Clean drinking water is an essential component to maintaining public health. The authors of this study tested the bacterial load of water from three different disinfection and filtration systems in order to determine which system might be superior.

The authors looked at the ability of Shewanella oneidensis to generate energy in a microbial fuel cell under varying conditions. They found that the S. Onedensis biofilm was able to produce energy in microgravity and that one of the biggest factors that limited energy production was a decrease in growth medium present.

In this study, three models are used to test the hypothesis that data-centric artificial intelligence (AI) will improve the performance of machine learning.

Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide is slowly acidifying our oceans. Here the authors test the effects of ocean acidification on the ability of hermit crabs (P. longicarpus) to find food. Though no statistically significant changes in food finding were observed, the data suggest a trend toward different activity.

A photovoltaic cell (PV cell), or solar cell, converts the energy of light into electricity and is the basis for solar power. In order to increase the efficiency of PV cells, the authors in this study used common household items as photon transmissions mediums and measured their effects on the temperature and voltage output of the PV cells.

Buildings, which are responsible for the majority of electricity consumption in cities like Dubai, are often exclusively reliant on electrical lighting even in the presence of daylight to meet the illumination requirements of the building. This inefficient use of lighting creates potential to further optimize the energy efficiency of buildings by complementing natural light with electrical lighting. Prior research has mostly used ballasts (variable resistors) to regulate the brightness of bulbs. There has been limited research pertaining to the use of pulse width modulation (PWM) and the use of ‘triodes for alternating current’ (TRIACs). PWM and TRIACs rapidly stop and restart the flow of current to the bulb thus saving energy whilst maintaining a constant illumination level of a space. We conducted experiments to investigate the feasibility of using TRIACs and PWM in regulating the brightness of bulbs. We also established the relationship between power and brightness within the experimental setups. Our results indicate that lighting systems can be regulated through these alternate methods and that there is potential to save up to 16% of energy used without affecting the overall lighting of a given space. Since most energy used in buildings is still produced through fossil fuels, energy savings from lighting systems could contribute towards a lower carbon footprint. Our study provides an innovative solution to conserve light energy in buildings during daytime.

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.

It's time-consuming to complete the calculations that are used to study nuclear reactions and energy. To uncover which computational chemistry tools are useful for this challenge, Pan, Vaiyakarnam, Li, and McMahan investigated whether the Python-based Simulations of Chemistry Framework’s Hartree-Fock (PySCF) method is an efficient and accurate way to assess alkane molecules.

Collisions of heavy ions, such as muons result in jets and noise. In high-energy particle physics, researchers use jets as crucial event-shaped observable objects to determine the properties of a collision. However, many ionic collisions result in large amounts of energy lost as noise, thus reducing the efficiency of collisions with heavy ions. The purpose of our study is to analyze the relationships between properties of muons in a dimuon collision to optimize conditions of dimuon collisions and minimize the noise lost. We used principles of Newtonian mechanics at the particle level, allowing us to further analyze different models. We used simple Python algorithms as well as linear regression models with tools such as sci-kit Learn, NumPy, and Pandas to help analyze our results. We hypothesized that since the invariant mass, the energy, and the resultant momentum vector are correlated with noise, if we constrain these inputs optimally, there will be scenarios in which the noise of the heavy-ion collision is minimized.

Quorum sensing (QS) is the process in which bacteria recognize and respond to the surrounding cell density, and it can be inhibited by certain antimicrobial substances. This study showed that illumination intensity data is insufficient for evaluating QS activity without proper statistical modeling. It concluded that modeling illumination intensity through time provides a more accurate evaluation of QS activity than conventional cross-sectional analysis.