Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
Abstract Recent major investments in infrastructure in the United States and globally present a crucial opportunity to embed equity within the heart of resilient infrastructure decision-making. Yet there is a notable absence of frameworks within the engineering and scientific fields for integrating equity into planning, design, and maintenance of infrastructure. Additionally, whole-of-government approaches to infrastructure, including the Justice40 Initiative, mimic elements of process management that support exploitative rather than exploratory innovation. These and other policies risk creating innovation traps that limit analytical and engineering advances necessary to prioritize equity in decision-making, identification and disruption of mechanisms that cause or contribute to inequities, and remediation of historic harms. Here, we propose a three-tiered framework toward equitable and resilient infrastructure through restorative justice, incremental policy innovation, and exploratory research innovation. This framework aims to ensure equitable access and benefits of infrastructure, minimize risk disparities, and embrace restorative justice to repair historical and systemic inequities. We outline incremental policy innovation and exploratory research action items to address and mitigate risk disparities, emphasizing the need for community-engaged research and the development of equity metrics. Among other action items, we recommend a certification system—referred to as Social, Environmental, and Economic Development (SEED)—to train infrastructure engineers and planners and ensure attentiveness to gaps that exist within and dynamically interact across each tier of the proposed framework. Through the framework and proposed actions, we advocate for a transformative vision for equitable infrastructure that emphasizes the interconnectedness of social, environmental, and technical dimensions in infrastructure planning, design, and maintenance.more » « less
-
The nature of dark matter, the invisible substance making up over 80% of the matter in the universe, is one of the most fundamental mysteries of modern physics. Ultralight bosons such as axions, axion-like particles, or dark photons could make up most of the dark matter. Couplings between such bosons and nuclear spins may enable their direct detection via nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy: As nuclear spins move through the galactic dark-matter halo, they couple to dark matter and behave as if they were in an oscillating magnetic field, generating a dark-matter–driven NMR signal. As part of the cosmic axion spin precession experiment (CASPEr), an NMR-based dark-matter search, we use ultralow-field NMR to probe the axion-fermion “wind” coupling and dark-photon couplings to nuclear spins. No dark matter signal was detected above background, establishing new experimental bounds for dark matter bosons with masses ranging from 1.8 × 10 −16 to 7.8 × 10 −14 eV.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

Full Text Available