The UK's global gas challenge

A UKERC Research Report exploring the UK's global gas challenge. This report takes an interdisciplinary perspective, which marries energy security insights from politics and international relations, with detailed empirical understanding from energy studies and perspectives from economic geography that emphasise the spatial distribution of actors, networks and resource flows that comprise the global gas industry. Natural gas production in the UK peaked in 2000, and in 2004 it became a net importer. A decade later and the UK now imports about half of the natural gas that it consumes. The central thesis of the project on which this report is based is that as the UK’s gas import dependence has grown, it has effectively been ‘globalising’ its gas security; consequently UK consumers are increasingly exposed to events in global gas markets. - See more at: http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/publications/the-uk-s-global-gas-challenge.html#sthash.wEP831Zn.dpu

Variability of the Accretion Stream in the Eclipsing Polar EP Dra

We present the first high time resolution light curves for six eclipses of the magnetic cataclysmic variable EP Dra, taken using the superconducting tunnel junction imager S-Cam2. The system shows a varying eclipse profile between consecutive eclipses over the two nights of observation. We attribute the variable stream eclipse after accretion region ingress to a variation in the amount and location of bright material in the accretion stream. This material creates an accretion curtain as it is threaded by many field lines along the accretion stream trajectory. We identify this as the cause of absorption evident in the light curves when the system is in a high accretion state. We do not see direct evidence in the light curves for an accretion spot on the white dwarf; however, the variation of the stream brightness with the brightness of the rapid decline in flux at eclipse ingress indicates the presence of some form of accretion region. This accretion region is most likely located at high colatitude on the white dwarf surface, forming an arc shape at the foot points of the many field lines channeling the accretion curtain.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS (7 pages

'Order out of chaos': Resources, hazards and the production of a tin-mining economy in northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century

This paper examines the development of commercial tin mining in northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century. It recounts how a fundamentally unknown space - an underground zone lying at the edge of Empire - came to be constructed as a mineral rich region, and subsequently integrated with capital and commodity markets in Europe as an extractive economy. From 1902 onwards, the landscape of the Jos Plateau was re-worked to supply tin ores and concentrates to smelters, refineries and fabricators in Europe. At their height, the mines of northern Nigeria provided almost one-tenth of the world's tin. The paper's primary aim is to problematise the processes of ordering and disordering that transformed the Plateau into an extractive economy. To this end, it examines geological science and colonial administration as practices that struggled to differentiate unfamiliar ecologies and invisible geologies into either resources to be exploited or hazards to be overcome. The paper illustrates the economic, political and cultural processes by which some conditions came to be seen as hazards (disease, seasonality of water supply, distance), while others were regarded as resources integral to the commerciality of mining on the Plateau (agricultural labour, land and water courses for sediment disposal, horizontal and vertical variation in ore grades). It shows how commercial exploitation of the Plateau's tin resources radically re-configured both physical landscapes and forms of social organisation on the Plateau, generating novel socio-natural juxtapositions that came to be experienced as poor working conditions, environmental hazards, and conflicts between agriculture and mining over access to land. © 2012 The White Horse Press

Electrospun gelatin-based scaffolds as a novel 3D platform to study the function of contractile smooth muscle cells in vitro

Contractile dysfunction of smooth muscle (SM) is a feature of chronic cardiovascular, respiratory and gastro-intestinal diseases. Owing to the low availability of human ex vivo tissue for the assessment of SM contractile function, the aim of this study was to develop a novel in vitro SM model that possesses the ability to contract, and a method to measure its contractility. A range of electrospun scaffolds were produced from crosslinked gelatin and methacrylated gelatin (GelMA), generating highly aligned scaffolds with average fibre diameters ranging from 200 nm to several micrometres. Young's moduli of the scaffolds ranged from 1x105 to 1x107 Pa. Primary aortic smooth muscle cells (AoSMCs; rat) cells readily adhered to and proliferated on the fibrous scaffolds for up to 10 days. They formed highly aligned populations following the topographical cues of the aligned scaffolds and stained positive for SM markers, indicating a contractile phenotype. Cell-seeded GelMA scaffolds were able, upon stimulation with uridine 5'-triphosphate (UTP), to contract and their attachment to a force transducer allowed the force of contraction to be measured. Hence, these electrospun GelMA fibres can be used as biomimetic scaffolds for SM cell culture and in vitro model development, and enables the contractile forces generated by the aligned three-dimensional sheet of cells to be directly measured. This will supplement in vitro drug screening tools and facilitate discovery of disease mechanisms

Creating elite encounters: The ‘campaign’ as approach for interviewing corporate elites

Qualitative research in economic geography recognizes the value of accessing business elite perspectives, yet identifying, approaching and interviewing elites present researchers with a set of challenges. Both practical and ethical, these challenges can be particularly acute for research involving ‘contentious’ firms and sectors – those facing increased societal scrutiny due to histories of labour exploitation, bribery and pollution and where there are often strong asymmetries in social power. This paper proposes a systematic approach for managing these challenges and successfully conducting interviews with business elites that we term an interview ‘campaign’. We propose the interview campaign as a strategic, organized and nimble approach designed to achieve a specific goal – an elite encounter. We show how instrumentalism and strategic ambiguity are central to the campaign, and how both can be harnessed to navigate an environment characterized by uncertainty, serendipity and structured relations of power. Our ‘campaign approach’ systematically breaks down a complex process into manageable parts without losing sight of the whole, via clear goals, strategic planning and critical reflection. The need for evidence-based research on corporate strategic action in relation to a wide range of contemporary economic phenomena suggests the campaign approach may have value across many areas of economic geography, business studies and beyond. The paper draws upon established social science literatures on elite interviewing and political campaigning, and on our own experience conducting interviews with senior executives in the oil and gas industry

Rethinking Energy Geopolitics: Towards a Geopolitical Economy of Global Energy Transformation

We are in the midst of a global energy system transformation (GEST) which is rewiring the world economy, opening new axes of political contestation, and revolutionising the energetic basis of human civilisation. Energy geopolitics has not yet reconciled itself to this challenge. The field has traditionally been preoccupied with the dependence of Western states on cross-border flows of fossil fuels. More recently, efforts have been made to prospectively map out what the geopolitics of a fully renewable world might look like. What both literatures miss, however, is the very fact of the GEST: that we are living through a changing and contested process of global transformation, across interacting high- and low-emissions systems, whose contours are open and actively constructed over time. In this paper, we start to develop a provisional framework to make sense of the GEST, that is able to capture the full scale of the transformation, and its dynamic, contingent, constructed nature. We attend to three areas of geopolitical economy: the wide-ranging material dimensions of the transformation, its geographical space-making, and its conflict-ridden political economy. We then apply this framework to two case studies, one looking at the fraught role of fossil gas as a ‘transition fuel’, the other at lithium-ion batteries