Life cycle assessment of battery electric vehicles: Implications of future electricity mix and different battery end-of-life management.

The environmental performance of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is influenced by their battery size and charging electricity source. Therefore, assessing their environmental performance should consider changes in the electricity sector and refurbishment of their batteries. This study conducts a scenario-based Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of three different scenarios combining four key parameters: future changes in the charging electricity mix, battery efficiency fade, battery refurbishment, and recycling for their collective importance on the life-cycle environmental performance of a BEV.

Temporalis, a generic method and tool for dynamic Life Cycle Assessment.

The limitations of the static nature of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are well known. To overcome the loss of temporal information due to the aggregation of flows in the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), several dynamic LCA methodologies have been proposed. In this paper we present a new generic and operational methodology for dynamic LCA that allows for the introduction of temporal information in both in the inventory and the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) phases.

EFO-LCI: A New Life Cycle Inventory Database of Forestry Operations in Europe.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a common methodology to analyze environmental impacts of forestry systems. Although LCA has been widely applied to forestry since the 90s, the LCAs are still often based on generic Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). With the purpose of improving LCA practices in the forestry sector, we developed a European Life Cycle Inventory of Forestry Operations (EFO-LCI) and analyzed the available information to check if within the European forestry sector national differences really exist.

Glucose transporter (Glut1, Glut3) mRNA in human placenta of diabetic and non-diabetic pregnancies.

Transport of glucose into the cell is catalyzed by glucose transporters (Glut). Glut1 and Glut3 are expressed at various levels in many human tissues, including the placenta. It has been reported that ambient glucose can affect both glucose transport activity and expression of the Glut genes, and protein.

Autoimmune markers of diabetes in diabetic pregnancy.

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has been described in 1-3% of pregnancies and increases the risk (up to 60-70%) to subsequently developing an overt diabetes (generally of type 2 non insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM)). Several humoral autoimmune phenomena have been described in GDM: islet cell antibodies (ICA) have been found and it was shown that ICA+ patients tend to have a worse glucose tolerance. Recently, autoantibodies against glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), were detected in type 1 diabetic sera before or at the onset of the disease; these markers, as well as ICA and insulin antibodies, seem to have a predictive value for the onset of the disease.