The SOLUTIONS project: challenges and responses for present and future emerging pollutants in land and water resources management.

SOLUTIONS (2013 to 2018) is a European Union Seventh Framework Programme Project (EU-FP7). The project aims to deliver a conceptual framework to support the evidence-based development of environmental policies with regard to water quality. SOLUTIONS will develop the tools for the identification, prioritisation and assessment of those water contaminants that may pose a risk to ecosystems and human health. To this end, a new generation of chemical and effect-based monitoring tools is developed and integrated with a full set of exposure, effect and risk assessment models. SOLUTIONS attempts to address legacy, present and future contamination by integrating monitoring and modelling based approaches with scenarios on future developments in society, economy and technology and thus in contamination. The project follows a solutions-oriented approach by addressing major problems of water and chemicals management and by assessing abatement options. SOLUTIONS takes advantage of the access to the infrastructure necessary to investigate the large basins of the Danube and Rhine as well as relevant Mediterranean basins as case studies, and puts major efforts on stakeholder dialogue and support. Particularly, the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) working groups, International River Commissions, and water works associations are directly supported with consistent guidance for the early detection, identification, prioritisation, and abatement of chemicals in the water cycle. SOLUTIONS will give a specific emphasis on concepts and tools for the impact and risk assessment of complex mixtures of emerging pollutants, their metabolites and transformation products. Analytical and effect-based screening tools will be applied together with ecological assessment tools for the identification of toxicants and their impacts. The SOLUTIONS approach is expected to provide transparent and evidence-based candidates or River Basin Specific Pollutants in the case study basins and to assist future review of priority pollutants under the WFD as well as potential abatement options.

Spectrophotometric properties of the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the OSIRIS instrument onboard the ROSETTA spacecraft

Context. The Rosetta mission of the European Space Agency has been orbiting the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) since August 2014 and is now in its escort phase. A large complement of scientific experiments designed to complete the most detailed study of a comet ever attempted are onboard Rosetta. Aims. We present results for the photometric and spectrophotometric properties of the nucleus of 67P derived from the OSIRIS imaging system, which consists of a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) and a Narrow Angle Camera (NAC). The observations presented here were performed during July and the beginning of August 2014, during the approach phase, when OSIRIS was mapping the surface of the comet with several filters at different phase angles (1.3 degrees-54 degrees). The resolution reached up to 2.1 m/px. Methods. The OSIRIS images were processed with the OSIRIS standard pipeline, then converted into I/F. radiance factors and corrected for the illumination conditions at each pixel using the Lommel-Seeliger disk law. Color cubes of the surface were produced by stacking registered and illumination-corrected images. Furthermore, photometric analysis was performed both on disk-averaged photometry in several filters and on disk-resolved images acquired with the NAC orange filter, centered at 649 ran, using Hapke modeling. Results. The disk-averaged phase function of the nucleus of 67P shows a strong opposition surge with a G parameter value of -0.13 +/- 0.01 in the HG system formalism and an absolute magnitude H-v(1, 1, 0) = 15.74 +/- 0.02 mag. The integrated spectrophotometry in 20 filters covering the 250-1000 nm wavelength range shows a red spectral behavior, without clear absorption bands except for a potential absorption centered at similar to 290 rim that is possibly due to SO2 ice. The nucleus shows strong phase reddening, with disk-averaged spectral slopes increasing from 11%/( 100 nm) to 16%/(100 nm) in the 1.3 degrees-54 degrees phase angle range. The geometric albedo of the comet is 6.5 +/- 0.2% at 649 nm, with local variations of up to similar to 16% in the Hapi region. From the disk-resolved images we computed the spectral slope together with local spectrophotometry and identified three distinct groups of regions (blue, moderately red, and red). The Hapi region is the brightest, the bluest in term of spectral slope, and the most active surface on the comet. Local spectrophotometry shows an enhancement of the flux in the 700-750 nm that is associated with coma emissions.

Pelvic Fractures in Children Results from the German Pelvic Trauma Registry: A Cohort Study.

As pelvic fractures in children and adolescents are very rare, the surgical management is not well delineated nor are the postoperative complications. The aim of this study using the prospective data from German Pelvic Trauma Registry study was to evaluate the various treatment approaches compared to adults and delineated the differences in postoperative complications after pelvic injuries.Using the prospective pelvic trauma registry established by the German Society of Traumatology and the German Section of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Osteosynthesefragen (AO), International in 1991, patients with pelvic fractures over a 12-year time frame submitted by any 1 of the 23 member level I trauma centers were reviewed.We identified a total of 13,525 patients including pelvic fractures in 13,317 adults and 208 children aged ≤14 years and compared these 2 groups. The 2 groups' Injury Severitiy Score (ISS) did not differ statistically. Lethality in the pediatric group was 6.3%, not statistically different from the adults' 4.6%. In all, 18.3% of the pediatric pelvic fractures were treated surgically as compared to 22.7% in the adult group. No child suffered any thrombosis/embolism, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), multiorgan failure (MOF), or neurologic deficit, nor was any septic MOF detected. The differences between adults and children were statistically significant in that the children suffered less frequently from thrombosis/embolism (P = 0.041) and ARDS and MOF (P = 0.006).This prospective multicenter study addressing patients with pelvic fractures reveals that the risk for a thrombosis/embolism, ARDS, and MOF is significant lower in pediatric patients than in adults. No statistical differences could be found in the ratios of operative therapy of the pelvic fractures in children compared to adults.