Role of Virtual Reality in Geography and Science Fieldwork Education

Fieldwork has a long tradition in geography, and in certain sciences, notably geology, biology and environmental sciences. Fieldwork involves leaving the classroom and engaging in learning and teaching through first-hand experience of phenomena in outdoor settings. Exploration in natural habitats introduces students to the complexity and unpredictability of the real world, stimulates their curiosity, and increases their interest in scientific inquiry. However, over the last decade, there has been a decline in field-study opportunities in schools. This policy paper describes the first extensive user-centered research programme into the role of technology-enabled virtual field trips as a means for improving the effectiveness of the outdoor fieldwork experience. It draws on a year-long research project that investigated how Google Expeditions, a smartphone-driven mobile virtual reality application, bridges virtual fieldwork with physical field trips and facilitates inquiry-based fieldwork and experiential learning. It examines the role of Google Expeditions in primary and secondary school science and geography, outlining the opportunities and challenges of integrating mobile virtual reality in schools and the practical implications of our research for fieldwork education in further and higher education

The Glacier Complexes of the Mountain Massifs of the North-West of Inner Asia and their Dynamics

The subject of this paper is the glaciation of the mountain massifs Mongun-Taiga, Tavan-Boghd-Ola, Turgeni- Nuru, and Harhira-Nuru. The glaciation is represented mostly by small forms that sometimes form a single complex of domeshaped peaks. According to the authors, the modern glaciated area of the mountain massifs is 21.2 km2 (Tavan-Boghd-Ola), 20.3 km2 (Mongun-Taiga), 42 km2 (Turgeni- Nuru), and 33.1 km2 (Harhira-Nuru). The area of the glaciers has been shrinking since the mid 1960’s. In 1995–2008, the rate of reduction of the glaciers’ area has grown considerably: valley glaciers were rapidly degrading and splitting; accumulation of morainic material in the lower parts of the glaciers accelerated. Small glaciers transformed into snowfields and rock glaciers. There has been also a degradation of the highest parts of the glaciers and the collapse of the glacial complexes with a single zone of accumulation into isolated from each other glaciers. Reduced snow cover area has led to a rise in the firn line and the disintegration of a common accumulation area of the glacial complex. In the of the Mongun-Taiga massif, in 1995– 2008, the firn line rose by 200–300 m. The reduction of the glaciers significantly lagged behind the change in the position of the accumulation area boundary. In the past two years, there has been a significant recovery of the glaciers that could eventually lead to their slower degradation or stabilization of the glaciers in the study area

Mapping poverty in rural China: how much does the environment matter?

A recently developed small area estimation technique is used to geographically derive detailed estimates of consumption-based poverty and inequality in rural Shaanxi, China. These estimates may be helpful for targeting since there is wide variability in poverty rates within Shaanxi but low levels of inequality within most counties and townships. We also investigate whether including environmental variables in the equation used to predict consumption and poverty improves upon typical approaches that only use household survey and census data. Ignoring environmental variables appears likely to produce targeting errors

Health Fetishism Among The Nacirema: A Fugue On Jenny Reardon’s The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge After The Genome (Chicago University Press, 2017) And Isabelle Stengers’ Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto For Slow Science (Polity Press, 2018)

Personalized medicine has become a goal of genomics and of health policy makers. This article reviews two recent books that are highly critical of this approach, finding their arguments very thoughtful and important. According to Stengers, biology’s rush to become a science of genome sequences has made it part of the “speculative economy of promise.” Reardon claims that the postgenomic condition is the attempt to find meaning in all the troves of data that have been generated. The current paper attempts to extend these arguments by showing that scientific alternatives such as ecological developmental biology and the tissue organization field theory of cancer provide evidence demonstrating that genomic data alone is not sufficient to explain the origins of common disease. What does need to be explained is the intransience of medical scientists to recognize other explanatory models beside the “-omics” approaches based on computational algorithms. To this end, various notions of commodity and religious fetishism are used. This is not to say that there is no place for Big Data and genomics. Rather, these methodologies should have a definite place among others. These books suggest that Big Data genomics is like the cancer it is supposed to conquer. It has expanded unregulated and threatens to kill the body in which it arose

Organophosphate esters in indoor dust from 12 countries: Concentrations, composition profiles, and human exposure

A total of 20 organophosphate triesters (OPEs), including seven alkyl-OPEs, three chlorinated (Cl)-OPEs, seven aryl-OPEs, and three oligomeric-OPEs were measured in 341 house dust samples collected from 12 countries during the period 2010-2014. OPEs were ubiquitous in indoor dust, and the total concentrations of OPEs (Sigma OPEs; sum of 20 OPEs) ranged from 49.4 to 249,000 ng/g dry weight (dw). Generally, Cl-OPEs were the predominant compounds (51% of total) in indoor dust samples, with a median concentration of 800 ng/g, followed by alkyl-OPEs (31%), aryl-OPEs (17%), and oligomeric-OPEs (1%), with median concentrations of 480, 270, and 21.9 ng/g, respectively. Sigma OPE concentrations in indoor dust from more industrialized countries (South Korea: median, 31,300; Japan: 29,800; and the United States: 26,500 ng/g dw) were one or two orders of magnitude higher than those from less industrialized countries (Greece: 7140, Saudi Arabia: 5310, Kuwait: 4420, Romania: 4110, Vietnam: 1190, China: 1120, Colombia: 374, India: 276, and Pakistan: 138 ng/g dw). Statistically significant positive correlations (0.114 < r < 0.748, p < 0.05) were found among the concentrations of 16 OPEs in dust samples, indicating similar sources of these compounds. The median estimated daily intakes of Sigma OPEs via dust ingestion for children and adults were in the ranges of 0.29-64.8 and 0.07-14.9 ng/kg bw/day, respectively

Diverse reductive dehalogenases are associated with Clostridiales-enriched microcosms dechlorinating 1,2-dichloroethane

The achievement of successful biostimulation of active microbiomes for the cleanup of a polluted site is strictly dependent on the knowledge of the key microorganisms equipped with the relevant catabolic genes responsible for the degradation process. In this work, we present the characterization of the bacterial community developed in anaerobic microcosms after biostimulation with the electron donor lactate of groundwater polluted with 1,2-dichloroethane (1,2-DCA). Through a multilevel analysis, we have assessed (i) the structural analysis of the bacterial community; (ii) the identification of putative dehalorespiring bacteria; (iii) the characterization of functional genes encoding for putative 1,2-DCA reductive dehalogenases (RDs). Following the biostimulation treatment, the structure of the bacterial community underwent a notable change of the main phylotypes, with the enrichment of representatives of the order Clostridiales. Through PCR targeting conserved regions within known RD genes, four novel variants of RDs previously associated with the reductive dechlorination of 1,2-DCA were identified in the metagenome of the Clostridiales-dominated bacterial community