Anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience

Anticipation is increasingly central to urgent contemporary debates, from climate change to the global economic crisis. Anticipatory practices are coming to the forefront of political, organizational, and citizens’ society. Research into anticipation, however, has not kept pace with public demand for insights into anticipatory practices, their risks and uses. Where research exists, it is deeply fragmented. This paper seeks to identify how anticipation is defined and understood in the literature and to explore the role of anticipatory practice to address individual, social, and global challenges. We use a resilience lens to examine these questions. We illustrate how varying forms of anticipatory governance are enhanced by multi-scale regional networks and technologies and by the agency of individuals, drawing from an empirical case study on regional water governance of Malaren, Sweden. Finally, we discuss how an anticipatory approach can inform adaptive institutions, decision making, strategy formation, and societal resilience

GA4GH: International policies and standards for data sharing across genomic research and healthcare.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) aims to accelerate biomedical advances by enabling the responsible sharing of clinical and genomic data through both harmonized data aggregation and federated approaches. The decreasing cost of genomic sequencing (along with other genome-wide molecular assays) and increasing evidence of its clinical utility will soon drive the generation of sequence data from tens of millions of humans, with increasing levels of diversity. In this perspective, we present the GA4GH strategies for addressing the major challenges of this data revolution. We describe the GA4GH organization, which is fueled by the development efforts of eight Work Streams and informed by the needs of 24 Driver Projects and other key stakeholders. We present the GA4GH suite of secure, interoperable technical standards and policy frameworks and review the current status of standards, their relevance to key domains of research and clinical care, and future plans of GA4GH. Broad international participation in building, adopting, and deploying GA4GH standards and frameworks will catalyze an unprecedented effort in data sharing that will be critical to advancing genomic medicine and ensuring that all populations can access its benefits

Up-Scaled Microfluidic Fuel Cells With Porous Flow-Through Electrodes

In this work, an experimental microfluidic fuel cell is presented with a novel up-scaled porous electrode architecture that provides higher available surface area compared to conventional microfluidic fuel cells, providing the potential for higher overall power outputs. Our proof-of-concept architecture is an up-scaled flow-through fuel cell with more than nine times the active electrode surface area of the flow-through architecture first proposed by A Microfluidic Fuel Cell With Flow-Through Porous Electrodes," J. Am. Chem. Soc., 130, pp. 4000-4006). Formic acid and potassium permanganate were employed as the fuel and oxidant, respectively, both dissolved in a sulfuric acid electrolyte. Platinum black was employed as the catalyst for both anode and cathode, and the performances of carbon-based porous electrodes including cloth, fiber, and foam were compared to that of traditional Toray carbon paper (TGP-H-120). The effects of catalyst loading were investigated in a microfluidic fuel cell containing 80 pores per linear inch carbon foam electrodes. A discussion is also provided of current density normalization techniques via projected electrode surface area and electrode volume, the latter of which is a highly informative means for comparing flow-through architectures

Four approaches to anticipatory climate governance: Different conceptions of the future and implications for the present

In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Much social science and sustainability science scholarship increasingly engages with the future. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of how the future is envisioned in these literatures, and with what implications for governance in the present. This article analyses these two aspects, building on the concept of “anticipatory governance.” We understand anticipatory governance to broadly mean governing in the present to adapt to or shape uncertain futures. We review perspectives within public policy, futures studies, social–ecological systems, environmental policy and governance, transition studies, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation literatures. All these literatures engage explicitly or implicitly with the notion of anticipatory governance, yet from distinct ontological and epistemological starting points. Through our review, we identify four approaches to anticipatory governance that differ with regard to (a) their conceptions of and engagement with the future; (b) their implications for actions to be taken in the present; and (c) the ultimate end to be realized through anticipatory governance. We then map onto these four approaches a diverse set of methods and tools of anticipation that each engages with. In concluding, we discuss how these four approaches provide a useful analytical lens through which to assess ongoing practices of anticipatory governance in the climate and sustainability realm

High-throughput measurement of the content and properties of nano-sized bioparticles with single-particle profiler

We introduce a method, single-particle profiler, that provides single-particle information on the content and biophysical properties of thousands of particles in the size range 5–200 nm. We use our single-particle profiler to measure the messenger RNA encapsulation efficiency of lipid nanoparticles, the viral binding efficiencies of different nanobodies, and the biophysical heterogeneity of liposomes, lipoproteins, exosomes and viruses