0060982.s001" target="_blank">Table S1</a>. Raw connectivity data are provided in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0060982#pone-0060982-t005" target="_blank">Table 5</a>. First row: averaged functional network (first degree connections) in subjects with the lowest ASSQ score (n = 52; 5th percentile, cut-off threshold: 2). Second row: lowest ASSQ scorer group, SPN based determination of connectivity strengths. Third row: averaged functional network in subjects with the highest ASSQ score (n = 7; 95th percentile, cut-off threshold: 24). Fourth row: high ASSQ scorer group, connections are visualized using SPN analysis.</p