Helping Community College Students Cope with Financial Emergencies: Lessons from Dreamkeepers and Angel Fund Emergency Financial Aid Programs

For low-income students, education can be easily derailed by a temporary financial emergency, like the loss of a job or a car repair. This final report offers lessons from two programs created by Lumina Foundation for Education that provide emergency grants or loans to help students at risk of dropping out. Eleven community colleges participated in Dreamkeepers, and 26 tribal colleges or universities participated in Angel Fund

Promoting Partnerships for Student Success: Lessons from the SSPIRE Initiative

The Student Support Partnership Integrating Resources and Education (SSPIRE) initiative aimed to increase the success of young, low-income, and academically underprepared California community college students by helping colleges strengthen their support services and better integrate these services with academic instruction. This report describes what the nine participating community colleges did to meet the goals of SSPIRE and offers lessons for other institutions drawn from MDRC's research on the initiative

Bistable Helical Origami Gripper for Sensor Placement on Branches

Understanding forest functioning is limited by the scalability of monitoring solutions and difficulty of access. Manual sensor placement can reach most locations but lacks scalability. Micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) allow for scalable sensor delivery, but current solutions are limited to attaching sensors to the trunk or large branches with spines or adhesives. The thinner branches of the outer canopy remain inaccessible, despite being of particular interest due to the important physiological processes occurring in the foliage. Herein, a MAV-deployable bistable helically coiling origami gripper is developed. The unfurled state allows for transport with a MAV, and when pushed against a branch triggers the second helically coiled state, which permits secure attachment to branches. Origami manufacturing keeps the weight of the gripper below 5 g, despite holding up to 280 g, and gripping diameters from 8 mm to 38 mm inclined up to 30°. The holding force, activation force, and resistance to tilt and rotation offsets are experimentally characterized. The deployment and retrieval of the gripper and sensor are demonstrated outside, where sensor data are collected from previously inaccessible branches in the outer canopy. Enabling robust sensor attachment in the outer canopy marks a step toward scalable environmental monitoring of forest ecosystems.ISSN:2640-456

Biodegradable Origami Gripper Actuated with Gelatin Hydrogel for Aerial Sensor Attachment to Tree Branches

Forest canopies are vital ecosystems, but remain understudied due to difficult access. Forests could be monitored with a network of biodegradable sensors that break down into environmentally friendly substances at the end of their life. As a first step in this direction, this paper details the development of a biodegradable origami gripper to attach conventional sensors to branches, deployable with an aerial robot. Through exposure to sufficient moisture the gripper loses contractile force, dropping the sensor to the ground for easier collection. The origami design of the gripper as well as biodegradable materials selection is detailed, allowing for further extensions utilizing biodegradable origami. Both the gripper and the gelatin hydrogel used as an actuating elastic element for generating the grasping force are experimentally characterized, with the gripper demonstrating a maximum holding force of 1 N. Additionally, the degradation of the grip per until failure in the presence of moisture is also investigated, where the gripper can absorb up to 10 ml of water before falling off a branch. Finally, deployment of the gripper on a tree branch with an aerial robot is demonstrated. Overall, the biodegradable origami gripper represents a first step towards a more scalable and environmentally sustainable approach for ecosystem monitoring

Protein-coated pH-responsive gold nanoparticles: Microwave-assisted synthesis and surface charge-dependent anticancer activity

The biocompatibility and ease of functionalization of gold nanoparticles underlie significant potential in biotechnology and biomedicine. Eight different proteins were examined in the preparation of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) in aqueous medium under microwave irradiation. Six of the proteins resulted in the formation of AuNPs. The intrinsic pH of the proteins played an important role in AuNPs with strong surface plasmon bands. The hydrodynamic size of the nanoparticles was larger than the values observed by TEM and ImageJ. The formation of a protein layer on the AuNPs accounts for this difference. The AuNPs exhibited sensitivity towards varying pH conditions, which was confirmed by determining the difference in the isoelectric points studied by using pH-dependent zeta potential titration. Cytotoxicity studies revealed anticancerous effects of the AuNPs at a certain micromolar concentration by constraining the growth of cancer cells with different efficacies due to the use of different proteins as capping agents. The positively charged AuNPs are internalized by the cells to a greater level than the negatively charged AuNPs. These AuNPs synthesized with protein coating holds promise as anticancer agents and would help in providing a new paradigm in area of nanoparticles

Robotic volatile sampling for early detection of plant stress

Global agriculture is challenged to provide food for a human population that is larger than ever before, and still increasing. This is accompanied by the need to reduce the large global impacts of agriculture while increasing yields. Early identification of plant stress enables fast intervention to limit crop losses, and optimized application of pesticides and fertilizer to reduce environmental impacts. Current image-based approaches identify plant stress responses hours or days after the stress event, usually only after substantial damage has occurred and visual cues become apparent. In contrast, plant volatiles are released seconds to hours after stress events, and can quickly indicate both the type and severity of stress. An automatable and non-disruptive sampling method is needed to enable the use of plant volatiles for monitoring plant stress in precision agriculture. In this work, we detail the development of a plant volatile sampler that can be deployed and collected with an uncrewed aerial vehicle. The effect of sampling flow rate, horizontal distance to volatile source, and overhead downwash on collected volatiles is investigated, along with the deployment accuracy and retrieval successes with manual flight. Finally, volatile sampling is validated in outdoor tests. The possibility of robotic collection of plant volatiles is a first and important step towards the use of chemical signals for early stress detection and opens up new avenues for precision agriculture beyond visual remote sensing

Robotic Volatile Sampling for Early Detection of Plant Stress: Precision Agriculture Beyond Visual Remote Sensing

Global agriculture is challenged to provide food for a human population that is larger than ever before, and still increasing. This is accompanied by the need to reduce the large global impacts of agriculture while increasing yields. Early identification of plant stress enables fast intervention to limit crop losses, and optimized application of pesticides and fertilizer to reduce environmental impacts. Current image-based approaches identify plant stress responses hours or days after the stress event, usually only after substantial damage has occurred and visual cues become apparent. In contrast, plant volatiles are released seconds to hours after stress events, and can quickly indicate both the type and severity of stress. An automatable and non-disruptive sampling method is needed to enable the use of plant volatiles for monitoring plant stress in precision agriculture. In this work, we detail the development of a plant volatile sampler that can be deployed and collected with an uncrewed aerial vehicle. The effect of sampling flow rate, horizontal distance to volatile source, and overhead downwash on collected volatiles is investigated, along with the deployment accuracy and retrieval successes with manual flight. Finally, volatile sampling is validated in outdoor tests. The possibility of robotic collection of plant volatiles is a first and important step towards the use of chemical signals for early stress detection and opens up new avenues for precision agriculture beyond visual remote sensing.ISSN:1070-9932ISSN:1558-223

Design and Control of a Micro Overactuated Aerial Robot with an Origami Delta Manipulator

This work presents the mechanical design and control of a novel small-size and lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) for aerial manipulation. To our knowledge, with a total take-off mass of only 2.0 kg, the proposed system is the most lightweight Aerial Manipulator (AM) that has 8-DOF independently controllable: 5 for the aerial platform and 3 for the articulated arm. We designed the robot to be fully-actuated in the body forward direction. This allows independent pitching and instantaneous force generation, improving the platform's performance during physical interaction. The robotic arm is an origami delta manipulator driven by three servomotors, enabling active motion compensation at the end-effector. Its composite multimaterial links help reduce the weight, while their flexibility allow for compliant aerial interaction with the environment. In particular, the arm's stiffness can be changed according to its configuration. We provide an in depth discussion of the system design and characterize the stiffness of the delta arm. A control architecture to deal with the platform's overactuation while exploiting the delta arm is presented. Its capabilities are experimentally illustrated both in free flight and physical interaction, highlighting advantages and disadvantages of the origami's folding mechanism