The nation faces tremendous costs required to maintain and improve its water and wastewater infrastructure. Effective management of water delivery and treatment systems would benefit from a regular national water demand data collection effort that captures consumption by economic sector as well as by end use. A water demand survey would provide the data necessary to better understand water demand trends, and ultimately to assess implications for water infrastructure needs and the U.S. economy. This report summarizes current publicly available water demand information and recommends data parameters for a national water demand survey.

Servers’ field energy use remains poorly understood, given heterogeneous computing loads, configurable hardware and software, and operation over a wide range of management practices. This paper explores various characteristics of 1- and 2-socket volume servers that affect energy consumption, and quantifies the difference in power demand between higher-performing SPEC and ENERGY STAR servers and our best understanding of a typical server operating today. We first establish general characteristics of the U.S. installed base of volume servers from existing IDC data and the literature, before presenting information on server hardware configurations from data collection events at a major online retail website. We then compare cumulative distribution functions of server idle power across three separate datasets and explain the differences between them via examination of the hardware characteristics to which power draw is most sensitive. We find that idle server power demand is significantly higher than ENERGY STAR benchmarks and the industry-released energy use documented in SPEC, and that SPEC server configurations—and likely the associated power-scaling trends—are atypical of volume servers. Next, we examine recent trends in server power draw among high-performing servers across their full load range to consider how representative these trends are of all volume servers before inputting weighted average idle power load values into a recently published model of national server energy use. Finally, we present results from two surveys of IT managers (n=216) and IT vendors (n=178) that illustrate the prevalence of more-efficient equipment and operational practices in server rooms and closets; these findings highlight opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of the U.S. server stock.

This report describes the analytical models Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed to estimate impacts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) WaterSense® labeling program. The models assess national impacts for WaterSense labeled toilets, faucets, faucet aerators, showerheads, flushing urinals, commercial pre-rinse spray valves, and weather or soil moisture sensor-based irrigation controllers (WBICs) by analyzing national inputs for water use in residential and commercial/institutional (CI) markets. For irrigation controllers, LBNL’s methodology also incorporates a scenario that evaluates impacts in three key large states that are considered to be the principal market for “smart” irrigation controllers: California, Florida, and Texas. The models estimate impacts for the water savings attributable to the program and the net present value (NPV) of the lifetime water savings from more efficient products.

This report describes the analytical models Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed to estimate impacts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) WaterSense® labeling program. The models assess national impacts for WaterSense labeled toilets, faucets, faucet aerators, showerheads, flushing urinals, commercial pre-rinse spray valves, and weather or soil moisture sensor-based irrigation controllers (WBICs) by analyzing national inputs for water use in residential and commercial/institutional (CI) markets. For irrigation controllers, LBNL’s methodology also incorporates a scenario that evaluates impacts in three key large states that are considered to be the principal market for “smart” irrigation controllers: California, Florida, and Texas. The models estimate impacts for the water savings attributable to the program and the net present value (NPV) of the lifetime water savings from more efficient products.

This report describes the analytical models Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed to estimate impacts of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) WaterSense® labeling program. The models assess national impacts for WaterSense labeled toilets, faucets, faucet aerators, showerheads, flushing urinals, commercial pre-rinse spray valves, and weather or soil moisture sensor-based irrigation controllers (WBICs) by analyzing national inputs for water use in residential and commercial/institutional (CI) markets. For irrigation controllers, LBNL’s methodology also incorporates a scenario that evaluates impacts in three key large states that are considered to be the principal market for “smart” irrigation controllers: California, Florida, and Texas. The models estimate impacts for the water savings attributable to the program and the net present value (NPV) of the lifetime water savings from more efficient products.

The formation of organic nitrates and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) were monitored during the NO₃ + limonene reaction in the atmosphere simulation chamber SAPHIR at Research Center Jülich. The 24-h run began in a purged, dry, particle-free chamber and comprised two injections of limonene and oxidants, such that the first experiment measured SOA yield in the absence of seed aerosol, and the second experiment yields in the presence of 10 μg m⁻³ seed organic aerosol. After each injection, two separate increases in aerosol mass were observed, corresponding to sequential oxidation of the two limonene double bonds. Analysis of the measured NO₃, limonene, product nitrate concentrations, and aerosol properties provides mechanistic insight and constrains rate constants, branching ratios and vapor pressures of the products. The organic nitrate yield from NO₃ + limonene is ≈30%. The SOA mass yield was observed to be 25–40%. The first injection is reproduced by a kinetic model. PMF analysis of the aerosol composition suggests that much of the aerosol mass results from combined oxidation by both O₃ and NO₃, e.g., oxidation of NO₃ + limonene products by O₃. Further, later aerosol nitrate mass seems to derive from heterogeneous uptake of NO₃ onto unreacted aerosol alkene.

The yields of organic nitrates and of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) particle formation were measured for the reaction NO₃+β-pinene under dry and humid conditions in the atmosphere simulation chamber SAPHIR at Research Center Jülich. These experiments were conducted at low concentrations of NO₃ (NO₃+N₂O₅<10 ppb) and β-pinene (peak~15 ppb), with no seed aerosol. SOA formation was observed to be prompt and substantial (~50% mass yield under both dry conditions and at 60% RH), and highly correlated with organic nitrate formation. The observed gas/aerosol partitioning of organic nitrates can be simulated using an absorptive partitioning model to derive an estimated vapor pressure of the condensing nitrate species of p_vap~5×10⁻⁶ Torr (6.67×10⁻⁴ Pa), which constrains speculation about the oxidation mechanism and chemical identity of the organic nitrate. Once formed the SOA in this system continues to evolve, resulting in measurable aerosol volume decrease with time. The observations of high aerosol yield from NO_x-dependent oxidation of monoterpenes provide an example of a significant anthropogenic source of SOA from biogenic hydrocarbon precursors. Estimates of the NO₃+β-pinene SOA source strength for California and the globe indicate that NO₃ reactions with monoterpenes are likely an important source (0.5–8% of the global total) of organic aerosol on regional and global scales.

During 2011 the LHCb experiment at CERN collected 1.0 fb−1 of √s = 7 TeV pp collisions. Due to the large heavy quark production cross-sections, these data provide unprecedented samples of heavy flavoured hadrons. The first results from LHCb have made a significant impact on the flavour physics landscape and have definitively proved the concept of a dedicated experiment in the forwardregion at a hadron collider. This document discusses the implications of these first measurements on classes of extensions to the Standard Model, bearing in mind the interplay with the results of searches for on-shell production of new particles at ATLAS and CMS. The physics potential of an upgrade to the LHCb detector, which would allow an order of magnitude more data to be collected, is emphasised.