National Academy of Engineering

Human institutions--ways of organizing activities--affect the resilience of the environment. Locally evolved institutional arrangements governed by stable communities and buffered from outside forces have sustained resources successfully for centuries, although they often fail when rapid change occurs. Ideal conditions for governance are increasingly rare. Critical problems, such as transboundary pollution, tropical deforestation, and climate change, are at larger scales and involve nonlocal influences. Promising strategies for addressing these problems include dialogue among interested parties, officials, and scientists; complex, redundant, and layered institutions; a mix of institutional types; and designs that facilitate experimentation, learning, and change.

This article describes and presents initial empirical tests of a theory that links values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior within a preference construction framework that emphasizes the activation of personal environmental norms. Environmental concern is related to egoistic, social‐altruistic, and biospheric value orientations and also to beliefs about the consequences of environmental changes for valued objects. Two studies generally support the hypothesized relationships and demonstrate links to the broader theory of values. However, the biospheric value orientation postulated in the theoretical literature on environmentalism does not differentiate from social‐altruism in a general population sample. Results are discussed in terms of value change, the role of social structural factors (including gender) in environmentalism, theories of risk perception, and the mobilization strategies of social movements, including environmental justice movements.

Human security has and will continue to rely on Earth's diverse soil resources. Yet we have now exploited the planet's most productive soils. Soil erosion greatly exceeds rates of production in many agricultural regions. Nitrogen produced by fossil fuel and geological reservoirs of other fertilizers are headed toward possible scarcity, increased cost, and/or geopolitical conflict. Climate change is accelerating the microbial release of greenhouse gases from soil organic matter and will likely play a large role in our near-term climate future. In this Review, we highlight challenges facing Earth's soil resources in the coming century. The direct and indirect response of soils to past and future human activities will play a major role in human prosperity and survival.

The atmospheric chemistry of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in urban areas results in the formation of ‘photochemical smog’, including secondary organic aerosol (SOA). State‐of‐the‐art SOA models parameterize the results of simulation chamber experiments that bracket the conditions found in the polluted urban atmosphere. Here we show that in the real urban atmosphere reactive anthropogenic VOCs (AVOCs) produce much larger amounts of SOA than these models predict, even shortly after sunrise. Contrary to current belief, a significant fraction of the excess SOA is formed from first‐generation AVOC oxidation products. Global models deem AVOCs a very minor contributor to SOA compared to biogenic VOCs (BVOCs). If our results are extrapolated to other urban areas, AVOCs could be responsible for additional 3–25 Tg yr −1 SOA production globally, and cause up to −0.1 W m −2 additional top‐of‐the‐atmosphere radiative cooling.

Plasticity is a remarkable feature of the brain, allowing neuronal structure and function to accommodate to patterns of electrical activity. One component of these long-term changes is the activity-driven induction of new gene expression, which is required for both the long-lasting long-term potentiation of synaptic transmission associated with learning and memory, and the activity dependent survival events that help to shape and wire the brain during development. We have characterized molecular mechanisms by which neuronal membrane depolarization and subsequent calcium influx into the cytoplasm lead to the induction of new gene transcription. We have identified three points within this cascade of events where the specificity of genes induced by different types of stimuli can be regulated. By using the induction of the gene that encodes brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) as a model, we have found that the ability of a calcium influx to induce transcription of this gene is regulated by the route of calcium entry into the cell, by the pattern of phosphorylation induced on the transcription factor cAMP-response element (CRE) binding protein (CREB), and by the complement of active transcription factors recruited to the BDNF promoter. These results refine and expand the working model of activity-induced gene induction in the brain, and help to explain how different types of neuronal stimuli can activate distinct transcriptional responses.

The levels of four sets of pollutants (heavy-metals, artificial radionuclides, petroleum components, and halogenated hydrocarbons), have been measured in U.S. coastal waters, using bivalves as sentinel organisms. The strategies of carrying out this programme are outlined and the results from the first year's work are given. Varying degrees of pollution in U.S. coastal waters have been indicated by elevated levels of pollutants in the bivalves, which comprised certain species of mussels and oysters and were collected at over one hundred localities.

COVID-19 may drive sustained research in robotics to address risks of infectious diseases.

This paper offers and tests an approach to conceptualizing the global competency of engineers. It begins by showing that the often-stated goal of working effectively with different cultures is fundamentally about learning to work effectively with people who define problems differently. The paper offers a minimum learning criterion for global competency and three learning outcomes whose achievement can help engineering students fulfill that criterion. It uses the criterion to establish a typology of established methods to support global learning for engineering students. It introduces the course, Engineering Cultures, as an example of an integrated classroom experience designed to enable larger numbers of engineering students to take the critical first step toward global competency, and it offers a test application of the learning criterion and outcomes by using them to organize summative assessments of student learning in the course.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences.

Abstract A set of specific health problems — called tracers — were selected by a set of criteria. The tracers include otitis media and associated hearing loss, visual disorders, iron-deficiency ane...

The use of big data research methods has grown tremendously over the past five years in both academia and industry. As the size and complexity of available datasets has grown, so too have the ethical questions raised by big data research. These questions become increasingly urgent as data and research agendas move well beyond those typical of the computational and natural sciences, to more directly address sensitive aspects of human behavior, interaction, and health. The tools of big data research are increasingly woven into our daily lives, including mining digital medical records for scientific and economic insights, mapping relationships via social media, capturing individuals’ speech and action via sensors, tracking movement across space, shaping police and security policy via “predictive policing,” and much more.

Interview with Dr. Tait Shanafelt on causes of burnout and efforts to improve support for clinicians. (13:21)Download The National Academy of Medicine, the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education have launched a national Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience to combat the clinician-burnout crisis.

A survey of the literature reveals that image processing tools aimed at supplementing the art historian's toolbox are currently in the earliest stages of development. To jump-start the development of such methods, the Van Gogh and Kroller-Muller museums in The Netherlands agreed to make a data set of 101 high-resolution gray-scale scans of paintings within their collections available to groups of image processing researchers from several different universities. This article describes the approaches to brushwork analysis and artist identification developed by three research groups, within the framework of this data set.

In boreal forests, climate warming is shifting the wildfire disturbance regime to more frequent fires that burn more deeply into organic soils, releasing sequestered carbon to the atmosphere. To understand the destabilization of carbon storage, it is necessary to consider these effects in the context of long-term ecological change. In Alaskan boreal forests, we found that shifts in dominant plant species catalyzed by severe fire compensated for greater combustion of soil carbon over decadal time scales. Severe burning of organic soils shifted tree dominance from slow-growing black spruce to fast-growing deciduous broadleaf trees, resulting in a net increase in carbon storage by a factor of 5 over the disturbance cycle. Reduced fire activity in future deciduous-dominated boreal forests could increase the tenure of this carbon on the landscape, thereby mitigating the feedback to climate warming.

The light emitted by stars and accreting compact objects through the history of the universe is encoded in the intensity of the extragalactic background light (EBL). Knowledge of the EBL is important to understand the nature of star formation and galaxy evolution, but direct measurements of the EBL are limited by galactic and other foreground emissions. Here, we report an absorption feature seen in the combined spectra of a sample of gamma-ray blazars out to a redshift of z ∼ 1.6. This feature is caused by attenuation of gamma rays by the EBL at optical to ultraviolet frequencies and allowed us to measure the EBL flux density in this frequency band.

The need for power semiconductor devices with high-voltage, high- frequency, and high-temperature operation capability is growing, especially for advanced power conversion and military applications, and hence the size and weight of the power electronic system are reduced. Development of 15-kV SiC IGBTs and their impact on utility applications is discussed.

Abstract Large numbers of students depart from engineering programs before graduation. For example, in fields such as engineering and computer science, students have commented on the inaccessible or unapproachable nature of faculty. To evaluate this problem, this study gathered data across four research universities. Using structural equation modeling, it measured environmental effects, i.e., academic integration or faculty distance on (a) self‐efficacy, (b) academic confidence and (c) self‐regulated learning behaviors effort, critical thinking, help‐seeking and peer learning, and (d) GPA. Results showed that faculty distance lowered self‐efficacy, academic confidence and GPA. Conversely, academic integration had a positive effect on self‐efficacy, which in turn had strong positive effects on effort and critical thinking. Consequently, ongoing educational reform efforts must encourage engineering faculty to understand the significance of their student/professor relationships and seriously undertake measures to become personally available to students.

This Perspective introduces a special Collection titled Energy, Climate and Society—jointly produced by Nature Energy and Nature Climate Change—that focuseson the social science insights into the linked problems of energy sustainability and climate change. The linked problems of energy sustainability and climate change are among the most complex and daunting facing humanity at the start of the twenty-first century. This joint Nature Energy and Nature Climate Change Collection illustrates how understanding and addressing these problems will require an integrated science of coupled human and natural systems; including technological systems, but also extending well beyond the domain of engineering or even economics. It demonstrates the value of replacing the stylized assumptions about human behaviour that are common in policy analysis, with ones based on data-driven science. We draw from and engage articles in the Collection to identify key contributions to understanding non-technological factors connecting economic activity and greenhouse gas emissions, describe a multi-dimensional space of human action on climate and energy issues, and illustrate key themes, dimensions and contributions towards fundamental understanding and informed decision making.

During the past decade, the incidence of women starting businesses dramatically accelerated in the US. A national, representative sample of women (and men) business owners was interviewed by telephone to understand better this phenomenon. This analysis focuses on women business owners who left corporate careers to start their own businesses. Respondents' experiences with corporate “glass ceilings” and “glass walls”, such as lack of flexibility and challenge, lack of role models and mentors, lack of access to line positions with concomitant intrapreneurial opportunities, and failure of organizations to credit and reward women's contributions, are examined. Differences among three age cohorts of women business owners, included in the analysis, portend increased difficulty for companies in retaining talented women professionals and managers, especially those with entrepreneurial interests. Recommendations to companies include identifying and eliminating barriers to women's advancement in the corporate culture and work environment, and development of more intrapreneurial opportunities.

Analyzing hand gestures is a comprehensive task involving motion modeling, motion analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning and even psycholinguistic studies. A comprehensive review of various techniques in hand modeling, analysis, and recognition is needed. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of this research topic, we cannot include all the works in the literature. Rather than function as a thorough review paper, this article serves as a tutorial to this research topic. We study 3-D hand models, various articulated motion analysis methods, and gesture recognition techniques employed in current research. We conclude with some thoughts about future research directions. We also include some of our own research results, some of which are shown as examples.