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2022-01-24
Allen Institute;
Whether it's classifying the billions of neurons that make up our brain, tracing the lineages of our development or understanding the detailed ins and outs of our cells, Allen Institute scientists are making the unknown known — and ultimately helping us to understand what it means to be human.
2022-03-30
Aspen Institute;
Scientific studies increasingly confirm what human beings across cultures and throughout time have long recognized: we are wired for art. The arts in all of their modalities can improve our physical and mental health, amplify our ability to prevent, manage, or recover from disease challenges, enhance brain development in children, build more equitable communities, and foster wellbeing through multiple biological systems.Most of us do not need rigorous research to recognize that arts and aesthetic experiences allow us to feel better; our own life experiences tell us that engaging with art, either as maker or user, can help us thrive. Why, then, have we developed the NeuroArts Blueprint: Advancing the Science of Arts, Health, and Wellbeing, a broad-reaching initiative designed to showcase the scientific evidence that explains these phenomena?The answer is that we have not developed the systems and strategies to use the extraordinary asset that is at our disposal to its fullest potential. We need a Blueprint to guide us through the vast body of knowledge that is accumulating across multiple disciplines, to identify collaborative opportunities to collect many kinds of evidence, and to employ these learnings in systematic and sustainable ways so that we can ease some of the most intractable problems that humanity faces.Â
2022-01-27
American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences' initiative on Challenges for International Scientific Partnerships (CISP) was formed to assess where international collaborations are key for U.S. interests and to identify solutions to the challenges they face. This initiative has taken a broad view of international scientific collaboration as extending across scientific disciplines and scales and as encompassing all regions of the globe. As scientists raise the alarm on risks from a warming planet and the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact lives and economies, this initiative has become only more convinced that a coordinated, collaborative science and technology (S&T) enterprise is essential to address the global challenges facing all of us. Key imperatives for international collaboration are presented in the initiative's first report, America and the International Future of Science, while principles for successful international collaboration on large-scale initiatives are presented in the subsequent report, Bold Ambition: International Large-Scale Science.Global Connections: Emerging Science Partners focuses on scientific partnerships between scientists in the United States and scientists in countries with emerging scientific enterprises. These countries are largely classified as Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) and Least-Developed Countries (LDCs) based in the Global South, including in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa. Of particular focus in this report are countries that have been identified by The World Academy of Sciences as "S&T Lagging" and are specifically seeking to boost science capacity for development.
2022-02-07
John Templeton Foundation;
In the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century, "wellbeing" occupies a special place. It is an ideal of personal and communal living, as well as a concept to help us move beyond the tired old categories of progress — such as money, fame, and the gross national product.But despite the noble sentiment around redefining our perception of wellbeing, what exactly it is and how we should measure it remains elusive, and certainly not for lack of effort. The last thirty years have seen a huge rise of investigations into wellbeing in the social sciences and humanities. This academic work has been institutionalized, with new journals, professional societies, and research centers. It is now making successful inroads into the worlds of public policy, commercial self-help, and HR management.But has this latest wave of effort been a success?This research paper on The Science of Wellbeing, co-authored by philosopher Anna Alexandrova and public policy scholar Mark Fabian, dives deep into this question. Alexandrova and Fabian first discuss the state of wellbeing research across key disciplines before turning to look at current and emerging trends – including measurement, impact of wellbeing public policy, and integration of wellbeing theories and perspectives.Â
2022-05-03
Future Africa;
It is with great appreciation that the University recognises the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). Through the Early Career Research Leader Fellowship (ECRLF), it provided a nurturing opportunity to twelve promising early career researchers from ten tertiary institutions in six countries across East, West and Southern Africa, as well as the Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius, over the past three years.This publication showcases the success stories of each of these postdoctoral fellows, and subsequently the successful interventions of their UP mentors, facilitated through Future Africa, to fill a critical gap in the African research capacity development ecosystem.
2022-08-08
Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP);
The Beyond Compliance project seeks to understand common approaches and challenges to environmental data management and sharing, as well as to identify areas for exploration and improvement. The first phase of this project focuses on data systems used or maintained by actors assessing environmental health: federal agencies, state departments of health and environment, researchers, and environmental justice organizations. Because data and information involved in these assessments are often hard to find, access, understand, assess, or integrate, it can be a challenge to paint an accurate picture of health risks. Furthermore, how results, guidance, and new data are shared depend on actors' respective goals, though we identified commonalities. This report explains our methods of investigation, identifies key themes and takeaways from our research, illustrates these with case studies, and poses some open questions and next steps.
2022-09-01
John Templeton Foundation;
This review—intended for curious readers, reporters, researchers, and teachers—is a road map to navigate rapidly moving terrain. To understand the direction of emerging research today, we need to ask: What happened to evolutionary biology during the 20th century and what did it leave out? Why is the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis seeking a more inclusive approach to evolutionary theorizing? And finally, what does a comprehensive evolutionary theory look like?The review proceeds in three parts: examining the genetic turn of evolutionary theory since Darwin (Part 1); sampling multiple, independent calls for an alternative outlook (Part 2); and finally, taking a close look at the emerging structure and outcomes of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis research program (Part 3).
2022-12-13
The Wood Foundation;
Raising Aspirations in Science Education (RAiSE) is a programme of The Wood Foundation, Scottish Government, Education Scotland, and participating local authorities which empowers primary practitioners with the skills, confidence, and networks to develop and deliver motivating and exciting STEM experiences.The RAiSE programme was established in 2016. Following a successful pilot with eight local authorities, RAiSE has now grown to engage with twenty local authorities.This report will profile how the RAiSE investment has acted as a catalyst for high-quality STEM education regionally and nationally, evidenced by three local authorities who have undertaken a full evaluation cycle - West Lothian, North Lanarkshire, and Clackmannanshire. This process was completed in June 2022.The qualitative and quantitative data within this report further proves the effectiveness of the model, as evidenced in the external analysis of the pilot and the legacy report.It should be noted that RAiSE continued to be delivered and have a positive impact for the local authorities in the period covered by this report, despite much of their engagement being delivered against the backdrop of the Covid19 pandemic.
2022-12-16
Allen Institute;
The mission of the Allen Institute is to unlock the complexities of bioscience and advance our knowledge to improve human health. Using an open science, multi-scale, team-oriented approach, the Allen Institute focuses on accelerating foundational research, developing standards and models, and cultivating new ideas to make a broad, transformational impact on science.Â
2022-12-07
Open Environmental Data Project (OEDP);
Environmental data is collected and used by researchers, regulatory agencies, communities, and businesses for a variety of purposes, though much of it only in single projects or to check regulatory boxes. While more data is being shared than ever before, spurred on by recent open data policies, increased availability does not guarantee that those who might use it can find, access, understand, or apply it in new contexts, nor that such data will be governed ethically.Open Environmental Data Project convened stakeholders from government, academia, environmental nonprofits, journalism, community organizations, and the private sector to discuss the challenges and promising solutions they've faced in sharing, using, and reusing environmental data. Four major needs emerged: findability and accessibility, data formats and infrastructure that enable interoperability, high quality or detailed enough data to answer different questions, and user capacity to understand and analyze the data. This brief offers nine opportunities to address these needs, each building on or leveraging existing efforts.
2022-10-04
Charles Darwin Foundation;
During 2021 we led 18 marine and terrestrial projects. In this document we present the most salient results of the year. We invite you to discover the report's new format which represents a slight departure from what we have previously called our Annual Report.
2022-10-27
Rockefeller Archive Center;
This report provides draft excerpts from my PhD dissertation titled "The Inaudible Sounds of Science and Medicine: Animals and Media from the Galton Whistle to Bat Echolocation," a chapter of which explores the laboratory work of Donald R. Griffin – and especially the emergence of the concept of bat echolocation – as it contributed to a sonic history of "ultrasound" and other typologies of liminal sound vibrations. Such "inaudible sounds" repeatedly defied amplification (efforts to make them louder); their frequencies were too high or too low to vibrate the human eardrum. But humans have long suspected that insects, bats, dogs, and other animals could hear them and communicate through them. The following research on bat echolocation in the Griffin laboratory is one aspect of a much more comprehensive historical project, which platforms nonhuman listeners in 19th- and 20th-century experimental contexts as they repeatedly pushed the limitations of human hearing. Broadly speaking, the dissertation suggests that animal figures are useful vectors for exploring an expanded history of sounds, including high-pitched frequencies, in science and medicine. My objective is to better understand how scientists designed media and choreographed animal listeners in order to make meaning from the sounds they could not hear on their own. I am most invested in understanding how humans exploited, collaborated with, and coexisted with animals to make sense of the insensible – or, to understand the unheard bestial worlds of communication.  In this report, I draw on material from the Donald R. Griffin Papers, held at the Rockefeller Archive Center, which includes a vast array of Griffin's laboratory notebooks, correspondences, sound films, newspaper clippings, and publications. The analysis spans the years between Donald Griffin's first experiment on bat navigation in the dark (1938) – conducted during his early graduate training years – and his postwar research on the physical principles of bat pulses into the 1960s.  More specifically, I characterize the ways in which various forms of media were deployed in experimental settings to study bats and the inaudible sounds emitted by them for orienting their bodies in flight. Scientists and collaborators of the Griffin lab relied on an array of mixed media, from the sound transposing devices of Harvard physicist George W. Pierce, to mechanical-visual apparatuses such as cathode-ray oscillograms and sound spectrographs, through to hand-written laboratory notes and printed correspondences and – ultimately – the bats themselves, to answer their questions. Furthermore, I explore the epistemic techniques of listening for sound and silence in the Griffin laboratory, in which the ears and eyes of scientists interfaced with special acoustic media to produce certain knowledges about bats and their patterns of flight. This project also engages with the highly militarized scientific contexts that constituted Griffin's work on bat echolocation.
