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Food insecurity is a social and economic condition where an individual or household have difficulty to obtain safe and nutritious food. Food insecurity in America is a serious issue given that more than 30 million people in America are food insecure. The complex nature of the problem cannot be address by federal nutrition assistance programs alone. Non-profit hunger relief organizations also play a significant role. Feeding America is the nation’s largest hunger relief organization and has over 200 affiliated food banks. Those food banks used to focus on providing emergency food assistance, more and more are paying more attention to the needs and preferences of the people they serve and provide culturally relevant food and food that meets the dietary and other health considerations. Working with a local food bank and its affiliated partner agencies, neighbor preference data were collected. An interactive dashboard was developed to allow decision-makers of the food bank to make evidence-based informed decisions in complex hunger relief operations such as food procurement and distribution. 

Natural kamacite samples (Fe92.5Ni7.5) from a fragment of the Gibeon meteorite were studied as a proxy material for terrestrial cores to examine phase transition kinetics under shock compression for a range of different pressures up to 140 GPa. In situ time-resolved X-ray diffraction (XRD) data were collected of a body-centered cubic (bcc) kamacite section that transforms to the high-pressure hexagonal close-packed (hcp) phase with sub-nanosecond temporal resolution. The coarse-grained crystal of kamacite rapidly transformed to highly oriented crystallites of the hcp phase at maximum compression. The hcp phase persisted for as long as 9.5 ns following shock release. Comparing the c/a ratio with previous static and dynamic work on Fe and Fe-rich Fe-Ni alloys, it was found that some shots exhibit a larger than ideal c/a ratio, up to nearly 1.65. This work represents the first time-resolved laser shock compression structural study of a natural iron meteorite, relevant for understanding the dynamic material properties of metallic planetary bodies during impact events and Earth’s core elasticity.