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ABSTRACTThis article explores Chinese environmental politics as a complex strategy for engineering weather and climate at national and then planetary scales. It argues that in times of meteorological insecurity, we can explore diverse sites in China's state environmental political apparatus as attempts at coordinating diverse physical, natural, and social processes into components of manipulable weather systems. Through considering two programs of state environmental intervention, the article explores "infrastructure" as a political practice and opportunity. First, in considering aerial seeding and ecological migration programs in the context of anti‐dust storm programs spearheaded by state forestry agencies, I show how environmental engineering involves the continual retooling of wind flows, local ecologies, and ex‐herder precarity into a variegated strategy of atmospheric control for downwind places in the path of dust storms. Then, I explore how the recent ascendance of the Chinese state in international climate accords builds on a decade‐long theorization of "socialist ecological civilization" by Party theorists. In aligning the longevity of state socialism with the sustaining of planetary climate systems, I argue that Chinese international politics increasingly rely on a vision of China as infrastructural to the political and climatic apparatus of the planet as such. [climate change, environment, infrastructure, dust storms, China]

The Sykes commentary advocates "a more sensible, graded approach for protection from low dose ionizing radiation" until the LNT dose-response issue is resolved. It urges scientists to stop criticizing the LNT model that links radiation to a risk of cancer and accept regulatory use of the threshold model to "protect" people, but with higher limits. It fails to mention the 120-year history of successful low-dose treatments of a wide variety of serious diseases, including cancers. The commentary ignores published evidence of a threshold at 1.1 Gy for radiogenic leukemia and a dose-rate threshold at about 0.6 Gy per year for lifespan shortening. LNT came from politicized science, replete with scientific misconduct and conflict of interest. Its acceptance created a false cancer scare that was likely intended to stop atomic bomb testing, but it has severely damaged human welfare. Many vitally important low-dose therapies were discarded when the radiation scare was disseminated in 1956. The rapid growth of nuclear energy ended with the media-inflamed public panic after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Extreme implementation of the precautionary principle made it uneconomic. Availability of a low-dose therapy for lung inflammation could have dramatically decreased the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

L'émergence des véhicules autonomes (VA) et des véhicules hautement autonomes (VHA) pose de nombreux défis aux régulateurs fédéraux, étatiques et locaux aux États-Unis. Elle entraîne des développements véritablement perturbateurs qui laissent présager des gains sociaux élevés en regard de coûts sociaux incertains. Les défis analysés menacent également de brouiller les attributions historiques des autorités de régulation et de rendre les techniques de régulation traditionnelles anachroniques et dysfonctionnelles. Cet article cartographie le paysage des défis régulatoires présentés par ces nouvelles générations de véhicules et fournit une évaluation préliminaire de la voie à suivre.

A critical body politics lens to sexual desire and attraction, told from the perspective of an autoethnography. ; Nault, Curran J. ; Women's and Gender Studies

Investigación en base al desarrollo de estrategias de comunicación para empoderar a un grupo de mujeres que fueron víctimas de violencia familiar y sexual, y que ahora son lideresas en el distrito de Laredo

Despite the global positive impacts of soybean-, maize- and sugarcane-based (first-generation) liquid biofuels, several drawbacks pertaining to increased use of agricultural land, causing deforestation in some countries and extensive practice of fertilizers have been observed. As a result, developing advanced (second- and third-generation) liquid biofuels have been identified as better alternatives and are considered to be of great importance in the future. These alternative biofuels will help to meet the energy demand by transition to ameliorate and fulfil the energy demand, especially in the transport sector.The actual energy demand for fossil fuels in Bolivia is unsustainable due to its continuous increase. Bolivia has its own fossil fuel resources, but these still fall short of demand, forcing the government to budget for yearly fuel imports. This situation has prompted attempts to achieve energy independence through the production of biofuels. However, it is important that Bolivian energy independence endeavours include a sustainable vision. Bolivia has great potential for local first- and second-generation liquid biofuel production. However, the intensification of liquid biofuel production should focus on second- and third-generation biofuel production to minimize direct and indirect undesired impacts.This thesis considers the development of suitable technology and procedures to produce second-generation liquid biofuels, which can be divided into biodiesel and ethanol production. The proposed biodiesel production includes the development of heterogeneous catalysts that enable the production of biodiesel from edible and non-edible oils (i.e. rapeseed, babassu, and Ricinus oils). These heterogeneous catalysts are based on gel-based mayenite and alumina supports with the co-precipitation of metal oxides of calcium, lithium, magnesium and tin. The synthesized catalysts were characterized using, N2 physisorption, X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The ...

This article examines the social and environmental costs of living in the mineral age, wherein contemporary global livelihoods depend almost completely on the extraction of mineral resources. Owing to the logic of extractivism—the rapid and widespread removal of resources for exchange in global capitalist markets—both developed and developing countries are inextricably entangled in pursuing resource extraction as a means of sustaining current lifestyles as well as a key mechanism for promoting socioeconomic development. The past 15 years has seen a massive expansion of mineral resource extraction as many developing countries liberalized their mining sectors, allowing foreign capital and mining companies onto the lands of peasant farmers and indigenous people. This mining expansion has also facilitated the rise of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). Transformations in livelihoods and corporate practices as well as the environmental impacts and social conflicts wrought by mining are the central foci of this article.