The Cities Wealth: Programs for Community Economic Control in Berkeley, California

Reflecting on a decade of radical and progressive coalition politics led Berkeley Citizen’s Action (BCA), a group of activists affiliated with elected councilmembers John Denton, Loni Hancock and Ying Lee Kelley, and organized as the Community Ownership Organizing Project, describe potential and actual programs that would effect a transition to community ownership for the City of Berkeley, CA. Topics covered include Charter and other reforms achieved by voter initiative designed to redistribute power to popular forces; housing policies like rent control and community ownership, public acquisition of electric power, cable television and telephone service; revenue producing enterprises such as banking, recycling and insurance; taxation and capital budgets; city employment policy, transportation and social services

The Riptide UUV: A new modular, open, low-cost micro-UUV

\u2022Riptide is contracted to deliver multiple micro-UUVs to the US Navy \u2022All specifications are being validated in test and in-water demonstrations \u2022Alternate Energy Options will be validated when available \u2022Riptide has an exclusive partnership with Open Water Power for the micro-UUV vehicle class and is supporting their ongoing power system development \u2022Riptide is actively seeking development partners to explore new applications for this new, state-of-the-art \u3bcUUV

The dawn of Structural One Health: A new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital

The One Health approach integrates health investigations across the tree of life, including, but not limited to, wildlife, livestock, crops, and humans. It redresses an epistemological alienation at the heart of much modern population health, which has long segregated studies by species. Up to this point, however, One Health research has also omitted addressing fundamental structural causes underlying collapsing health ecologies. In this critical review we unpack the relationship between One Health science and its political economy, particularly the conceptual and methodological trajectories by which it fails to incorporate social determinants of epizootic spillover. We also introduce a Structural One Health that addresses the research gap. The new science, open to incorporating developments across the social sciences, addresses foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the place-specific deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and economic geographies driving disease emergence. We introduce an ongoing project on avian influenza to illustrate Structural One Health's scope and ambition. For the first time researchers are quantifying the relationships among transnational circuits of capital, associated shifts in agroecological landscapes, and the genetic evolution and spatial spread of a xenospecific pathogen.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Manipulation of microalgal lipid production: a genetic engineering aspect

Interests in microalgal lipids as green and renewable energy sources are piquing as cheap hydrocarbon fossil fuels reach their limit. Lipids from microalgae have important human uses, i.e., energy, food, and pharmaceuticals, depending on its quantity and quality. Genetic engineering is the introduction or suppression of a target gene for the selective expression of a bio-product, e.g., hydrocarbons for fuel or polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) for food, at a favorable quantity. Past studies like nitrogen starvation or salinity stress have shown to increase lipid contents of microalgae; however, studies on the molecular mechanisms underlying these stress-induced lipid productions remain limited. Next, complementing environmental stress manipulation with genetic engineering would potentially be a better and more effective approach to increase microalgae lipid production and accumulation. There are generally two approaches to enhance microalgae lipid production on a molecular level: firstly, overexpression and improvement of key enzymes involved in fatty acid and isoprenoid biosynthesis and, secondly, repression of lipid catabolic and competitive pathways such as beta-oxidation and starch synthesis. This review provides an update of microalgae lipid research findings to date and aims to address recent system biology discoveries and approaches on microalgae lipid production, the roadblocks encountered, and help needed to realize the ultimate goal, that is, microalgal lipids as sustainable resources for energy and high-value products