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1. Innovative Use of Technologies to Teach Chemical Engineering Core Classes and Laboratories During the Covid-19 Pandemic at an HBCU

   Dua, Rupak (July 2021, 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   Most chemical engineering core classes are best taught when students are exposed to a face-to-face learning/teaching environment. With the arrival of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the whole education system and the setting were disrupted at Hampton University (HU). Traditional in-person face-to-face classes were forced to move to remote instructions to maintain a healthy and safe campus environment and minimize the spread of COVID-19 on campus and in the community. As an instructor teaching core courses and unit operations laboratory in the Department of Chemical Engineering, it was challenging to move completely virtual and deliver instructions remotely without affecting students' learning outcomes. However, with the appropriate modern technologies and adapting to the students' change and needs, online teaching can be done efficiently and can still have efficient learning outcomes. Various activities were introduced to make the online/virtual class environment engaging in developing technical and professional skills and inducing learning for students. Using the latest educational tools and online resources, formative assessments were conducted throughout the course in an effort to improve student learning and instructor teaching. In addition to that, innovative ways of technology were also used to evaluate student learning and understanding of the material for grading and reporting purposes. Many of the modern educational tools, including Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Ka-hoot, linoit, surveys, polls, and chemical engineering processes’ simulations and videos were in-troduced to make the synchronous sessions interactive. Likert-like surveys conducted were anal-yses to gauge the effectiveness of incorporation of technology during remote learning. This paper describes the innovative use of technologies to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chemical Engineering Classes. It will also explain the strategies to assess the mode of delivery efficacy and how to change the course of teaching to adapt to the students' changing needs. 

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2. Understanding the U.S. Bioeconomy: A New Definition and Landscape

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su13041627  

   Frisvold, George B.; Moss, Steven M.; Hodgson, Andrea; Maxon, Mary E. (February 2021, Sustainability)

   null (Ed.)

   This article provides an overview of the U.S. bioeconomy, discussing how its definition has evolved and been formalized over time. The first attempts to conceptualize and define the U.S. bioeconomy began in the early 1990s. This was followed by a series of government and private efforts to develop methods to understand and evaluate it and to develop programs to promote it. These efforts culminated in the 2020 release of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), Safeguarding the Bioeconomy report. The report recommended a formal definition of the U.S. bioeconomy, providing the rationale for that particular definition in the U.S. context. Formally adopting a comprehensive definition of the U.S. bioeconomy would enable the U.S. government to better assess the bioeconomy’s current state, to develop strategies to support its growth, and to promote strategies to safeguard it. Along with this recommendation, the NASEM Safeguarding report also discussed defining the “bioeconomy landscape,” which involves more precise determination and quantification of which economic activities are part of and external to the U.S. economy. Defining this landscape could guide metric development and data collection needed to track the bioeconomy’s growth, conduct economic assessments, and enable policy makers to keep abreast of advances that could potentially pose new national or economic security challenges. The report also includes an analysis of the broad range national bioeconomy strategies, identification of the four drivers of the U.S. bioeconomy, and the first of its kind, comprehensive estimate of the size and scope of the U.S. bioeconomy of USD 959B (valued in 2016 constant USD ). 

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3. Expedition 379 Scientific Prospectus: Amundsen Sea West Antarctic Ice Sheet History

   https://doi.org/10.14379/iodp.sp.379.2017  

   Gohl, K.; Wellner, J.S.; Klaus, A. (December 2017, Scientific prospectus)

   null (Ed.)

   The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is largely marine based and thus highly sensitive to both climatic and oceanographic changes. Therefore, the WAIS has likely had a very dynamic history over the last several million years. A complete collapse of the WAIS would result in a global sea level rise of 3.3–4.3 m, yet the world’s scientific community is not able to predict its future behavior. Moreover, knowledge about past behavior of the WAIS is poor, in particular during geological times with climatic conditions similar to those expected for the near and distant future. Reconstructions and quantifications of partial or complete WAIS collapses in the past are urgently needed for constraining and testing ice sheet models that aim to predict future WAIS behavior and the potential contribution of the WAIS to global sea level rise. Large uncertainties exist regarding the chronology, extent, rates, and spatial and temporal variability of past advances and retreats of the WAIS across the continental shelves. These uncertainties largely result from the fundamental lack of data from drill cores recovered proximal to the WAIS. The continental shelf and rise of the Amundsen Sea are prime targets for drilling because the records are expected to yield archives of pure WAIS dynamics unaffected by other ice sheets and the WAIS sector draining into the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE) currently experiences the largest ice loss in Antarctica (Paolo et al., 2015). We propose a series of drill sites for the ASE shelf where seismic data reveal seaward-dipping sedimentary sequences that span from the preglacial depositional phase to the most recent glacial periods. Our strategy is to drill a transect from the oldest sequences close to the bedrock/basin boundary at the middle–inner shelf transition to the youngest sequences on the outer shelf in the eastern ASE. If the eastern ASE is inaccessible due to sea ice cover, a similar transect of sites can be drilled on the western ASE. The core transect will provide a detailed history of the glacial cycles in the Amundsen Sea region and allow comparison to the glacial history from the Ross Sea sector. In addition, deep-water sites on the continental rise of the Amundsen Sea are selected for recovering continuous records of glacially transported sediments and detailed archives of climatic and oceanographic changes throughout glacial–interglacial cycles. We will apply a broad suite of analytical techniques, including multiproxy analyses, to address our objectives of reconstructing the onset of glaciation in the greenhouse to icehouse transition, processes of dynamic ice sheet behavior during the Neogene and Quaternary, and ocean conditions associated with the glacial cycles. The five principal objectives of Expedition 379 are as follows: 1. To reconstruct the glacial history of West Antarctica from the Paleogene to recent times and the dynamic behavior of the WAIS during the Neogene and Quaternary, especially possible partial or full WAIS collapses, and the WAIS contribution to past sea level changes. Emphasis is placed in particular on studying the response of the WAIS at times when the pCO2 in Earth’s atmosphere exceeded 400 ppm and atmospheric and oceanic temperatures were higher than at present. 2. To correlate the WAIS-proximal records of ice sheet dynamics in the Amundsen Sea with global records of ice volume changes and proxy records for air and seawater temperatures. 3. To study the relationship between incursions of warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) onto the continental shelf of the Amundsen Sea Embayment and the stability of marine-based ice sheet margins under warm water conditions. 4. To reconstruct the processes of major WAIS advances onto the middle and outer shelf that are likely to have occurred since the middle Miocene and compare their timing and processes to those of other Antarctic continental shelves. 5. To identify the timing of the first ice sheet expansion onto the continental shelf of the ASE and its possible relationship to the uplift of Marie Byrd Land. 

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4. Indigenous peoples and local communities as partners in the sequencing of global eukaryotic biodiversity

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-023-00013-7  

   Mc Cartney, Ann. M.; Head, M. A.; Tsosie, K. S.; Sterner, B.; Glass, J. R.; Paez, S.; Geary, J.; Hudson, M. (December 2023, npj Biodiversity)

   The aim to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity is the shared mission of many ongoing large-scale biodiversity genomics initiatives. Reference genomes of global flora and fauna have the potential to inform a broad range of major issues facing both biodiversity and humanity, such as the impact of climate change, the conservation of endangered species and ecosystems, public health crises, and the preservation and enhancement of ecosystem services. Biodiversity is dramatically declining: 28% of species being assessed by the IUCN are threatened with extinction, and recent reports suggest that a transformative change is needed to conserve and protect what remains. To provide a collective and global genomic response to the biodiversity crisis, many biodiversity genomics initiatives have come together, creating a network of networks under the Earth BioGenome Project. This network seeks to expedite the creation of an openly available, “public good” encyclopedia of high-quality eukaryotic reference genomes, in the hope that by advancing our basic understanding of nature, it can lead to the transformational scientific developments needed to conserve and protect global biodiversity. Key to completing this ambitious encyclopedia of reference genomes, is the ability to responsibly, ethically, legally, and equitably access and use samples from all of the eukaryotic species across the planet, including those that are under the custodianship of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. Here, the biodiversity genomics community is subject to the provisions codified in international, national, and local legislations and customary community norms, principles, and protocols. We propose a framework to support biodiversity genomic researchers, projects, and initiatives in building trustworthy and sustainable partnerships with communities, providing minimum recommendations on how to access, utilize, preserve, handle, share, analyze, and communicate samples, genomics data, and associated Traditional Knowledge obtained from, and in partnership with, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities across the data-lifecycle. 

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5. Governing complexity: Integrating science, governance, and law to manage accelerating change in the globalized commons

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102798118  

   Cosens, Barbara; Ruhl, J. B.; Soininen, Niko; Gunderson, Lance; Belinskij, Antti; Blenckner, Thorsten; Camacho, Alejandro E.; Chaffin, Brian C.; Craig, Robin Kundis; Doremus, Holly; et al (September 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   The speed and uncertainty of environmental change in the Anthropocene challenge the capacity of coevolving social–ecological–technological systems (SETs) to adapt or transform to these changes. Formal government and legal structures further constrain the adaptive capacity of our SETs. However, new, self-organized forms of adaptive governance are emerging at multiple scales in natural resource-based SETs. Adaptive governance involves the private and public sectors as well as formal and informal institutions, self-organized to fill governance gaps in the traditional roles of states. While new governance forms are emerging, they are not yet doing so rapidly enough to match the pace of environmental change. Furthermore, they do not yet possess the legitimacy or capacity needed to address disparities between the winners and losers from change. These emergent forms of adaptive governance appear to be particularly effective in managing complexity. We explore governance and SETs as coevolving complex systems, focusing on legal systems to understand the potential pathways and obstacles to equitable adaptation. We explore how governments may facilitate the emergence of adaptive governance and promote legitimacy in both the process of governance despite the involvement of nonstate actors, and its adherence to democratic values of equity and justice. To manage the contextual nature of the results of change in complex systems, we propose the establishment of long-term study initiatives for the coproduction of knowledge, to accelerate learning and synergize interactions between science and governance and to foster public science and epistemic communities dedicated to navigating transitions to more just, sustainable, and resilient futures. 

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