Actors, legitimacy, and governance challenges facing negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies.

Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based on a rigorous sample of semi-structured expert interviews ( = 125), we empirically explore the types of actors and groups associated with both negative emissions and solar geoengineering research and deployment.

Fighting Science with Science: Counter-Expertise Production in Anti-Shale Gas Mobilizations in France and Poland.

Between the second half of the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, the prospect of shale gas extraction in Europe at first prompted fervent political support, then met with local and national opposition, and was finally rendered moot by a global collapse in the oil price. In the Europe-wide protests against shale gas and the main technique employed to extract it, hydraulic fracturing (or fracking), counter-expertise played a crucial role. This kind of expertise is one of the main elements of "energy citizenship," a concept recently developed in the field of energy humanities which describes the empowerment of citizens in decision-making processes related to energy issues.

What's in a Pipe?: NATO's Confrontation on the 1962 Large-Diameter Pipe Embargo.

By the late 1950s, the Soviet Union had acquired a strong position as a world oil exporter, thanks to major discoveries in the Ural-Volga area. In order to transport their oil to strategic areas within the Union and to Europe, the Soviets devised a project to build a colossal pipeline system. This plan caused anxiety at NATO since Russian oil could be wielded as a weapon to weaken the West both militarily and economically.

The waste crisis in Campania, South Italy: a historical perspective on an epidemiological controversy.

Between 2001 and 2009, the area of Naples, South Italy, repeatedly hit the headlines of national and international media due to the waste management crisis that on many occasions filled up the streets of the region with huge piles of waste. What soon emerged as the main bone of contention concerned the connections between the population's health and the presence of dumps on the territory. What the risks for health actually were, who was entitled to assess them, and whether pollution from proximity to dumps caused health problems were all topics that came to the fore during a debate that took place within the Italian epidemiological community, alongside the political and governance crisis.

Analysis of ancient sequence motifs in the H-PPase family.

The unique family of membrane-bound proton-pumping inorganic pyrophosphatases, involving pyrophosphate as the alternative to ATP, was investigated by characterizing 166 members of the UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot + UniProtKB/TrEMBL databases and available completed genomes, using sequence comparisons and a hidden Markov model based upon a conserved 57-residue region in the loop between transmembrane segments 5 and 6. The hidden Markov model was also used to search the approximately one million sequences recently reported from a large-scale sequencing project of organisms in the Sargasso Sea, resulting in additional 164 partial pyrophosphatase sequences. The strongly conserved 57-residue region was found to contain two nonapeptidyl sequences, mainly consisting of the four 'very early' proteinaceous amino acid residues Gly, Ala, Val and Asp, compatible with an ancient origin of the inorganic pyrophosphatases.