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The authors survey how emotional responses to music differ across cultures and the impact of hearing loss on these emotional responses.

Digital compasses are essential in technology that we use in our everyday lives: phones, vehicles, and more. Li and Liu address the accuracy of these devices by presenting a new algorithm for accurately calibrating low-cost magnetometers.

The authors explore hearing students' misconceptions about the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HoH) community. Results indicate that some misconceptions are more common than others, and that personal experience with individuals in the Deaf and HoH community reduces the frequency of such misconceptions.

Heating of DNA-containing solutions is a part of many experiment protocols, but it can also cause damage and degradation of the DNA molecules, potentially leading to error in the experimental results. The authors of this paper investigate whether the presence of certain cations during heating can stabilize the DNA polymer and aid the preservation of the molecule.

The authors test different machine learning algorithms to remove background noise from audio to help people with hearing loss differentiate between important sounds and distracting noise.

The authors analyzed the heat transfer of different containers in the microwave aiming to identify the most optimal material of container to reduce heating time.

The authors looked at the ability of eggshells to slow ice melting. They found that eggshells were able to increase ice melting time when crushed showing that they were an effective thermal barrier.

Sweet potatoes are one of the most common starches in Taiwan, and sweet potato peels hold significant potential to make biodegradable plastics which can alleviate the environmental impact of conventional petroleum-based plastics. In this paper, Tsai et al created starch-based bioplastics derived from sweet potato peels and manipulated the amount of added glycerol to alter the plastic’s strength and flexibility properties. Their results indicated that higher concentrations of glycerol yield more malleable plastics, providing insights into how recycled agricultural waste material might be used to slow down the rate of pollution caused by widespread production of conventional plastics.

Textile waste from the fashion industry is a major environmental pollutant, but recycling waste into novel building material is a strategy to reduce the negative effects. This manuscript characterized five different binders that can be used to repurpose textile waste into bricks for construction purposes. Water-based glue, cement, white cement, plaster of Paris, and epoxy resin were mixed with shredded textile waste, and the mechanical characteristics and thermal insulation of each brick type were measured. Bricks with increased mechanical strength had the poorest thermal resistance, and the contrasting properties would suit different building purposes. This work provides a first step in generating recycled textile bricks for construction in a circular economy framework.