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Managing the nation's air quality is a complex undertaking, involving tens of thousands of people in regulating thousands of pollution sources. The authors identify what has worked and what has not, and they offer wide-ranging recommendations for setting future priorities, making difficult choices, and increasing innovation. This new book explores how to better integrate scientific advances and new technologies into the air quality management ...

Development of Unconventional Hydrocarbon Resources in the Appalachian Basin is the summary of a workshop convened by the National Research Council to examine the geology and unconventional hydrocarbon resources of the Appalachian Basin, technical methods for producing unconventional hydrocarbons and disposing of wastewater, the potential effects of production on the environment, relevant policies and regulations, and priorities for future sci...

Spatial thinking--a constructive combination of concepts of space, tools of representation, and processes of reasoning--uses space to structure problems, find answers, and express solutions. It is powerful and pervasive in science, the workplace, and everyday life. By visualizing relationships within spatial structures, we can perceive, remember, and analyze the static and dynamic properties of objects and the relationships between objects. De...

Dual-use applications for chemical manufacturing equipment have been recognized as a concern for many years, and export-control regulations worldwide are in place as a result. These regulations, in conjunction with the verification and inspection requirements of Article VI of the Chemical Weapons Convention, are designed to support non-proliferation of manufacturing equipment suitable for production of chemical warfare agents. In recent years,...

For over a century, field stations have been important entryways for scientists to study and make important discoveries about the natural world. They are centers of research, conservation, education, and public outreach, often embedded in natural environments that range from remote to densely populated urban locations. Because they lack traditional university departmental boundaries, researchers at field stations have the opportunity to conver...

Stem cells offer tremendous promise for advancing health and medicine. Whether being used to replace damaged cells and organs or else by supporting the body's intrinsic repair mechanisms, stem cells hold the potential to treat such debilitating conditions as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, and spinal cord injury. Clinical trials of stem cell treatments are under way in countries around the world, but the evidence base to support the medical use...

Microbial forensics is a scientific discipline dedicated to analyzing evidence from a bioterrorism act, biocrime, or inadvertent microorganism or toxin release for attribution purposes. This emerging discipline seeks to offer investigators the tools and techniques to support efforts to identify the source of a biological threat agent and attribute a biothreat act to a particular person or group. Microbial forensics is still in the early stages...

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Convergence of the life sciences with fields including physical, chemical, mathematical, computational, engineering, and social sciences is a key strategy to tackle complex challenges and achieve new and innovative solutions. However, institutions face a lack of guidance on how to establish effective programs, what challenges they are likely to encounter, and what strategies other organizations have used to address the issues that arise. This ...

Technological Challenges in Antibiotic Discovery and Development is the summary of a workshop convened by the Chemical Sciences Roundtable in September 2013 to explore the current state of antibiotic discovery and examine the technology available to facilitate development. Through formal presentations and panel discussions, participants from academia, industry, federal research agencies discussed the technical challenges present and the incent...

A report that follows up the 2012 report A Research Strategy for Environmental, Health, and Safety Aspects of Engineered Nanomaterials, which presented a strategic approach for developing the science and research infrastructure needed to address uncertainties regarding the potential environmental, health, and safety risks posed by ENMs.

The growing problem of changing environmental conditions caused by climate destabilization is well recognized as one of the defining issues of our time. The root problem is greenhouse gas emissions, and the fundamental solution is curbing those emissions. Climate geoengineering has often been considered to be a "last-ditch" response to climate change, to be used only if climate change damage should produce extreme hardship. Although the likeli...

Recent serious and sometimes fatal accidents in chemical research laboratories at United States universities have driven government agencies, professional societies, industries, and universities themselves to examine the culture of safety in research laboratories. These incidents have triggered a broader discussion of how serious incidents can be prevented in the future and how best to train researchers and emergency personnel to respond appro...

In the last few decades great strides have been made in chemistry at the nanoscale, where the atomic granularity of matter and the exact positions of individual atoms are key determinants of structure and dynamics. Less attention, however, has been paid to the mesoscale--it is at this scale, in the range extending from large molecules (10 nm) through viruses to eukaryotic cells (10 microns), where interesting ensemble effects and the functiona...

Climate change poses risks to human health and well-being through shifting weather patterns, increases in frequency and intensity of heat waves and other extreme weather events, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, and other environmental effects. Those risks occur against a backdrop of changing socioeconomic conditions, medical technology, population demographics, environmental conditions, and other factors that are important in determinin...

The tremendous progress in biology over the last half century - from Watson and Crick's elucidation of the structure of DNA to today's astonishing, rapid progress in the field of synthetic biology - has positioned us for significant innovation in chemical production. New bio-based chemicals, improved public health through improved drugs and diagnostics, and biofuels that reduce our dependency on oil are all results of research and innovation i...

A new focus on glycoscience, a field that explores the structures and functions of sugars, promises great advances in areas as diverse as medicine, energy generation, and materials science, this report finds. Glycans--also known as carbohydrates, saccharides, or simply as sugars--play central roles in many biological processes and have properties useful in an array of applications. However, glycans have received little attention from the resea...

Climate is changing, forced out of the range of the past million years by levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases not seen in the Earth's atmosphere for a very, very long time. Lacking action by the world's nations, it is clear that the planet will be warmer, sea level will rise, and patterns of rainfall will change. But the future is also partly uncertain--there is considerable uncertainty about how we will arrive at that differen...

Now more than ever, biology has the potential to contribute practical solutions to many of the major challenges confronting the United States and the world. A New Biology for the 21st Century recommends that a "New Biology" approach--one that depends on greater integration within biology, and closer collaboration with physical, computational, and earth scientists, mathematicians and engineers--be used to find solutions to four key societal nee...

The hominin fossil record documents a history of critical evolutionary events that have ultimately shaped and defined what it means to be human, including the origins of bipedalism, the emergence of our genus Homo, the first use of stone tools, increases in brain size, and the emergence of Homo sapiens, tools, and culture. The Earth's geological record suggests that some evolutionary events were coincident with substantial changes in African a...