The Multi-Faceted Practice of Architectural Sustainability Found in the Regional Architecture of Vorarlberg, Austria

The biggest and increasingly more urgent challenge of the twenty-first century has become how a more sustainable level of development can be achieved. In order to bring about a better sustainable approach to ‘development’ it is necessary to address various different challenges of economy and society simultaneously. By examining the various aspects of sustainability found in the contemporary regional architecture of Vorarlberg, Austria, this paper attempts to highlight a more holistic and multi-faceted practice of architectural sustainability. The literature review on the definition of sustainable architecture and the architectural culture of Vorarlberg will be followed by the characteristic examination of four case studies. The common characteristics found from the evaluation were matched with some of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Goals to illustrate the multi-layered and connected nature of the sustainability qualities. The results of the research is indicative of a more holistic notion of architectural sustainability that is beyond energy-oriented and the functional efficiency of a building. Rather, it would mean the sustainability of a region, as a whole, when it encompasses the continuation of heritage, the way of living as well as how a building should be responding to the environment throughout its life-cycle

Women in Engineering: Almost No Gap at University but a Long Way to Go for Sustaining Careers

Engineering is one of the career fields where women’s underrepresentation has been tenacious. In Korea, the government has made continuous efforts in the last decades to make a difference, yet the rate of women who pursue an engineering career pathway is still low. In this study, we analyzed 415 survey responses at a large private university in Korea to fulfill the aims of the current study: (1) to examine the gender difference on the 11 major- and career-related variables using t-test, (2) to test the adjusted social cognitive career theory (SCCT) model for the engineering undergraduate students’ intention to pursue an engineering career using path analysis. The independent t-test results revealed that the gender differences were found not in any major-related variable, but in three career-related variables, indicating the female students perceived their future career less vested than the male students. The path analysis results indicated that the adjusted SCCT model fitted to the data well and the relations among the variables were generally in the expected way with some exceptions. The highlighted implication is that removing systematic barriers and gender stereotype threats is as important as providing supports for gender equity in pursuing an engineering career

A global metagenomic map of urban microbiomes and antimicrobial resistance

We present a global atlas of 4,728 metagenomic samples from mass-transit systems in 60 cities over 3 years, representing the first systematic, worldwide catalog of the urban microbial ecosystem. This atlas provides an annotated, geospatial profile of microbial strains, functional characteristics, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) markers, and genetic elements, including 10,928 viruses, 1,302 bacteria, 2 archaea, and 838,532 CRISPR arrays not found in reference databases. We identified 4,246 known species of urban microorganisms and a consistent set of 31 species found in 97% of samples that were distinct from human commensal organisms. Profiles of AMR genes varied widely in type and density across cities. Cities showed distinct microbial taxonomic signatures that were driven by climate and geographic differences. These results constitute a high-resolution global metagenomic atlas that enables discovery of organisms and genes, highlights potential public health and forensic applications, and provides a culture-independent view of AMR burden in cities.Funding: the Tri-I Program in Computational Biology and Medicine (CBM) funded by NIH grant 1T32GM083937; GitHub; Philip Blood and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), supported by NSF grant number ACI-1548562 and NSF award number ACI-1445606; NASA (NNX14AH50G, NNX17AB26G), the NIH (R01AI151059, R25EB020393, R21AI129851, R35GM138152, U01DA053941); STARR Foundation (I13- 0052); LLS (MCL7001-18, LLS 9238-16, LLS-MCL7001-18); the NSF (1840275); the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1151054); the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (G-2015-13964); Swiss National Science Foundation grant number 407540_167331; NIH award number UL1TR000457; the US Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231; the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, supported by the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy; Stockholm Health Authority grant SLL 20160933; the Institut Pasteur Korea; an NRF Korea grant (NRF-2014K1A4A7A01074645, 2017M3A9G6068246); the CONICYT Fondecyt Iniciación grants 11140666 and 11160905; Keio University Funds for Individual Research; funds from the Yamagata prefectural government and the city of Tsuruoka; JSPS KAKENHI grant number 20K10436; the bilateral AT-UA collaboration fund (WTZ:UA 02/2019; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, UA:M/84-2019, M/126-2020); Kyiv Academic Univeristy; Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine project numbers 0118U100290 and 0120U101734; Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa 2013–2017; the CERCA Programme / Generalitat de Catalunya; the CRG-Novartis-Africa mobility program 2016; research funds from National Cheng Kung University and the Ministry of Science and Technology; Taiwan (MOST grant number 106-2321-B-006-016); we thank all the volunteers who made sampling NYC possible, Minciencias (project no. 639677758300), CNPq (EDN - 309973/2015-5), the Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Advanced Theory and Application in Statistics and Data Science – MOE, ECNU, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong through project 11215017, National Key RD Project of China (2018YFE0201603), and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2017SHZDZX01) (L.S.