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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Sustainable Agriculture: How France Promotes Sustainability, Jordan Pulling Jun 2016

Sustainable Agriculture: How France Promotes Sustainability, Jordan Pulling

Honors Theses

High consumption lifestyles led to a rapid decline in natural resources. The daily gestures of the people of the world use a quantity massive resource and energy that cannot be replaced. Decision makers of the world are invited to consider what changes will be needed to focus about sustainable and sustainable practices if we want to continue living in the way which we have become accustomed to. The development of renewable energies was a first step towards total sustainable development. Recently, however, we have seen a new way to reduce negative impacts on the rights of the Earth: changes in …


Evolving Soft Robots With Vibration Based Movement, Andrew Danise Jun 2014

Evolving Soft Robots With Vibration Based Movement, Andrew Danise

Honors Theses

Creating effective designs for soft robots is extremely difficult due to the large number of different possibilities for shape, material properties, and movement mechanisms. Due to the lack of methods to design soft robots, previous research has used evolutionary algorithms to tackle this problem of overwhelming options. A popular technique is to use generative encodings to create designs using evolutionary algorithms because of their modularity and ability to induce large scale coordinated change. The main drawback of generative encodings is that it is difficult to know where along the ontogenic trajectory resides the phenotype with the highest fitness. The two …


Gaming Classics: The Bard, Thomas Defina Jun 2012

Gaming Classics: The Bard, Thomas Defina

Honors Theses

Technological advancement is a driving influence in the development of today’s culture. Upon the creation of electronic videogames, gaming has allowed players to not only experience new ideas previously unheard of in a gaming medium, but gaming is easily accessible to people throughout the world. Academia has begun studying games, checking the positive and negative effects videogames have on people. Might one of these positive effects be educational? If it was, college professors might use the game to help supplement their classes. The question this paper will be focused on is as follows: using the classics as our field of …


Evolution Of Flow In Games, Paul J. Tunison Jun 2011

Evolution Of Flow In Games, Paul J. Tunison

Honors Theses

Every one wants to play a fun game, but ”fun” is a subjective quality. Flow, a psychological theory to define what ”fun” is, states that, for an activity to be considered fun, the chal-lenge it presents must correlate with that participant’s abilities such that the activity is neither too easy or too difficult. One of the biggest problems for game designers is balancing the difficulty of its content in such a way that it appeals to the largest audience possible. In order to broaden audiences, de-velopers need to invest effort into creating numerous, discrete balances that are aligned to varying …


The Effects Of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (Pcbs) On Nerve Growth Factor (Ngf) In The Developing Frog, Xenopus Laevis, Cari Delong Apr 2004

The Effects Of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (Pcbs) On Nerve Growth Factor (Ngf) In The Developing Frog, Xenopus Laevis, Cari Delong

Honors Theses

Polychlorinated biphenyls are ubiquitous, persistent environmental contaminants that cause a variety of adverse health effects wildlife and humans. PCBs are the major contaminant in the Kalamazoo River Superfund Site, in which the Environmental Institute is funded to study. Projects at the Environmental Institute are focused on developing molecular biotechnology tools that will improve environmental risk assessment. Previous acute studies involved the exposure of developing tadpoles, Xenopus laevis to PCBs through aquarium water in order to measure gene expression. Nerve growth factor (NGF) gene expression showed changes in these previous studies. NGF is a neurotrophic factor that regulates the growth and …