Altitude Diving on a Closed Circuit Oxygen Rebreather.

Closed-circuit rebreather diving is becoming more common. Rebreathers are complicated, adding to the stress of diving. Also adding to this complexity in the presented case is diving at a high-altitude, cold-water reservoir in Colorado. One diver experienced an oxygen-induced seizure at depth. The other diver had a rapid ascent with loss of consciousness. In this case, two experienced divers recovered from a possible devastating dive. Fortunately, they both returned to their pre-dive baseline health. Dive plan- ning is important, but as in this case, dive execution is paramount. This is a clinical case for an uncommon event presenting to an emergency department.

Does bank credit to the private sector promote low-carbon development in Brazil? An extended STIRPAT analysis using dynamic ARDL simulations.

In support of the global efforts to tackle climate change, policy makers in the past decades have been actively involved, exploring possible options for ensuring low-carbon pattern of development. This study contributes to this important stream of policy discussion by using a newly developed econometric technique, dynamic ARDL simulations, to estimate and simulate the impact of bank credit to the private sector on aggregate carbon emissions and carbon emission intensity in Brazil over the period 1971-2014. The examined empirical model is based on a framework that incorporates the impact of population, economic growth, fossil energy intensity of consumption, and economic globalization. The analysis produced interesting results. First, the estimates show that economic growth and fossil energy intensity of consumption have significant long-run increasing impact on CO2 emissions in Brazil. Second, bank credit to the private sector has significant short-run and long-run reducing effects on aggregate CO2 emission and carbon emission intensity in the economy. Overall, the results reflect the tendency of the economy to become less carbon-intensive as bank credit supply to the private sector increases.

Biomass-Derived Carbon Molecular Sieves Applied to an Enhanced Carbon Capture and Storage Process (e-CCS) for Flue Gas Streams in Shallow Reservoirs.

It is possible to take advantage of shallow reservoirs (<300 m) for CO2 capture and storage in the post-combustion process. This process is called enhanced carbon capture and storage (e-CCS). In this process, it is necessary to use a nano-modifying agent to improve the chemical-physical properties of geological media, which allows the performance of CO2 selective adsorption to be enhanced. Therefore, this study presents the development and evaluation of carbon sphere molecular nano-sieves (CSMNS) from cane molasses for e-CSS. This is the first report in the scientific literature on CSMNS, due to their size and structure. In this study, sandstone was used as geological media, and was functionalized using a nanofluid, which was composed of CNMNS dispersed in deionized water. Finally, CO2 or N2 streams were used for evaluating the adsorption process at different conditions of pressure and temperature. As the main result, the nanomaterial allowed a natural selectivity towards CO2, and the sandstone enhanced the adsorption capacity by an incremental factor of 730 at reservoir conditions (50 °C and 2.5 MPa) using a nanoparticle mass fraction of 20%. These nanofluids applied to a new concept of carbon capture and storage for shallow reservoirs present a novel landscape for the control of industrial CO2 emissions.