Drones provide a privileged birds’-eye view for collecting high-resolution imagery formorphometric and behavioral sampling of animals. Biologically meaningful measurements extracted from overhead images require an accurate estimate of altitude, but current commercial drones include inaccurate barometer estimates. Recent proposals for coupling altimeter systems to drones have provided customized, open-source solutions,...
Kombucha is a fermented sweet tea beverage of Asian origin which has become popular in the West due to its distinct flavor and possible health benefits. Kombucha is fermented by inoculating sweet tea with yeast and bacteria until a pellicle, referred to as a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and...
Nanoparticles are a hugely diverse category of material that have a wide variety of biomedical applications, and developing tools for biological research with high cellular uptake is critical to their effective application. However, rarely is attention paid to the exact mechanism by which this is occurring, with most studies focusing...
Our experiments aimed to investigate responses of the marine cyanobacteria Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus to toxic arsenic species, such as arsenate, and to understand cellular mechanisms that contribute to arsenic tolerance. We used two strains of Prochlorococcus, a high-light adapted MED4 and low-light adapted MIT9313, both axenic, for cultivation experiments. For...
Wind energy is one of the fastest growing renewable forms of energy in the United States and the world. However, interactions between wind turbines and wildlife have the possibility to injure animals such as birds and bats. Strategies to assess and minimize wind turbine interactions with wildlife are critical for...
The spring bloom is a key oceanic phenomenon in the Northern Gulf of Alaska (NGA), where it supports the regional ecosystem, fisheries, and CO2 sequestration. Despite its significance, mechanisms that trigger NGA blooms are still debated, largely due to a lack of sufficient data from late winter through spring. New...
As the development, processing, and manufacturing of plastic has improved over the years, so has our amount of plastic waste. Currently, only approximately 9% of post-consumer plastics get recycled. The other 91% is buried in landfills, burned, ends up in the ocean, or is accumulating in communities without access to...
Tooth decay in the form of dental caries and cavities is estimated to be among the most common health conditions globally, with treatment of these oral diseases resulting in a massive, world-wide economic burden. The cause of this demineralization of teeth is rooted in the action of complex microbial biofilms...
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
The concepts of cancer and chemotherapy are not unheard of to children, but are often scary and confusing. This paper addresses the need for children’s books on difficult concepts (such as cancer), the creation of a script for a children’s book explaining chemotherapy on a cellular level, the creation of...
Executive function (EF) is an extensively researched topic as a predictor for academic achievements for children. Delineated as qualities of self-regulation, EF prepares a child to produce successful behaviors for their learning and social environments. Entering school with sufficient self-regulation skills is proven advantageous for scholarly performance. Within the early...
Aperiodic structures cause significant challenges to subtractive manufacturing methods due to the common features such as inaccessible voids within the structure. Additive man- ufacturing presents an appealing alternative for this purpose. The aim of this research is to test analysis heuristics for validity through application to periodic structures. First, a...
At the macroscopic scale, we have pumps that use the classical laws of physics to move liquids at a well defined rate. In the microscopic world, physicists are exploring pumps that make use of quantum mechanical behavior to build analogous pumps for quantum particles. The importance of such “quantum pumps”...
Through a desk-top analysis, this research shows that South African women have gained and utilize specialized skills, behaviors, and adaptations through their daily activities which are useful when applied to water resource management. Further, South African women are shown to build and draw on social capital as a way to...
Different educational modalities can affect students in learning challenging engineering concepts. Studies that specifically measure students’ conceptual learning gains have been conducted in face-to-face (F2F) and online modalities, but few direct comparisons have been reported. In this study, we collected data from undergraduate students enrolled in introductory materials science courses...
Community-Engaged Research (CEnR) is a strategy for integrating community needs, priorities, and concerns into the research design, data collection strategies, and subsequent analysis of data. CEnR shares similar properties with both citizen science and community-based participatory research (Woolley et al., 2016). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, CEnR occurred predominantly via face-to-face...
The corrosion and heat resistance properties of nickel alloys are hallmarks of their importance in infrastructure and industrial catalysis processes, but these properties are highly dependent on the chemical composition of the alloy surface. Density functional theory was used for analysis of surface oxidation of four combinations of chromium and...
The rapid accumulation of plastic waste in landfill, waterways and oceans is becoming a critical problem, one that current recycling technologies are not capable of solving. Recent proposed approaches in the depolymerization of waste plastics employ an Olefin-Intermediate Process (OIP), where feedstocks like polyolefin plastics are ‘activated,’ producing an olefin...
Powder Metallurgy Hot Isostatic Pressing (PM-HIP) is a widely recognized powder metallurgy manufacturing process to produce near-net-shape and net-shape components. During general PM-HIP processes the metal powders are filled within a capsule (die), heated and loaded with high pressure simultaneously, and solidified to form the final product. Due to the...