Ocean I3. Pedagogical Innovation for Sustainability

Universities are undertaking transformation projects that align their work with the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper describes how Ocean I3, an educational innovation project that aims to reduce plastic in the sea, has made an impact on its community over its three editions (2018/19 to 2020/21). Methodologically, it has been approached by the people who make up the technical team and academic coordination as an exploratory study using discrete, non-reactive techniques, mainly from the public domain (websites, blogs, press releases, etc.), and instruments, such as field notes and work material to manage, organize, and train within the project. The analytical procedure has represented a dynamic and systematic process of categorisation. The results highlight the repercussion of the project in terms of capstone projects, master’s thesis, coursework, etc., produced by the students involved; association with employability; collaborative work from the teaching teams; monitoring experience for research purposes, and social dissemination of the project. It concludes by suggesting lines for Ocean I3 to work on in the future to make its footprint sustainable in institutions over time.This research received external funding. The Ocean I3 project. Blue skills to develop the blue economy on the Basque-Aquitaine cross-border coast was jointly financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the Spain-France-Andorra cooperation programme (POCTEFA 2014–2020) set up by the European Union. The aim of the project is to strengthen skills and inclusion within the territories

Proposing a roadmap for HealthGrids

Présentation commune des éditeur

SHARE roadmap 1:Towards a debate

10 pagesInternational audienceWe present the ‘HealthGrid' initiative and review work carried out in various European projects. Since the European Commission's Information Society Technologies programme funded the first grid-based health and medical projects, the HealthGrid movement has flourished in Europe. Many projects have now been completed and ‘Healthgrid' consulted a number of experts to compile and publish a ‘White Paper' which establishes the foundations, potential scope and prospects of an approach to health informatics based on a grid infrastructure. The White Paper demonstrates the ways in which the healthgrid approach supports many modern trends in medicine and healthcare, such as evidence-based practice, integration across levels, from molecules and cells, through tissues and organs to the whole person and community, and the promise of individualized health care. A second generation of projects have now been funded, and the EC has commissioned a study to define a research roadmap for a ‘healthgrid for Europe', seen as the preferred infrastructure for medical and health care projects in the European Research Area

Demonstration of the First Prototype of RUGBI, Design and Deployment of a Grid for Bioinformatics

présenté par N. Jacq, proceedings publiés par "Studies in health technology and informatics" seriesInternational audienceRUGBI is an industrial and academic project to design and deploy on top of existing technologies a computing grid offering a set of grid and bioinformatics services to analyse proteins. It aims to support life sciences SMEs for computing and storage, to deploy an interregional grid for bioinformatics and to create a biologists community in a grid environment. The proposed demonstration presents the first prototype of RUGBI architecture and bioinformatics services

Set up of a methodology for participatory plant breeding in bread wheat in France

In Organic Agriculture, cultivation environments and agronomic practices are very diverse. This diversity can be handled with decentralized selection based on the knowledge of farmers and scientists. A collaborative work between associations from Réseau Semences Paysannes and the DEAP team from INRA du Moulon set up an innovative breeding approach on farm based on decentralization and participation of farmers. This approach makes it possible to (i) create new population varieties of bread wheat locally adapted (genetic innovation) (ii) set up an organizational scheme based on decentralization and co construction between actors (societal innovation) and (iii) develop experimental designs, create statistical and data management tools which stimulate these genetic and societal innovations

Observing the Evolution of the Universe

How did the universe evolve? The fine angular scale (l>1000) temperature and polarization anisotropies in the CMB are a Rosetta stone for understanding the evolution of the universe. Through detailed measurements one may address everything from the physics of the birth of the universe to the history of star formation and the process by which galaxies formed. One may in addition track the evolution of the dark energy and discover the net neutrino mass. We are at the dawn of a new era in which hundreds of square degrees of sky can be mapped with arcminute resolution and sensitivities measured in microKelvin. Acquiring these data requires the use of special purpose telescopes such as the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), located in Chile, and the South Pole Telescope (SPT). These new telescopes are outfitted with a new generation of custom mm-wave kilo-pixel arrays. Additional instruments are in the planning stages.Comment: Science White Paper submitted to the US Astro2010 Decadal Survey. Full list of 177 author available at http://cmbpol.uchicago.ed

At What Stage of Neural Processing Does Cocaine Act to Boost Pursuit of Rewards?

Dopamine-containing neurons have been implicated in reward and decision making. One element of the supporting evidence is that cocaine, like other drugs that increase dopaminergic neurotransmission, powerfully potentiates reward seeking. We analyze this phenomenon from a novel perspective, introducing a new conceptual framework and new methodology for determining the stage(s) of neural processing at which drugs, lesions and physiological manipulations act to influence reward-seeking behavior. Cocaine strongly boosts the proclivity of rats to work for rewarding electrical brain stimulation. We show that the conventional conceptual framework and methods do not distinguish between three conflicting accounts of how the drug produces this effect: increased sensitivity of brain reward circuitry, increased gain, or decreased subjective reward costs. Sensitivity determines the stimulation strength required to produce a reward of a given intensity (a measure analogous to the KM of an enzyme) whereas gain determines the maximum intensity attainable (a measure analogous to the vmax of an enzyme-catalyzed reaction). To distinguish sensitivity changes from the other determinants, we measured and modeled reward seeking as a function of both stimulation strength and opportunity cost. The principal effect of cocaine was a two-fourfold increase in willingness to pay for the electrical reward, an effect consistent with increased gain or decreased subjective cost. This finding challenges the long-standing view that cocaine increases the sensitivity of brain reward circuitry. We discuss the implications of the results and the analytic approach for theories of how dopaminergic neurons and other diffuse modulatory brain systems contribute to reward pursuit, and we explore the implications of the conceptual framework for the study of natural rewards, drug reward, and mood

Innovations for Sustainability: Pathways to an efficient and post-pandemic future

3rd Report prepared by The World in 2050 initiativ

The NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE): facilitating European and worldwide collaboration on suspect screening in high resolution mass spectrometry

Background: The NORMAN Association (https://www.norman-.network.com/) initiated the NORMAN Suspect List Exchange (NORMAN-SLE; https://www.norman-.network.com/nds/SLE/) in 2015, following the NORMAN collaborative trial on non-target screening of environmental water samples by mass spectrometry. Since then, this exchange of information on chemicals that are expected to occur in the environment, along with the accompanying expert knowledge and references, has become a valuable knowledge base for "suspect screening" lists. The NORMAN-SLE now serves as a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) chemical information resource worldwide.Results: The NORMAN-SLE contains 99 separate suspect list collections (as of May 2022) from over 70 contributors around the world, totalling over 100,000 unique substances. The substance classes include per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), pharmaceuticals, pesticides, natural toxins, high production volume substances covered under the European REACH regulation (EC: 1272/2008), priority contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) and regulatory lists from NORMAN partners. Several lists focus on transformation products (TPs) and complex features detected in the environment with various levels of provenance and structural information. Each list is available for separate download. The merged, curated collection is also available as the NORMAN Substance Database (NORMAN SusDat). Both the NORMAN-SLE and NORMAN SusDat are integrated within the NORMAN Database System (NDS). The individual NORMAN-SLE lists receive digital object identifiers (DOIs) and traceable versioning via a Zenodo community (https:// zenodo.org/communities/norman-.sle), with a total of > 40,000 unique views, > 50,000 unique downloads and 40 citations (May 2022). NORMAN-SLE content is progressively integrated into large open chemical databases such as PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) and the US EPA's CompTox Chemicals Dashboard (https://comptox. epa.gov/dashboard/), enabling further access to these lists, along with the additional functionality and calculated properties these resources offer. PubChem has also integrated significant annotation content from the NORMAN-SLE, including a classification browser (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/classification/#hid=101).Conclusions: The NORMAN-SLE offers a specialized service for hosting suspect screening lists of relevance for the environmental community in an open, FAIR manner that allows integration with other major chemical resources. These efforts foster the exchange of information between scientists and regulators, supporting the paradigm shift to the "one substance, one assessment" approach. New submissions are welcome via the contacts provided on the NORMAN-SLE website (https://www.norman-.network.com/nds/SLE/)