Ion Exchange (India)

As a key branch of the STEM fields, geoscience has been facing challenges of gender imbalance for a long time, with women encountering systematic barriers in career advancement, fieldwork, and disciplinary culture. Based on a strategic analysis of Australia's Pathway to Diversity in STEM Review Final Recommendations and considering the unique disciplinary characteristics of geoscience, this paper systematically examines the experiential challenges women face in the field and their structural causes. An integrated implementation framework is constructed, encompassing four key pathways: gender-sensitive reforms in the education system, innovative supportive institutional practices, embedding gender indicators into policy and funding systems, and fostering international collaborative networks. It proposes that future efforts should focus on strengthening local empirical research, promoting the transformation of evaluation mechanisms, and enhancing cross-sectoral leadership. This aims to deeply integrate gender equality into the developmental fabric of geoscience, providing a reference for building an inclusive and excellent geoscientific community.

Graduate international students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) faced significant inequities in their classroom experiences during COVID-19, a global crisis that exposed longstanding disparities in institutional preparedness and academic support. In this study, inequities are defined as barriers that limited students’ ability to fully engage in academic learning, including interruptions to instruction, reductions in access to technology and academic support, challenges related to language proficiency, and alterations in interactions with faculty. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, this study examined the academic transitional experiences of 11 graduate international students enrolled at HBCUs during the pandemic. Guided by Schlossberg’s Transition Theory and its Four S’s framework, findings revealed challenges related to remote learning, diminished confidence in classroom participation, and perceived declines in English language proficiency. As global disruptions increasingly shape international student mobility and academic engagement, this study addresses a critical gap in the literature and underscores the need for equitable, crisis-responsive academic support structures for international students at HBCUs.

Effectively addressing the climate crisis at scale in a timely manner will require novel engagement strategies that move beyond laboratory findings and policy dictates. In this practice insight, we present the Moving Farm Tour, a movement-based, farm- and community-centered exploration of the intersection of art and culture with agriculture and climate change. Through this model, we highlight the use of dance and creative engagement as tangible mechanisms for learning about, sharing, understanding and creating new perspectives. Additionally, we demonstrate the value of not only bringing science (and scientists) out of the lab, but of establishing a visceral, physical connection with place and community. Our collaborative efforts have resulted in a scalable, replicable model that demonstrates how live, interactive experiences are useful for cross-sector learning, broadening perspectives, fostering community building, and inspiring novel approaches to collaboration that can lead to better outcomes for researchers, industries, communities, and the planet.

The Florida Department of Corrections is the third largest prison system in the United States with 82,124 inmates and a recidivism rate averaging 23% (Florida Department of Corrections, 2022a, 2022b; World Population Review, 2025). Previous research has advocated for more structured and meaningful resources for occupying free time in correctional settings to decrease recidivism risk (Link & Williams, 2017). Leisure Education can address these concerns. Exchange for Change is a nonprofit organization offering skills-building courses through writing activities to incarcerated individuals. This article describes the 2023 development of a Leisure Education curriculum for a correctional population within the context of the Exchange for Change writing program. Broad outcomes for the program included enhancement of participants’ writing and verbal communication skills, as well as participants’ ability to describe the value of leisure in their own lives, their leisure motivations, and their leisure interests.

To examine how persons using different methamphetamine-opioid combinations differ with respect to social, risk, and health characteristics, and to identify patterns of vulnerability across simultaneous, sequential, and independent use. 414 people who use illicit drugs were surveyed, 384 of whom reported polydrug use involving methamphetamine, in Nevada and New Mexico between June 2022 and August 2023. Participants were classified into three mutually exclusive groups based on self-reported methamphetamine and opioid use patterns: simultaneous use (deliberately using both drugs together), sequential use (using both drugs but not deliberately using simultaneously), and independent use (using methamphetamine alone or with non-opioid drugs). Prevalence ratios were calculated to examine associations between use patterns and social, economic, health, and drug use characteristics. We identified three distinct use patterns: simultaneous (53.1%), sequential (17.7%), and independent (29.2%). Individuals in these risk groups exhibited differential social, economic, carceral, and health-related risk: those engaged in simultaneous showed higher vulnerability relative to people who use independently and sequentially. Healthcare engagement was associated with lower simultaneous use. These findings suggest the need to support development of strategies to support transition from higher to lower-risk drug use patterns.

With the national "Document No. 136" promoting the full integration of new energy generation into the power market, China's electricity market reform has entered a new phase. However, the randomness and volatility of new energy output pose severe challenges to provincial power markets designed around traditional thermal power generation, with issues such as market price failure and supply-demand imbalances becoming increasingly prominent. This study aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of the impacts of full new energy market entry on supply-demand dynamics and price formation within Anhui's provincial power market. It specifically evaluates the economic effects of the "differential settlement mechanism" designed to safeguard new energy enterprises' revenues, with the goal of providing decision support for optimizing market rules and promoting the efficient integration of new energy into the power system.

This paper proposes a novel grid-connected Solar Photovoltaic battery energy storage system (PV-BESS) architecture with the support of both DC loads and grid connection. The system combines photovoltaic panels, DCDC converters with Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) based on an intelligent Battery Management System (BMS), and bidirectional converters with a net metering policy. The real-time demand management further facilitates the Smart Energy Management System (SEMS,) which optimizes an optimum dispatching mechanism for energy flow inside constituent components of the system. Simulation results confirm efficient PV generation and battery recharging, accurate State of Charge (SOC) control, and steady synchronization with the inverter and the grid. The estimated power efficiency of the DCconnected system is $10-15 \%$ higher than that of the conventional AC-coupled systems. The future is envisioned with AI-based forecasting, advanced storage technology, and integration with other sectors due to the system’s scalability and resilience. The PV-BESS dual system is both economical and eco-friendly to future generations, as per the research acknowledgments.

With the growing global demand for clean energy, green power trading has attracted widespread attention as an important means of optimising energy resource allocation. Due to the intermittent and uncertain nature of green power, traditional power trading methods are inadequate when dealing with complex distributed systems. This paper proposes an optimisation framework for green power trading based on reinforcement learning, using a deep Q network (DQN) and its improved version, Double DQN, to optimise power trading strategies in real time. Experimental verification shows that the proposed method significantly reduces transaction costs and transmission losses, and improves the supplydemand balance of distributed systems. The research results show the potential of reinforcement learning algorithms in dynamic electricity markets and provide new solutions for the efficient use of renewable energy. This research lays the theoretical foundation for the construction of future smart grids and the management of green energy.

In an era marked by the increasing importance of aGlobal South agenda to overcome environmental challenges, the BRICS have gained prominence as an influential actor in pursuing sustainable development. This paper investigates how transnational legal mechanisms have become indispensable in propelling sustainability in the BRICS context. It explores the complexities of current environmental legal documents and how the BRICS founding members have addressed them to understand the challenges associated with harnessing legal processes to foster sustainability. By analyzing the interplay between transnational legal frameworks and sustainability agendas, this research contributes valuable insights into the evolving landscape of global governance. It illuminates how BRICS nations navigate legal pathways to address environmental concerns, promote clean energy, and bolster socio-economic development while balancing their domestic legal frameworks. Finally, this paper underscores the significance of transnational legal processes, highlighting the implications for international sustainability efforts in an increasingly interconnected world, particularly in emerging economies.

Single-cell DNA sequencing offers a powerful means of studying somatic mosaicism but requires careful analysis to mitigate DNA amplification-related artifacts. We performed primary template-directed amplification (PTA) and sequencing of 102 nuclei from postmortem lung and colon tissues of a 74-year-old male. Single-cell mutation burdens and spectra were validated by duplex sequencing and revealed heterogeneity across organs and cells, including signatures of APOBEC activity and tobacco exposure. Cells from both tissues exhibited chromosomal aneuploidies, loss of chromosome Y, and chromosomal rearrangements including rearrangements of the T-cell receptor loci indicative of T-cells. Shared embryonic mutations between cells enabled reconstruction of cellular ancestries from the zygote, which were validated by bulk sequencing. Collectively, we demonstrate a comprehensive approach for single-cell genomics that yields an expansive view of diverse somatic mutation types from development through aging across diverse tissues-insights that are obscured in bulk sequencing and only partially captured by other single-cell methods.