Chabot College

This chapter examines the five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), the critical climate challenges in the region, and the actions taken in response to the climate crisis. It analyzes significant regional climate vulnerabilities, including extreme weather events, water shortages, air pollution, glacial melting, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. The chapter reviews each country’s institutional climate actions, focusing on the legal frameworks for water management, desertification, and biodiversity and the region’s commitments to international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Joint initiatives by these countries to address the regional climate crisis are also discussed. Furthermore, the chapter evaluates noninstitutional actions taken by civil society in response to climate challenges.

In response to the 18 March episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, in which artist Geraldine Cox talks about the links between science and art, and her collaborations with physicists at Imperial College London and other research institutes.

Trade-offs are fundamental to evolutionary outcomes and play a central role in eco-evolutionary theory. They are often examined by experimentally selecting on one life-history trait and looking for negative correlations in other traits. For example, populations of the moth Plodia interpunctella selected to resist viral infection show a life-history cost with longer development times. However, we rarely examine whether the detection of such negative genetic correlations depends on the trait on which we select. Here, we examine a well-characterized negative genotypic trade-off between development time and resistance to viral infection in the moth Plodia interpunctella and test whether selection on a phenotype known to be a cost of resistance (longer development time) leads to the predicted correlated increase in resistance. If there is tight pleiotropic relationship between genes that determine development time and resistance underpinning this trade-off, we might expect increased resistance when we select on longer development time. However, we show that selecting for longer development time in this system selects for reduced resistance when compared to selection for shorter development time. This shows how phenotypes typically characterized by a trade-off can deviate from that trade-off relationship, and suggests little genetic linkage between the genes governing viral resistance and those that determine response to selection on the key life-history trait. Our results are important for both selection strategies in applied biological systems and for evolutionary modelling of host-parasite interactions.

Instructor Talk—noncontent language used by instructors in classrooms—is a recently defined and promising variable for better understanding classroom dynamics. Having previously characterized the Instructor Talk framework within the context of a single course, we present here our results surrounding the applicability of the Instructor Talk framework to noncontent language used by instructors in novel course contexts. We analyzed Instructor Talk in eight additional biology courses in their entirety and in 61 biology courses using an emergent sampling strategy. We observed widespread use of Instructor Talk with variation in the amount and category type used. The vast majority of Instructor Talk could be characterized using the originally published Instructor Talk framework, suggesting the robustness of this framework. Additionally, a new form of Instructor Talk—Negatively Phrased Instructor Talk, language that may discourage students or distract from the learning process—was detected in these novel course contexts. Finally, the emergent sampling strategy described here may allow investigation of Instructor Talk in even larger numbers of courses across institutions and disciplines. Given its widespread use, potential influence on students in learning environments, and ability to be sampled, Instructor Talk may be a key variable to consider in future research on teaching and learning in higher education.