Improving fish passage and public safety at the Ballard Locks

The Ballard Locks, operated by the US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), marked their 100th year of operation in 2017. The Locks allow access for all commercial and recreational vessel traffic between the Salish Sea and Lake Washington Ship Canal, Lake Union, and Lake Washington in Seattle. Annually, over $1.2 billion dollars of maritime commerce and 1 million tons of cargo depends on the Locks, and with over 40,000 vessels passing through each year, the Locks are the busiest in the country. In addition to vessel traffic, all salmon in the greater Lake Washington watershed must pass through the Locks both as ocean bound juveniles and as adults returning to spawn. While adult passage is facilitated through the fish ladder and juvenile passage has improved through smolt flumes and slides, repairs are needed to ensure effective fish passage and reduce salmon mortality. The Corps has identified a list of priority Locks repair projects, which need funding to be implemented. In addition to passage, high temperatures in the Ship Canal upstream of the Locks pose a salmon migratory barrier and mortality hotspot. Without fish passage and water quality improvements at the Locks, the local and regional investment of over$130 million dollars in habitat protection and restoration is at risk. Despite their enormous value to the region, the Locks do not align well with Corps’ criteria for facility maintenance funding, and repairs are not being implemented quickly enough. Fixing the Locks increases fish survival, but also reduces the likelihood of a regional catastrophe. A Locks failure would drop lake levels significantly, which would likely collapse the I-90 floating bridge, cause water quality issues, and effectively shut down the region. Locks repairs and upgrades are immediately necessary to improve conditions for fish and safeguard the people and infrastructure that depend on them

Supplemental Columbia River Protection Activities at the Department of Energy Hanford Site: 2006 Technical Peer Review

Prompted by a $10 million Congressional allocation to identify supplemental actions to protect the Columbia River from groundwater contamination beneath the Hanford Reservation, the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) Environmental Management (EM) Office of Clean-up Technology identified twenty-three potential technical projects and then down-selected ten of these for further evaluation. An independent expert peer review was conducted for the ten down-selected proposals. The review panel consisted of twenty-three recognized subject matter experts that broadly represented academia, industry, and federal laboratories. Of the initial ten proposals reviewed, one was given unconditional support, six were given conditional support, and three were not supported as proposed. Three additional proposals were then submitted by DOE for review--these proposals were structured, in part, to respond to the initial round of technical peer review comments. Peer reviews of these additional proposals provided conditional support. For those proposals that received conditional support, DOE requested specific implementation and work plans and assessed whether the plans adequately addressed the technical conditions identified by the review panel. The final list of technology proposals receiving support, or conditional support, primarily focused on understanding and reducing the potential impacts of uranium, chromium, and strontium from facilities adjacent to the Columbia River, with a secondary focus on understanding and limiting the future Columbia River impacts from the large carbon tetrachloride groundwater plume underlying and downgradient of the Hanford Central Plateau facilities. The results and recommendations of the peer reviews informed the final DOE project selections and supported implementation of the selected projects to protect the Columbia River and address groundwater contamination at Hanford

Dose-related effects of alcohol on cognitive functioning

We assessed the suitability of six applied tests of cognitive functioning to provide a single marker for dose-related alcohol intoxication. Numerous studies have demonstrated that alcohol has a deleterious effect on specific areas of cognitive processing but few have compared the effects of alcohol across a wide range of different cognitive processes. Adult participants (N = 56, 32 males, 24 females aged 18–45 years) were randomized to control or alcohol treatments within a mixed design experiment involving multiple-dosages at approximately one hour intervals (attained mean blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of 0.00, 0.048, 0.082 and 0.10%), employing a battery of six psychometric tests; the Useful Field of View test (UFOV; processing speed together with directed attention); the Self-Ordered Pointing Task (SOPT; working memory); Inspection Time (IT; speed of processing independent from motor responding); the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP; strategic optimization); the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; vigilance, response inhibition and psychomotor function); and the Trail-Making Test(TMT; cognitive flexibility and psychomotor function). Results demonstrated that impairment is not uniform across different domains of cognitive processing and that both the size of the alcohol effect and the magnitude of effect change across different dose levels are quantitatively different for different cognitive processes. Only IT met the criteria for a marker for wide-spread application: reliable dose-related decline in a basic process as a function of rising BAC level and easy to use non-invasive task properties.Mathew J. Dry, Nicholas R. Burns, Ted Nettelbeck, Aaron L. Farquharson and Jason M. Whit

Perceived barriers related to testing, management and treatment of HCV infection among physicians prescribing opioid agonist therapy : The C-SCOPE Study

The aim of this analysis was to evaluate perceived barriers related to HCV testing, management and treatment among physicians practicing in clinics offering opioid agonist treatment (OAT). C-SCOPE was a study consisting of a self-administered survey among physicians practicing at clinics providing OAT in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States between April and May 2017. A 5-point Likert scale (1 = not a barrier, 3 = moderate barrier, 5 = extreme barrier) was used to measure responses to perceived barriers for HCV testing, evaluation and treatment across the domains of the health system, clinic and patient. Among the 203 physicians enrolled (40% USA, 45% Europe, 14% Australia/Canada), 21% were addiction medicine specialists, 29% psychiatrists and 69% were metro/urban. OAT physicians in this study reported poor access to on-site venepuncture (35%), point-of-care HCV testing (16%), and noninvasive liver disease assessment (25%). Only 30% of OAT physicians reported personally treating HCV infection. Major perceived health system barriers to HCV management included the lack of funding for noninvasive liver disease testing, long wait times to see an HCV specialist, lack of funding for new HCV therapies, and reimbursement restrictions based on drug/alcohol use. Major perceived clinic barriers included the lack of peer support programmes and/or HCV case managers to facilitate linkage to care, the need to refer people off-site for noninvasive liver disease staging, the lack of support for on-site phlebotomy and the lack of on-site delivery of HCV therapy. This study highlights several important modifiable barriers to enhance HCV testing, evaluation and treatment among PWID attending OAT clinics

Trends in easement language and the status of current monitoring on working forest conservation ease

Master of ScienceNatural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97611/1/39015060808378.pd

Comparing engineering students perceptions of online and traditional face-to-face environments during a problem and Project Based Learning (PBL) module

Research examining the future of engineering education has highlighted forthcoming challenges for engineering institutions, such as increasing cohort sizes, limited budgets and a demand for the delivery of flexible, diverse and student-centred curricula. To this end,scholars have suggested the use of problem and project based learning (PBL) methodologies that can be implemented within hybrid learning environments. This paper examines and compares students' perceptions of a PBL module that was delivered by means of online and traditional face-to-face environments. The goal of this paper is to highlight the students' voice over other stakeholders to provide valuable insights into their preferences of current pedagogical practices. This in turn can provide information to improve teaching and learning in hybrid learning environments. This study was carried out with two student cohorts of first year engineering students. One of the cohorts completed the module in 2021 (N=94) in an online environment and the second in 2022 (N=89) in a traditional face-to-face environment. This paper focus on analysing the 2022 cohort and comparing the results against the findings presented at SEFI 2022 in Barcelona for the 2021 cohort. The findings revealed areas of significance for educators conducting PBL within online and hybrid environments. This includes the role of communication, module planning, dealing with conflict, and flexibility in learning.</p

Perceived barriers related to testing, management and treatment of HCV infection among physicians prescribing opioid agonist therapy: The C‐SCOPE Study

The aim of this analysis was to evaluate perceived barriers related to HCV testing, management and treatment among physicians practicing in clinics offering opioid agonist treatment (OAT). C-SCOPE was a study consisting of a self-administered survey among physicians practicing at clinics providing OAT in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States between April and May 2017. A 5-point Likert scale (1 = not a barrier, 3 = moderate barrier, 5 = extreme barrier) was used to measure responses to perceived barriers for HCV testing, evaluation and treatment across the domains of the health system, clinic and patient. Among the 203 physicians enrolled (40% USA, 45% Europe, 14% Australia/Canada), 21% were addiction medicine specialists, 29% psychiatrists and 69% were metro/urban. OAT physicians in this study reported poor access to on-site venepuncture (35%), point-of-care HCV testing (16%), and noninvasive liver disease assessment (25%). Only 30% of OAT physicians reported personally treating HCV infection. Major perceived health system barriers to HCV management included the lack of funding for noninvasive liver disease testing, long wait times to see an HCV specialist, lack of funding for new HCV therapies, and reimbursement restrictions based on drug/alcohol use. Major perceived clinic barriers included the lack of peer support programmes and/or HCV case managers to facilitate linkage to care, the need to refer people off-site for noninvasive liver disease staging, the lack of support for on-site phlebotomy and the lack of on-site delivery of HCV therapy. This study highlights several important modifiable barriers to enhance HCV testing, evaluation and treatment among PWID attending OAT clinics

Drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier: recent advances in the use of nanocarriers

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) has a significant contribution to homeostasis and protection of the CNS. However, it also limits the crossing of therapeutics and thereby complicates the treatment of CNS disorders. To overcome this limitation, the use of nanocarriers for drug delivery across the BBB has recently been exploited. Nanocarriers can utilize different physiological mechanisms for drug delivery across the BBB and can be modified to achieve the desired kinetics and efficacy. Consequentially, several nanocarriers have been reported to act as functional nanomedicines in preclinical studies using animal models for human diseases. Given the rapid development of novel nanocarriers, this review provides a comprehensive insight into the most recent advancements made in nanocarrier-based drug delivery to the CNS, such as the development of multifunctional nanomedicines and theranostics