Assessing the impact of future greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas production.

Greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by the extraction of natural gas are an important contributor to lifecycle emissions and account for a significant fraction of anthropogenic methane emissions in the USA. The timing as well as the magnitude of these emissions matters, as the short term climate warming impact of methane is up to 120 times that of CO. This study uses estimates of CO and methane emissions associated with different upstream operations to build a deterministic model of GHG emissions from conventional and unconventional gas fields as a function of time.

Membrane buckling induced by curved filaments.

We present a novel buckling instability relevant to membrane budding in eukaryotic cells. In this mechanism, curved filaments bind to a lipid bilayer without changing its intrinsic curvature. As more and more filaments adsorb, newly added ones are more and more strained, which destabilizes the flat membrane.