Transforming Shipping Containers into Livable Spaces: Replacing Traditional Insulation with Living Walls

One of the greatest issues that people are facing in Hawai‘i today is the high cost of living and finding an affordable place to call home is becoming increasingly difficult. Hawai‘i, unlike many places, has an environment conducive of outdoor lifestyle year round, which makes it such a desirable place to live. Because it is warm year round, homes need to be insulated properly in order to provide comfortable living conditions. By taking advantage of the unique climates here in Hawai‘i, growing plants and vegetables on the walls of a home could replace the need for traditional insulation and replace it with a sustainable alternative. This Doctorate Project will utilize this unique climate, exploring alternative methods of insulation by using living walls and aquaponic systems to benefit the transformation of shipping containers into livable spaces

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead