A secure energy supply is a basic need of society. Along with electricity market deregulation, a responsibility gap has arisen, where private energy companies lack economic incentives to invest in an electricity distribution grid that is secured to the level desired by society. This article discusses the emergency management strategies of municipal authorities for securing the electricity supply,

Energy is an important social resource on which we depend in our everyday lives; however, energy-related emissions constitute a major environmental load, so we need to use energy more efficiently. To develop sustainable energy systems, users should transform their behavior and start reflecting on their energy use. This paper discusses different methods for visualizing household energy use. We will

The trend in the district heating industry is toward increased privatization and openness to competition, which bring with them other phenomena associated with civil law, such as bankruptcies. Vingåker was one of six Swedish municipalities whose district heating companies went bankrupt in 2004. The bankruptcy caused major disruptions in Vingåker, not least as a result of the unregulated legal fram

This study aims to increase our understanding of how co-operation in inter-municipality policy networks in a Swedish region is established and maintained regarding emergency management. We discuss how a network of five municipalities emerged and took shape. Overall, we conclude that co-ordination and co-operation in municipal emergency management are probably relatively easy to develop, because it

Case studies of two Swedish municipalities indicate that the general energy area was divided into three independent policy areas: One dealing with supply, one with conservation and one with environmental questions related to the Agenda 21 vision of an ecologically sustainable energy system. However, the dominant energy policy area in the municipalities was supply policy. This article discusses why

The widespread international interest in the Nordic region and the mobility of Nordic brand imaginaries call for more research into the global relevance of Nordic place-branding practices. This book offers a timely attempt to unpack the specificity of the Nordic in regard to place branding by gathering different transdisciplinary accounts written by researchers in marketing, tourism, geography, co

In this study, a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor was developed for the detection and quantification of a secreted bacterial factor (RoxP) from skin. A molecular imprinting method was used for the preparation of sensor chips and five different monomer-cross-linker compositions were evaluated for sensitivity, selectivity, affinity, and kinetic measurements. The most promising molecularly i

Different FAD dependent GDH enzymes together with the Os-redox polymer Os(4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-bipyridine)2(PVI)10Cl]+ and a modified graphite electrode was shown to have distinct selectivity and high turnover rates towards glucose. The results of this study suggest that such electrodes may be applied either for glucose determination or as bioanodes in glucose biofuel cells. Further, higher current

Cutibacterium acnes is an abundant skin commensal with several proposed mutualistic functions. A protein with strong antioxidant activity was recently identified from the C. acnes secretome. This protein, termed RoxP, facilitated aerobic bacterial growth in vitro and ex vivo. As reducing events naturally occurred outside of the bacterial cell, it was further hypothesized that RoxP could also serve

The study of quantum thermal machines, and more generally of open quantum systems, often relies on master equations. Two approaches are mainly followed. On the one hand, there is the widely used, but often criticized, local approach, where machine sub-systems locally couple to thermal baths. On the other hand, in the more established global approach, thermal baths couple to global degrees of freed

We propose the use of a quantum thermal machine for low-temperature thermometry. A hot thermal reservoir coupled to the machine allows for simultaneously cooling the sample while determining its temperature without knowing the model-dependent coupling constants. In its most simple form, the proposed scheme works for all thermal machines that perform at Otto efficiency and can reach Carnot efficien

We review our recent proposals for the on-demand generation of entangled few-electron states using dynamic single-electron sources. The generation of entanglement can be traced back to the single-electron entanglement produced by quantum point contacts (QPCs) acting as electronic beam splitters. The coherent partitioning of a single electron leads to entanglement between the two outgoing arms of t

The communicative role of nonlinear vocal phenomena remains poorly understood since they are difficult to manipulate or even measure with conventional tools. In this study parametric voice synthesis was employed to add pitch jumps, subharmonics/sidebands, and chaos to synthetic human nonverbal vocalizations. In Experiment 1 (86 participants, 144 sounds), chaos was associated with lower valence, an

Carbon storage dynamics in vegetation and soil are determined by the balance of carbon influx and turnover. Estimates of these opposing fluxes differ markedly among different empirical datasets and models leading to uncertainty and divergent trends. To trace the origin of such discrepancies through time and across major biomes and climatic regions, we used a model-data fusion framework. The framew

Magnetic sensing is used to structure every-day, non-migratory behaviours in many animals. We show that crayfish exhibit robust spontaneous magnetic alignment responses. These magnetic behaviours are altered by interactions with Branchiobdellidan worms, which are obligate ectosymbionts. Branchiobdellidan worms have previously been shown to have positive effects on host growth when present at moder

The vertebrate gene repertoire is characterized by “cryptic” genes whose identification has been hampered by their absence from the genomes of well-studied species. One example is the Bmp16 gene, a paralog of the developmental key genes Bmp2 and -4. We focus on the Bmp2/4/16 group of genes to study the evolutionary dynamics following gen(om)e duplications with special emphasis on the poorly studie