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The relentless pursuit of lower production costs causes companies to invest in more efficient production systems so that they can remain economically competitive, while the actions focusing on more sustainable operations from an environmental point of view are usually performed to meet the political government regulating environmental control. However, it is common for companies to focus their efforts to minimize the environmental impacts at an early stage of the product life cycle, neglecting sustainability management in the post-use phase. Given the context, this study seeks to develop sustainability indicators that can be used by the electronics industry to assess the level of practice and performance during production that are related to product recovery after the use phase, in order to better understand how companies are acting to reduce the environmental impacts of their products at the end of their life cycle. Initially, critical success factors related to environmental management of the product's end-of-life are obtained. Then, some of those critical success factors are prioritized, giving rise to the indicators of sustainability used in the benchmarking method. Benchmarking was performed in electronics Brazilian companies, and the data was obtained by means of a questionnaire and interviews. It is concluded from the results that the proposed indicators are suitable for measuring the levels of practices and performance of the participant companies in environmental management at the end of the product life cycle as the indicators were able to portray faithfully the reality of each company. ; N/A

Background: Several independent lines of evidence suggest that Amazon forests have provided a significant carbon sink service, and also that the Amazon carbon sink in intact, mature forests may now be threatened as a result of different processes. There has however been no work done to quantify non-land-use-change forest carbon fluxes on a national basis within Amazonia, or to place these national fluxes and their possible changes in the context of the major anthropogenic carbon fluxes in the region. Here we present a first attempt to interpret results from ground-based monitoring of mature forest carbon fluxes in a biogeographically, politically, and temporally differentiated way. Specifically, using results from a large long-term network of forest plots, we estimate the Amazon biomass carbon balance over the last three decades for the different regions and nine nations of Amazonia, and evaluate the magnitude and trajectory of these differentiated balances in relation to major national anthropogenic carbon emissions. Results: The sink of carbon into mature forests has been remarkably geographically ubiquitous across Amazonia, being substantial and persistent in each of the five biogeographic regions within Amazonia. Between 1980 and 2010, it has more than mitigated the fossil fuel emissions of every single national economy, except that of Venezuela. For most nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname) the sink has probably additionally mitigated all anthropogenic carbon emissions due to Amazon deforestation and other land use change. While the sink has weakened in some regions since 2000, our analysis suggests that Amazon nations which are able to conserve large areas of natural and semi-natural landscape still contribute globally-significant carbon sequestration. Conclusions: Mature forests across all of Amazonia have contributed significantly to mitigating climate change for decades. Yet Amazon nations have not directly benefited from providing this global scale ecosystem ...

This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Soicety © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved ; We present results of the first dynamical stream fits to the recently discovered Tucana III stream. These fits assume a fixed Milky Way potential and give proper motion predictions, which can be tested with the upcoming Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2). These fits reveal that Tucana III is on an eccentric orbit around the Milky Way and, more interestingly, that Tucana III passed within 15 kpc of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) approximately 75 Myr ago. Given this close passage, we fit the Tucana III stream in the combined presence of the Milky Way and the LMC. We find that the predicted proper motions depend on the assumed mass of the LMC and that the LMC can induce a substantial proper motion perpendicular to the stream track. A detection of this misalignment will directly probe the extent of the LMC's influence on our Galaxy, and has implications for nearly all methods which attempt to constraint the Milky Way potential. Such a measurement will be possible with the upcoming Gaia DR2, allowing for a measurement of the LMC's mass. ; DE and VB acknowledge that the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007- 2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 308024. EB acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (StG-335936). ABP acknowledges generous support from the George P. and Cynthia Woods Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro- Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundacâo Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnología e Inovacâo, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey

Reproduced with permission of AAS ; We present chemical abundance measurements of three stars in the ultrafaint dwarf galaxy Horologium I, a Milky Way satellite discovered by the Dark Energy Survey. Using high-resolution spectroscopic observations, we measure the metallicity of the three stars, as well as abundance ratios of several α-elements, iron-peak elements, and neutron-capture elements. The abundance pattern is relatively consistent among all three stars, which have a low average metallicity of [Fe/H] ∼ -2.6 and are not α-enhanced ([α/Fe] ∼ 0.0). This result is unexpected when compared to other low-metallicity stars in the Galactic halo and other ultrafaint dwarfs and suggests the possibility of a different mechanism for the enrichment of Hor I compared to other satellites. We discuss possible scenarios that could lead to this observed nucleosynthetic signature, including extended star formation, enrichment by a Population III supernova, and or an association with the Large Magellanic Cloud ; Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV- 2012-0234, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007- 2013), including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project no. CE110001020

Aim: The accurate mapping of forest carbon stocks is essential for understanding the global carbon cycle, for assessing emissions from deforestation, and for rational land-use planning. Remote sensing (RS) is currently the key tool for this purpose, but RS does not estimate vegetation biomass directly, and thus may miss significant spatial variations in forest structure. We test the stated accuracy of pantropical carbon maps using a large independent field dataset. Location: Tropical forests of the Amazon basin. The permanent archive of the field plot data can be accessed at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5521/FORESTPLOTS.NET/2014_1 Methods: Two recent pantropical RS maps of vegetation carbon are compared to a unique ground-plot dataset, involving tree measurements in 413 large inventory plots located in nine countries. The RS maps were compared directly to field plots, and kriging of the field data was used to allow area-based comparisons. Results: The two RS carbon maps fail to capture the main gradient in Amazon forest carbon detected using 413 ground plots, from the densely wooded tall forests of the north-east, to the light-wooded, shorter forests of the south-west. The differences between plots and RS maps far exceed the uncertainties given in these studies, with whole regions over- or under-estimated by >???25%, whereas regional uncertainties for the maps were reported to be

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) ; U.S. Department of Energy ; U.S. National Science Foundation ; Ministry of Science and Education of Spain ; Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom ; Higher Education Fending Council for England ; National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago ; Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University ; Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas AM University ; Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos ; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) ; Ministerio da Ciencia, Tecnologia e Inovacao ; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey ; Argonne National Laboratory ; University of California at Santa Cruz ; University of Cambridge ; Centro de Investigaciones Energeticas, Medioambientales y Tecnologicas-Madrid ; University of Chicago ; University College London ; DES-Brazil Consortium ; University of Edinburgh ; Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich ; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Institut de Ciencies de l'Espai (IEEC/CSIC) ; Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies ; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ; Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat Munchen ; associated Excellence Cluster Universe ; University of Michigan ; National Optical Astronomy Observatory ; University of Nottingham ; Ohio State University ; University of Pennsylvania ; University of Portsmouth ; SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University ; University of Sussex ; Texas AM University ; OzDES Membership Consortium ; National Science foundation ; MINECO ; European Union ; CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) ; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO) ; U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics ; CNPq: 141935/2014-6 ; CNPq: 465376/2014-2 ; National Science foundation: AST-1138766 ; National Science foundation: AST-1536171 ; MINECO: AYA2015-71825 ; MINECO: ESP2015-66861 ; MINECO: FPA2015-68048 ; MINECO: SEV-2016-0588 ; MINECO: SEV-2016-0597 ; MINECO: MDM-2015-0509 ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013): 240672 ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013): 291329 ; European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013): 306478 ; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO): CE110001020 ; U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics: DE-AC02-07CH11359 ; We use data from the first-year observations of the DES collaboration to measure the galaxy angular power spectrum (APS), and search for its BAO feature. We test our methodology in a sample of 1800 DES Y1-like mock catalogues. We use the pseudo-C-l, method to estimate the APS and the mock catalogues to estimate its covariance matrix. We use templates to model the measured spectra and estimate template parameters firstly from the G's of the mocks using two different methods, a maximum likelihood estimator and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo, finding consistent results with a good reduced chi(2). Robustness tests are performed to estimate the impact of different choices of settings used in our analysis. Finally, we apply our method to a galaxy sample constructed from DES Y1 data specifically for LSS studies. This catalogue comprises galaxies within an effective area of 1318 deg(2) and 0.6 < z < 1.0. We find that the DES Y1 data favour a model with BAO at the 2.6 sigma C.L. However, the goodness of fit is somewhat poor, with chi(2)/(d.o.f.) = 1.49. We identify a possible cause showing that using a theoretical covariance matrix obtained from C-l's that are better adjusted to data results in an improved value of chi(2)/(dof) = 1.36 which is similar to the value obtained with the real-space analysis. Our results correspond to a distance measurement of D-A (Z(eff) = 0.81)/r(d) = 10.65 +/- 0.49, consistent with the main DES BAO findings. This is a companion paper to the main DES BAO article showing the details of the harmonic space analysis.

Despite vast improvements in the measurement of the cosmological parameters, the nature of dark energy and an accurate value of the Hubble constant (H-0) in the Hubble-Lemaitre law remain unknown. To break the current impasse, it is necessary to develop as many independent techniques as possible, such as the use of Type II supernovae (SNe II). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the utility of SNe II for deriving accurate extragalactic distances, which will be an asset for the next generation of telescopes where more-distant SNe II will be discovered. More specifically, we present a sample from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program (DES-SN) consisting of 15 SNe II with photometric and spectroscopic information spanning a redshift range up to 0.35. Combining our DES SNe with publicly available samples, and using the standard candle method (SCM), we construct the largest available Hubble diagram with SNe II in the Hubble flow (70 SNe II) and find an observed dispersion of 0.27 mag. We demonstrate that adding a colour term to the SN II standardization does not reduce the scatter in the Hubble diagram. Although SNe II are viable as distance indicators, this work points out important issues for improving their utility as independent extragalactic beacons: find new correlations, define a more standard subclass of SNe II, construct new SN II templates, and dedicate more observing time to high-redshift SNe II. Finally, for the first time, we perform simulations to estimate the redshift-dependent distance-modulus bias due to selection effects. ; National Science Foundation (NSF) AST-1211916 TABASGO Foundation, Gary and Cynthia Bengier Christopher R. Redlich Fund Sylvia and Jim Katzman Foundation Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science (UC Berkeley) - European Union 839090 Spanish grant PGC2018-095317-B-C21 European Union (EU) EU/FP7-ERC grant 615929 National Science Foundation (NSF) Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) collaboration includes the astronomical communities of Japan Princeton University Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) University of Tokyo High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) FIRST programme from the Japanese Cabinet Office Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (MEXT) Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Japan Science & Technology Agency (JST) Toray Industries, Inc. Institute for Astronomy (the University of Hawaii) Max Planck Society Foundation CELLEX National Central University of Taiwan Space Telescope Science Institute National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) NNX08AR22G National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) National Science Foundation (NSF) AST-1238877 University of Maryland Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE) National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) W.M. Keck Foundation National Research Council of Canada Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) National Research Council Comision Nacional de Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnologica (CONICYT) Australian Research Council National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas (CONICET) GN-2005A-Q11 GN-2005B-Q-7 GN-2006A-Q-7 GS-2005A-Q-11 GS-2005BQ-6 GS-2008B-Q-56 United States Department of Energy (DOE) Spanish Government Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Higher Education Funding Council for England National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ohio State University Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas AM University Ciencia Tecnologia e Inovacao (FINEP) Fundacao Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient'tronomy at Texas AM University German Research Foundation (DFG) University of Portsmouth OzDES Membership Consortium National Science Foundation (NSF) AST-1138766 AST-1536171 AYA2015-71825 ESP2015-66861 FPA2015-68048 SEV2016-0588 SEV-2016-0597 European Union (EU) European Union - CERCA programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya European Research Council (ERC) European Research Council (ERC) 240672 291329 306478 National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) 465376/2014-2 United States Department of Energy (DOE) United States Department of Energy (DOE) DE-AC02-05CH11231 United States Department of Energy (DOE) DE-AC02-05CH11231