Other Life Sciences Commons^™

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Whole-Brain Approaches For Investigating Iron Accumulation By Mri Show No Excess From Occupational Exposure To Welding Fumes, Jennifer Davis

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Detection Of Adsorbed Chlordecone On Microplastics In Marine Sediments In Guadeloupe: A Preliminary Study, Fidji Sandre, Charlotte R. Dromard, Karyn Le Menach, Yolande Bouchon-Navaro, Sébastien Cordonnier, Nathalie Tapie, Hélène Budzinski, Claude Bouchon

Gulf and Caribbean Research

Plastic pollution in the oceans is recognized as a worldwide problem. Since the 1950s, the production of plastics has been increasing and the first reports of microplastics (particles < 500 μm) in the marine environment began to appear in the 1970s. These particles represent a growing environmental problem due to their dispersion in seawater and marine organisms. Additionally, microparticles in general can adsorb pollutants that will then become bioavailable to organisms by being desorbed during digestion, which could be an important pathway for the contamination of organisms. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, an organochlorine pesticide called “chlordecone” was used from 1972 to 1993 in banana plantations and this very persistent pollutant contaminates soils, rivers, and coastal marine areas and accumulates in marine foodwebs. To examine these issues, we had two goals: 1) to assess the contamination of marine sediments by microplastics surrounding Guadeloupe; and 2) to determine the ability of microplastics to adsorb chlordecone, as has been demonstrated for other organochlorine pollutants. To do so, marine sediments were collected in triplicate from 12 sites in coral reef environments around the island. Microplastics from each sample were then enumerated by size, color and shape under a binocular microscope. The results indicate that microplastics are found in all the studied sites and that their distribution could be linked to marine currents or proximity to areas of significant human activities (port activities, agglomeration, etc.). Finally, our preliminary results indicated that chlordecone could be adsorbed onto microplastics, with a concentration ranging from 0.00036—0.00173 µg/µg of microfilter.

Investigating Sociodemographic Disparities In Cancer Risk Using Web-Based Informatics, Hong-Jun Yoon, Georgia Tourassi

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

Cancer health disparities due to demographic and socioeconomic factors are an area of great interest in the epidemiological community. Adjusting for such factors is important when developing cancer risk models. However, for digital epidemiology studies relying on online sources such information is not readily available. This paper presents a novel method for extracting demographic and socioeconomic information from openly available online obituaries. The method relies on tailored language processing rules and a probabilistic scheme to map subjects’ occupation history to the occupation classification codes and related earnings provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using this information, a case-control study is …

Niche By Basma Kavanagh, Vivian M. Hansen

The Goose

Review of Basma Kavanagh's Niche.