Materializing Exposure: Developing an Indexical Method to Visualize Health Hazards Related to Fossil Fuel Extraction

Biomimicry in nanotechnology: a comprehensive review

Biomimicry has been utilized in many branches of science and engineering to develop devices for enhanced and better performance. The application of nanotechnology has made life easier in modern times. It has offered a way to manipulate matter and systems at the atomic level. As a result, the miniaturization of numerous devices has been possible. Of late, the integration of biomimicry with nanotechnology has shown promising results in the fields of medicine, robotics, sensors, photonics, etc. Biomimicry in nanotechnology has provided eco-friendly and green solutions to the energy problem and in textiles. This is a new research area that needs to be explored more thoroughly. This review illustrates the progress and innovations made in the field of nanotechnology with the integration of biomimicry.

Thinking the Future of Agricultural Worker Health on a Warming Planet and an Automating Farm

Over the last 20 years, earth's increasing surface temperature has dramatically altered local climates and risks associated with agricultural work. In parallel, increasing automation has continued to be a hallmark of innovation in agriculture, promising to lower the economic and health externalities of labor in food production by reducing worker demand and hazardous exposure. However, many of these automations neither eliminate labor nor ameliorate climate change pressures on farms. As a result of the confluence between automation and environmental change, empirical studies into the social determinants of agricultural health and safety in rapidly automating industries impacted by local effects of climate change are essential for a responsive agricultural health and safety science. In this commentary, I suggest that looking outside of our disciplinary boundaries to the lessons learned from rural studies (RS), environmental social science (ESS), and science and technology studies (STS) can lend useful theoretical framing for the development of new research trajectories in the areas of automation and climate change as they impact agricultural health and safety.

SAGE advice and political decision-making: 'Following the science' in times of epistemic uncertainty

This article presents a preliminary analysis of the advice provided by the UK government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) held between 22 January and 23 March 2020 in response to the emerging coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on the published minutes of the group's meetings, the article examines what was known and not known, the assumptions and working practices that shaped their work, and how this knowledge was reflected in the decisions made by the government. In doing so, the article critically examines what it means for policy making to be 'led by the science' when the best available science is provisional and uncertain. Using ideas of 'externality' and 'evidential significance', the article argues that the apparent desire for high levels of certainty by both scientists and political decision-makers made early action impossible as the data needed were not, and could not be, available in time. This leads to an argument for changes to the institutions that provide scientific advice based on sociologically informed expectations of science in which expert judgement plays a more significant role.

Photopaper as a Tool for Community-Level Monitoring of Industrially Produced Hydrogen Sulfide and Corrosion

Scientific instrumentation driven by academic, military, and industrial applications tends to be high cost, designed for expert use, and "black boxed". Community-led citizen science (CLCS) is creating different research instruments with different measurement goals and processes. This paper identifies four design attributes for CLCS tools: affordability, accessibility, builds community efficacy and provides actionable data through validating a community method for monitoring the neurotoxic and corrosive gas Hydrogen Sulfide (H2S). For $1 per sample, the semi-quantitative method provides an affordable and easily interpretable data for communities to compare H2S concentrations and silver corrosion in their home environments to those in a major municipal sewage treatment plant. H2S is a leading cause of workplace injury in the U.S. and commonly found in oil and gas production, sewage treatment plants, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Communities neighboring such sources tend to be socio-economically marginalized with little access to scientific or political resources. Consequently, health risks and material degradation from corrosion are well studied in workplaces while community exposures are under-studied. Existing commercial H2S detection methods are prohibitively expensive for low-income communities and often require the support of professional scientists. This paper describes a simple and inexpensive semi-quantitative H2S measurement method that uses photopaper. Photopaper passively measures H2S as its silver halide layer linearly reacts with H2S between concentrations of 60 ppb to 1 ppm, discoloring the paper from white to brown. We develop a colorimetric scale for this discoloration for visual estimation of H2S concentration and overall corrosion. The scale is based on comparing silver sulfide (Ag2S) measured by Purafil Corrosion Classification Coupons (CCCs) and H2S concentrations measured with the industry standard tool a Jerome Meter to silver and sulfur bound to the photopaper as measured with X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF). We conduct our validation studies in a major municipal sewage treatment plant to provide real-world occupational benchmarks for comparison to community results. This community science method is affordable, accessible, designed to build collective efficacy and to create actionable data to flag the need for follow-up research.

Data by Proxy - Material Traces as Autographic Visualizations

Information visualization limits itself, per definition, to the domain of symbolic information. This paper discusses arguments why the field should also consider forms of data that are not symbolically encoded, including physical traces and material indicators. Continuing a provocation presented by Pat Hanrahan in his 2004 IEEE Vis capstone address, this paper compares physical traces to visualizations and describes the techniques and visual practices for producing, revealing, and interpreting them. By contrasting information visualization with a speculative counter model of autographic visualization, this paper examines the design principles for material data. Autographic visualization addresses limitations of information visualization, such as the inability to directly reflect the material circumstances of data generation. The comparison between the two models allows probing the epistemic assumptions behind information visualization and uncovers linkages with the rich history of scientific visualization and trace reading. The paper begins by discussing the gap between data visualizations and their corresponding phenomena and proceeds by investigating how material visualizations can bridge this gap. It contextualizes autographic visualization with paradigms such as data physicalization and indexical visualization and grounds it in the broader theoretical literature of semiotics, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of scientific representation. The main section of the paper proposes a foundational design vocabulary for autographic visualization and offers examples of how citizen scientists already use autographic principles in their displays, which seem to violate the canonical principles of information visualization but succeed at fulfilling other rhetorical purposes in evidence construction. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of autographic visualization, a roadmap for the empirical investigation of trace perception, and thoughts about how information visualization and autographic visualization techniques can contribute to each other.

The epistemic culture in an online citizen science project: Programs, antiprograms and epistemic subjects

In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the 'essential tensions' that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these large-scale citizen science projects.