Feasibility test of per-flight contrail avoidance in commercial aviation.

Contrails, formed by aircraft engines, are a major component of aviation's impact on anthropogenic climate change. Contrail avoidance is a potential option to mitigate this warming effect, however, uncertainties surrounding operational constraints and accurate formation prediction make it unclear whether it is feasible. Here we address this gap with a feasibility test through a randomized controlled trial of contrail avoidance in commercial aviation at the per-flight level.

Short- and long-term efficacy of forest thinning to mitigate drought impacts in mountain forests in the European Alps.

In many regions of the world, drought is projected to increase under climate change, with potential negative consequences for forests and their ecosystem services (ES). Forest thinning has been proposed as a method for at least temporarily mitigating drought impacts, but its general applicability and longer-term impacts are unclear. We use a process-based forest model to upscale experimental data for evaluating the impacts of forest thinning in a drought-susceptible valley in the interior of the European Alps, with the specific aim of assessing (1) when and where thinning may be most effective and (2) the longer-term implications for forest dynamics.

Hydrogen exchange-mass spectrometry measures stapled peptide conformational dynamics and predicts pharmacokinetic properties.

Peptide drugs have traditionally suffered from poor pharmacokinetic properties due to their conformational flexibility and the interaction of proteases with backbone amide bonds. "Stapled Peptides" are cyclized using an all-hydrocarbon cross-linking strategy to reinforce their α-helical conformation, yielding improved protease resistance and drug-like properties. Here we demonstrate that hydrogen exchange-mass spectrometry (HX-MS) effectively probes the conformational dynamics of Stapled Peptides derived from the survivin-borealin protein-protein interface and predicts their susceptibility to proteolytic degradation.

Evaluating the relative impact of climate and economic changes on forest and agricultural ecosystem services in mountain regions.

Provisioning of ecosystem services (ES) in mountainous regions is predicted to be influenced by i) the direct biophysical impacts of climate change, ii) climate mediated land use change, and iii) socioeconomic driven changes in land use. The relative importance and the spatial distribution of these factors on forest and agricultural derived ES, however, is unclear, making the implementation of ES management schemes difficult. Using an integrated economic-ecological modeling framework, we evaluated the impact of these driving forces on the provision of forest and agricultural ES in a mountain region of southern Switzerland.