Kinds Of Creatures Research Articles

Micro Learning: A Modernized Education System Using the VIKOR Method

A micro-teaching clinic marks a performance plateau once educators attain an advanced level. Enhancing teacher performance serves as a beneficial catalyst. Despite highly skilled teachers reaching career peaks initially, they often lack motivation to further elevate their capabilities. Introducing new ideas and effortlessly encouraging them to explore fosters professional growth, benefiting student learning outcomes significantly. A live snake in the hands of a class of micro-teachers. Her lesson's goal was to point out traits unique to snakes that other creatures do not have. His dramatic arrival made the students immediately engaged, and they remained so for the whole five-minute HD instruction. By the time the lesson ends, it's actual Furthermore, it is undeniable that laboratory instruction is not. Supervisors assess and assign scores to pupils of teachers in accordance with the Stanford Assessment Guide. Overall, he scored really well, with an exception of "improving the learning material." This gifted instructor covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time using the lecture method while providing immediate feedback. It was advised that the student concentrate again to give a more succinct summary that was more robust close, and that the topics be restricted to the minimum of three fundamental traits that set snakes apart from other kinds of creatures. The similar handling of snakes lesson was repeated by the teacher, who also provided instant comments on proposed advancement. The instructor, students, and supervisors all saw that the lesson had advanced considerably with frequent repeating. Everyone was in agreement that the content had been well examined and had an extremely clear structure. In addition to "accelerating the curriculum," The VIKOR method, that was developed for multifaceted optimization in complicated systems is becoming more and more common. Its main objective is to rank and choose among alternatives that have disparate and contradictory unit requirements. Concession in the VIKOR method approach is defined as a decision based on common preferences, and compromise ranking is determined by evaluating its degree of near to the optimal solution. Online Courses and Tutorials, Micro-Credentials and Badges, YouTube and Podcasts, Mobile Learning Apps and Self-paced Learning Modules. Cost and Affordability group Learning, Outcomes and Application group, Environment group and Interactivity and Engagement. the final Results of Micro education analysis using the Vikor Method. Micro education in Self-Paced Learning Modules is showing the highest Rank and Mobile Learning Apps is showing the Lowest rank

14. An Analytical Study of the Cultural Rituals of the Prophet’s Time (Foods, Beverages and Clothes)

I begin with the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Merciful. All praise is due to the Holy One who is the Sustainer of all tears and all kinds of creatures. Millions of blessings and peace be upon the Muhammad (swa), his Alles and his companions. The fact of the matter is that I find it so difficult to work on any aspect of the life of the Prophet(swa) that I walk with my feet on a bare sword. Why is it that at any time a word may come out of the mouth of a biographer which is not acceptable to the Prophet (swa)? And it should be rejected from the Holy shrine. Did any of the lovers of the Prophet (swa) say well that every deed and action that Mustafa (swa) is able to do is in fact the same Sira?. The biographer must have the God of love and the love of Mustafa (swa)otherwise he cannot be a biographer. By the grace and mercy of Allah, I have tried to mention briefly the most famous of the cultural rites of the Prophet(swa). In general, there are three types of rituals mentioned in the Prophets time. No.1 of the Prophets meales era.No.2 of the Prophets drinks era. No.3 of the Prophes cloths era. What were the drinks of that time? and what counted as drinks. All the springs of Makkah and Madinah have been discussed. And the names of different springs are also mentioned with argument. The fountain of Hazrat Abu Ayyub Ansari is also mentioned. costumes of the Prophet (swa) have been discussed as needed. Different types of clothing of this era, different names, Makkey dress, especially Madni dress have been highlighted a lot. Especially the blessed clothes of Muhammad (swa) have been described in a beautiful and charming way. Also the blessed turban of the Muhammad (swa) the decoration of the article. Then the fragrances and perfumes of the Prophets time are mentioned. Then the ornaments of the Prophet (swa) are brought. May Allah Almighty be your protector and helper.

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

EVOLUTION, ORIGINAL SIN, AND RACE

This issue's Symposium is dedicated to the topic of “Evolution, Original Sin, and the Fall,” with five articles and an introduction by the Symposium's guest editors, Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt. As De Cruz and De Smedt point out, original sin and the Fall have taken a central place in Christian contributions to the religion and science discussion. The first two articles reflect on Aquinas, who is still central to the Roman Catholic tradition; the third article stems from the presbytarian tradition; and the fourth and fifth articles draw on literary science and sociology, respectively—this Symposium definitely includes an interesting mix of disciplines. Paul Macdonald shows how traditional Thomistic claims about the creation and fall of the first human beings—or “Adam”—are compatible with the claims of evolutionary science concerning human origins. He defends Aquinas's claims that God created Adam in a state or condition of original justice, wholly subject to God and so fully virtuous, as well as internally immune to bodily corruption, suffering, and natural death. Julie Loveland Swanstrom finds space in Aquinas's thinking for evolutionary thought. She argues that individual or original sin is an inadequate explanation for variation within kinds of creatures and she shows that the existence of argumentative parallels between Aquinas’s treatment of women and mules challenges presumptions about what medievals meant by “static kinds.” Hans Madueme maintains that although the search for a post-Darwinian doctrine of sin has prompted fascinating areas of research, coming up with an evolutionary theology of sin remains a remarkably difficult project. He critically surveys recent theodicies that aim to explain why evolution results in so much suffering. Austin Freeman argues that because God is the author of history and has a purpose for his creation, evolution has a plot and can be analyzed with tools drawn from literary criticism. He engages with the “epic of evolution” genre of scientific literature, distinguishing between a purely naturalistic epic of evolution and a goal-oriented Christian epic of evolution. Finally, Jack Mulder addresses ways in which one important view of racism parallels the Christian doctrine of original sin. Using an epistemology of ignorance, he argues that the dichotomy between two main strands of Christian thinking about original sin, Augustinian versus Irenaean, is short-sighted, and he proposes a model of original sin similar to an epistemology of racist ignorance. In this issue's Comment section, Daniel Lim offers a fresh comment on Mikael Leidenhag's (2019) article in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science and on Leidenhag's (2020) response to an earlier comment. Lim critically assesses the way that Leidenhag uses Jaegwon Kim's work on causal exclusion to critique what he calls “Natural Divine Causation” (NDC). Although he agrees with Leidenhag that questions about divine action can fruitfully be posed in terms of Kim's so-called “Causal Exclusion Argument,” the technical way that this is done requires amendment. The comment provides new possibilities for those who wish to construe a noninterventionist picture of divine action based on emergence theory or nonreductive physicalism. This issue contains six contributions in the Articles section. John Calvin Chatlos proposes a “framework of spirituality” for the future of naturalism; this framework identifies part of the “unseen order” of religion as opening a “spiritual core” within persons as a source of healing and happiness. Libby Osgood delves into interpretations of Teilhard de Chardin, in order to address ecological eschatological questions; she disentangles the “nature of nature” in his work by distinguishing thirteen distinct definitions of “nature” that can be summarized into five categories. Harvey Cawdron develops a model of panentheism in which God's embodiment in the cosmos allows all, including all nonbelievers, to have a relationship with God; his model does not require subjects to recognize that they are in a relationship with God. Robbert Zandbergen writes about antinatalism—the conviction that existence is not intrinsically more valuable than nonexistence—and the “death of God”; he describes how antinatalism is the most modern outgrowth of the death of God and represents the most radical face of secular humanism. Hussein Ali Agrama discusses the reports and results of recent official studies of UFOs and argues they may pose a challenge to contemporary science, religion, and secularity; current knowledge on UFOs renders both science and religion uncanny, placing them in a domain where they become irreducibly strange while unshakably familiar. Lari Launonen calls out “debunking arguments”—that belief-forming processes underlying belief in supernatural agents are unreliable—based solely on cognitive science of religion; he highlights that in conjunction with claims about evolutionary epistemology and religious diversity, cognitive science of religion can provide an explanation of why people might believe in gods even if gods did not exist. The issue ends with Lluis Oviedo's review of Gavin Flood's Religion and the Philosophy of Life.

Toward a Poetics of Allyship: Rajiv Mohabir’s Radical, Animal Coolitude

AbstractI offer one alternative to media depictions of migrant bodies as animalistic threat by tracing animal movement in Rajiv Mohabir’s poetry. Mohabir is a queer Indo-Caribbean American poet whose poetry depicts animals’ fettered movement, often a consequence of heteropatriarchal and nationalist operations of power. Mohabir suggests that such artistic productions might align and thus ally themselves with disparate imperiled bodies due in part to the ethics of Coolitude, or, the state of having descended from Indo-Caribbean coolies. Mohabir has revitalized the term in a series of manifestos and craft essays published on Jacket2, where he claims Coolitude poetics as a corrective to the kind of nationalist mindset that would condemn imperiled migrants.Mohabir’s poetry prominently features two kinds of creatures: those who enjoy conditional movement, such as the whales that populate verse from across his career, which denotes a subject’s attempts to free themselves from the conscripts of heterosexual or imperial legacies; and those such as the taxidermied wren or coyotes that adorn his first published collection, The Taxidermist’s Cut (2016). These figures best describe political subjects who have internalized the resentment of their political environment and are consequently destroyed. Mohabir does, however, offer one other figure: the unfettered whale of “Why Whales are Back in New York City” (2017). The whales of this poem represent a subject that succeeds in defending itself from the oppression that distinguishes the rest of his poetry; the poem thus serves as a model of sanctuary.

Why the Content of Animal Thought Cannot Be Propositional

In “Steps toward Origins of Propositional Thought”, Burge claims that animals of different species are capable of making deductive inferences. According to Burge, that is why propositional thought is extended beyond the human mind to the minds of other kinds of creatures. But, as I argue here, the inferential capacities of animals do not guarantee a propositional structure. According to my argument, propositional content has predicates that might involve a quantificational structure. And the absence of this structure in animal thought might explain some of the differences with the propositional content of human thought.

Neural Synchrony and the Causal Efficacy of Consciousness

The purpose of this paper is to address a well-known dilemma for physicalism. If mental properties are type identical to physical properties, then their causal efficacy is secure, but at the cost of ruling out mentality in creatures very different to ourselves. On the other hand, if mental properties are multiply realizable, then all kinds of creatures can instantiate them, but then they seem to be causally redundant. The causal exclusion problem depends on the widely held principle that realized properties inherit their causal powers from their realizers. While this principle holds for functional realization, it fails on a broader notion of realization that permits the realization of complex qualitative properties such as spatial and temporal patterns. Such properties are best seen as dependent powerful qualities, which have their causal roles in virtue of being the qualities they are, and do not inherit powers from their realizers. Recent studies have identified one such property—neural synchrony—as a correlate of consciousness. If synchrony is also partially constitutive of consciousness, then phenomenal properties are both multiply realizable and causally novel. I outline a version of representationalism about consciousness on which this constitution claim holds.

Resisting the Great Endarkenment: On the Future of Philosophy

Elijah Millgram’s book The Great Endarkenment takes philosophy to task for failing to note the kinds of creatures we are (serial hyperspecializers) and what that means for philosophy. In this commentary, I will complicate the picture he draws, while suggesting a more hopeful path forward. First, I argue that we are not actually serial hyperspecializers. Nevertheless, we are hyperspecializers, and this is the main source of the looming endarkenment. I will suggest that a proper understanding of expertise, particularly the requirement that experts (at least experts whose success is not readily assessable) be required to explicate their judgments helps to mitigate the threat of siloed expertise and endarkenment. Further, I argue that grappling directly with the institutional structures that encourage narrow and isolated hyperspecialists in academia can be a way to avoid endarkenment problems. The current landscape of academia, with its valorization of narrow disciplinary expertise, is neither necessary nor sustainable. In order to change this landscape, we need to understand how current incentives construct epistemic niches, and what we might change in order to reshape the ecology of academia.

Binding process between E.coli SSB and ssDNA by single-molecule dynamics

Single-stranded DNA binding proteins (SSBs) widely exist in different kinds of creatures. It can bind single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) with high affinity. The binding is sequence independent. SSB can also interact with different kinds of proteins, and thus leading them to work at the special sites. It plays an essential role in cell metabolism. E.coli SSB is a representative of SSB among all kinds of SSBs, it is a homotetramer consisting of four 18.9 kD subunits, the homotetramer is stable under low concentration. E.coli SSB has different binding modes under different salt concentrations (for example NaCl). When NaCl concentration is higher than 200 mM, E.coli SSB can bind 65 nt ssDNA, when NaCl concentration is lower than 20 mM, it can bind 35 nt ssDNA, and when the NaCl concentration is between 20 mM and 200 mM, it can bind 56 nt ssDNA. The characteristics of E.coli SSB are so attractive that a large number of researches have been done to distinguish its binding process. Earlier researchers tried to use stop flow technology to study the interaction between SSB and ssDNA in bulk. However, the high affinity between SSB and ssDNA makes this interaction too rapid to be observed at all, and the dissociate interaction even could not be measured. Single molecule technology which combines with low and accurate force offers researchers another way to achieve this goal. Some researchers observed the unwrapping phenomenon in an optical tweezers pulling experiment. However, they did not find the detailed process of binding or dissociation. In our work, we use a magnetic tweezer to pull the SSB/ssDNA complex and find a special phenomenon like double-state jump. Using the single molecule dynamics to analyse the data, we find that this phenomenon is the combination and dissociation between SSB and ssDNA. After comparing the pulling curve of ssDNA only and SSB/ssDNA complex, we find that the SSB binding process consists of two stages, one is rapid combination/dissociation under the action of a critical force; the other is continuous wrapping following the reduced force. According to Bell formula and SSB/ssDNA complex binding model, we obtain the interaction rate and free energy parameters under 0 pN, and we calibrate the free energy to obtain its continuous wrapping part, so we can obtain the whole free energy landscape and understand the binding process. Our analysis way is also applicable to the case of similar interactions to obtain their interaction details and free energy characteristics.

Designs of Animals, Birds and Humans in Iranian Painting

The designs of human figures, animals and birds in visual arts of Iran has its particular characteristics in every era which results a certain shared cultural vision of the people of this land. For example in the cultural perspective of Iranian painting, the design of human body is very important. However, the artist never tries to make a real similarity of human visages and his greater emphasis is on a kind of human quality of visages. It also provides a partial understanding of each others assets. Application of animal's and bird's motifs, or different reasons such as their application in everyday life or in particular rituals and..., always has a special position in the visual arts of Iran and usually are divided into two kinds of creatures: good (pure), evil (bad) This paper is an attempt to identify the general features and characteristics of motifs of human, birds and animals in Iranian paintings associated with visual samples.

Monster Violence in the Book of Job

In this paper, I explore the book of Job in terms of the symbolic and ideological warfare waged between God and the human protagonist, Job. Specifically, I argue that the invocation of various kinds of creatures under the “monster” rubric (such as Leviathan, Rahab, Yamm, the Twisting Serpent, and Behemoth) can be illuminated through a consideration of contemporary work—in the history of religions, literary theory, and film studies—that categorizes the monstrous in terms of ecological disorientation, metaphors of the torn human body, and the boundaries of the “home.” Moreover, I draw on the work of Marie Helene Huet in her book Monstrous Imagination to argue that some of God’s showcase animals in Job 38–41 (most prominently Behemoth and Leviathan, but also others) should be discussed as monsters with reference to their ambiguous species representation and their “false resemblance” to other known creatures. When considered within the context of Job’s pervasive themes of geological and animal violence, Joban monsters take their place among the menagerie of creatures adduced by Job’s speaking characters as rhetorical gestures of disorientation, community redemption, and the meaning of small community experience within empire.

Cats and categories — reply to Teubert

This paper is a response to the discussion article inLanguage and Dialogue 3:2by Wolfgang Teubert, “Was there a cat in the garden? Knowledge between discourse and the monadic self.” Teubert deals there with a number of themes, including a discussion of some philosophical issues raised by Roy Harris and Martin Heidegger. In my response, I am less concerned with those aspects of the article than with the claims made by Teubert about the contrasts between humans and other animals. I respond to Teubert’s position on the status and origins of categories of animals from a realist perspective, with reference to evidence from the natural sciences and anthropology. I suggest that Teubert’s thesis rests on a number of errors, including an over-estimation of the power of discourse, an under-estimation of the range of sensory and semiotic perception available to different kinds of creatures, and a lack of attention to contemporary developments in relevant ethological research.

Are We Luminous?

Since its appearance over a decade ago, Timothy Williamson's anti‐luminosity argument has come under sustained attack. Defenders of the luminous overwhelmingly object to the argument's use of a certain margin‐for‐error premise. Williamson himself claims that the premise follows easily from a safety condition on knowledge together with his description of the thought experiment. But luminists argue that this is not so: the margin‐for‐error premise either requires an implausible interpretation of the safety requirement on knowledge, or it requires other equally implausible (and soritical) assumptions. In this paper I bolster the margin‐for‐error premise against these attacks by recasting Williamson's own two‐part defence, the first part intended to work on the assumption that there is no constitutive connection between the phenomenal and the doxastic, and the second intended to work without this assumption. Pace various luminists, I argue that the appeals to safety needed for Williamson's two‐part defence (the first in terms of outright belief, the second in terms of degrees of confidence) are plausible. I also argue that all that is needed to generate the margin‐for‐error premise from these safety conditions is an empirical assumption about the kinds of creatures we are: that is, creatures whose beliefs are structured by certain dispositions. By recasting the anti‐luminosity argument in this way, we can understand what is really at stake in the debate about luminosity: that is, whether we are luminous.

Selfhood beyond the Species Boundary

Selfhood beyond the Species Boundary David Herman (bio) A review of Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: U of California P, 2013. Growing out of fieldwork conducted in the forests around Ávila, a Quichua-speaking Runa village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon region, Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think participates in what might be called the “ontological turn” in recent anthropological research. This turn calls for the comparative study of the various ontologies projected by different cultures, past and present. At issue are more or less widely shared understandings of the kinds of beings that populate the world, the qualities and abilities those beings are taken to embody (including the capacity to have perspectives on events, among other attributes linked to selfhood), and how the beings included in various categories and subcategories relate to those categorized as human.1 Coming to terms with differences among such categorization systems has far-reaching implications not only for anthropology but also for other areas of inquiry concerned with how systems of this sort shape various institutions and practices; pertinent fields of research include the history of agriculture, animal ethics, and the sociology of companion animals in families. Cultural ontologies also bear saliently on the study of literary and other narratives that feature the perspectives and experiences of nonhuman animals, or that more or less explicitly situate human characters in wider, trans-species constellations of agents.2 In his introduction, Kohn suggests that “an ethnographic focus not just on humans or only on animals but also on how humans and animals relate breaks open the circular closure that otherwise confines us when we seek to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans”—for example, via sociocultural anthropology with its emphasis on language, culture, society, and history (6).3 Although he connects his approach to other research on human-nonhuman relationships, including Bruno Latour’s use of actor-network analysis to explore the hybrid formations that link humans with various artifacts and instruments and also Jane Bennett’s Deleuze-inspired account of the agency of matter, Kohn objects to the way some of this work flattens out “important distinctions between humans and other kinds of beings, as well as those between selves and objects” (7). Accordingly, he gravitates toward “Donna Haraway’s conviction that there is something about our everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures that can open new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding” (Kohn 7). In the discussion of runa puma, or “were-jaguars,” that opens the book, Kohn comments, How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. If jaguars also represent us—in ways that can matter vitally to us—then anthropology cannot limit itself just to exploring how people from different societies might happen to represent them as doing so. Such encounters with other kinds of beings force us to recognize the fact that seeing, representing, and perhaps knowing, even thinking, are not exclusively human affairs. (1) Kohn’s other key conceptual resources include monistic models that resist dichotomizing culture and nature, and that thereby offset dualistic anthropological paradigms “in which humans are portrayed as separate from the worlds they represent” (9), along with Charles Saunders Peirce’s semiotic system and Terrence W. Deacon’s more recent use of Peirce’s ideas to explore emergent phenomena in the domain of biology. In the book’s first chapter, “The Open Whole,” Kohn combines his emphases on monism and on semiotics to map out what he terms the “ecology of selves,” human as well as nonhuman, within which the human inhabitants of Ávila situate themselves. Kohn proposes the concept of “amplification” to distinguish forest settings from other places where the multifarious ecology of selves might be less evident, arguing that immersion in the especially “dense ecology [of the Amazonian forest] amplifies and makes visible a larger semiotic field beyond that which is exceptionally human” (49). He then goes on to explore how anthropology might be reoriented around the assumption that life itself is constitutively semiotic. In Kohn’s account, which builds on Peirce’s triadic model of the sign as...

Constitutivism and normativity: a qualified defence

In this article, I defend a meta-normative account of constitutivism by specifically addressing what I take to be a fundamental criticism of the constitutivist stance, namely, the objection that constitutive standards have conceptual, not normative, force, and so that no practical normativity can be extracted from them as constitutive of agency. In reply to this objection, I argue that the conceptual role of the standards constitutive of agency – their applying to us by virtue of our being the kinds of creatures we are – does not exclude, but rather combines with, the normative role the same standards play in our practical life.

Growth characteristics comparison of lettuce and silkworms in and out of the multibiological life support system

To establish bioregenerative life support system (BLSS) on lunar or Mars bases in the future, it is necessary to firstly conduct manned simulation experiments, including several different kinds of creatures on the ground. To provide the basis for establishing the system, a multibiological life support system composed of lettuce, silkworm and algae was set up in this study. Lettuce and silkworms were cultivated in a closed integrated cultivating system (CICS) of integrative experimental system (IES). The conveyor-type cultivation method was implemented, which harvested the largest batch of lettuce and silkworms from the system and carried the smallest batch of them into the system every four days. During this process, the main element contents of lettuce were determined. Biomasses, heights, and crown diameters of lettuce in and out of the system were compared. Biomasses, excrement production rates, and bioconversion rates of silkworms in and out of the system were also studied. Results showed silkworms and lettuce in the IES could grow normally. There were no significant differences of biomass, height, or excrement production rates between creatures (lettuce and silkworms) in the system and those out of the system.

Comment on “Evolutionary dynamics of RNA-like replicator systems: A bioinformatic approach to the origin of life” by Nobuto Takeuchi and Paulien Hogeweg

As emphasized, e.g., by Dyson [1] one can envisage life processes from two points of view: the metabolic processes, in which a cascade of free-energy dissipating physico-chemical reactions maintain the living system out of thermodynamical equilibrium, and the information process, whose eventual effect is to allow the living form to produce offspring similar to itself – and to incorporate information about the environment by the mechanism of natural selection. Thus explaining the origin of life poses a two-pronged question: the origin of metabolism, and the origin of biological information. “Either life began only once, with the functions of replication and metabolism already present in rudimentary form and linked together from the beginning, or life began twice, with two separate kinds of creatures, one kind capable of metabolism without exact replication and the other kind capable of replication without metabolism” [1]. However, while “metabolism without exact replication” is already a form of information processing, “replication without metabolism” is highly unlikely to take place, since replication itself cannot take place except far from equilibrium, and to keep a system out of equilibrium some form of metabolic process should take place. I think that this dilemma is ill-placed: the essential difference lies between a mainly analogical and a mainly digital form of information processing. In the present life forms, information is essentially processed in a digital form represented by the nucleotide sequences in the form’s DNA. But one can imagine a kind of prebiotic system similar to Oparin’s coacervates [2] or to Luisi’s liposomes [3], which are able to (inaccurately) reproduce, carrying information to their offspring via their composition, i.e., in analogic language. Takeuchi and Hogeweg [4] start by assuming the existence of a digital reproduction mechanism, in the form of a collection of self-replicating RNA molecules. However, the system is not able to stabilize its information-processing properties without exploiting some form of localization or compartmentation, allowing for the stable coexistence of template and actuator molecules. The need for spatial structure and some form of compartmentation mechanism to avoid the dire consequences of the error threshold was emphasized long ago by Michod [5]. Then the “analogic” information is inscribed in the relative local fraction of template and actuator molecules. Takeuchi and Hogeweg elegantly show that spiral reaction waves can provide some of the necessary localization mechanisms, even in the absence of strict compartmentation. The appearance of active compartmentation adds of course stability to the mechanism. (See, e.g., the mechanisms for the maintenance of producer–nonproducer coexistence in a synthetic biological system reported in [6].) They show moreover that the transition from an RNA-based system to a dual DNAand RNA-based

The fluxes of carbon, nitrogen and water in the multibiological life support system

To establish bioregenerative life support systems (BLSS) on lunar or mars bases, firstly, it is necessary to conduct BLSS experiments including humans and various kinds of creatures on the ground. Carbon and nitrogen balances as well as water cycle are the important subjects that need to be studied. To provide basis for establishing a manned BLSS, a multibiological life support system composed of lettuce, silkworm and algae was set up in this study to carry out gas exchange investigation between humans and the system. During this process, the production rate and quality of condensate, substance flows of lettuce, silkworm and algae in and out of the system as well as carbon and nitrogen contents of these substances were studied. Results showed water was completely cycled in the system and condensate quality was relatively good, certain amounts of carbon and nitrogen were accumulated in the system and existed in the form of microorganisms.

Characteristics of riverbed configuration affected by river-crossing structures

In the middle reaches of gravel-bed rivers, the formation of alternate or linguoid bars provides a diverse microhabitat for many kinds of creatures, much as with riffle pools and dry riverbed areas. The riverbed configuration, however, is completely altered by river-crossing structures, such as weirs or drop structures, installed in a river channel. In this study, both a large river and a small stream that have many river-crossing structures were targeted, and the characteristic feature of the topography in a river channel was investigated. Consequently, there was clarification that a similar pattern of topography was created in both rivers. The elevation gap between the bank and the riverbed was largest just downstream of a river-crossing structure but decreased in the flow direction and disappeared upstream of the next structure. Contrastingly, the width of the low-flow channel was narrowest just downstream of a river-crossing structure and gradually increased in the flow direction. The implication was that the longitudinal profile of the bank was determined by significant past floods and the low-flow channel was gradually created by small floods afterwards. Based on these results, we conclude that a change of river-crossing structure height is effective to manage the floodplain for habitat control, and the installation of large boulder is also effective to restore the low-flow channel.

Gas exchange between humans and multibiological life support system

To establish a Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS) in lunar or Mars bases in the future, manned stimulation experiments including several kinds of creatures are needed to be conducted first. Gas exchange relation, element transfer and transformation principles, etc. between humans and the multibiological system composed of plants, animals, microalgae and so on must be investigated in order to place different organisms with appropriate numbers and proportions in the BLSS. This research cultivated lettuce ( Lactuca sativa L.) and silkworm ( Bombyx mori L.) in the CICS (Closed Integrative Cultivating System) of the IES (Integrative Experimental System) with Chlorella vulgaris cultivated in the PPB (Plate Photo Bioreactor) of the IES. Conveyor-type cultivation method was implemented for harvesting the largest batch of lettuce and silkworms through the mass exchange chamber of the IES every four days and transferring the smallest batch of lettuce and silkworms into the system; carrying certain amounts of alga liquid out with nutrient liquid replenished every day. Gas exchange between testers and the IES including three phases was conducted periodically. Phase I involved one person participating in gas exchange with lettuce in plant chamber as primary means of air revitalization for 3 months. Phase II was gas exchange between one person and autotrophic creatures, which were lettuce and microalgae, for 1 month. In the Phase III test, silkworms were introduced into the animal chamber for 2 months. Mathematical modeling and experimental simulation for this system was done to study its gas robustness. Results show that CO 2/O 2 concentration fluctuated around normal levels, the system possessed relatively good gas robustness and there were no trace gas (CH 4, NH 3 and C 2H 4) contaminant problems in the system.