This article explores the substantial role of craft breweries in community development, emphasizing their contribution beyond local economic impact. Craft breweries serve as community hubs, fostering social connections and local identity through their unique positioning as "third places." The article shares diverse case studies, particularly from a brewery-centric workshop at the 2023 Community Development Society (CDS) annual conference in Portland, Oregon, showcasing how breweries contribute to social capital, economic resilience, and environmental sustainability. The findings highlight the importance of neolocalism and community engagement strategies, demonstrating that breweries can be pivotal in revitalizing neighborhoods, promoting localism, and supporting sustainable development. Through case analyses, the article provides a framework to start a conversation about the multifaceted role of craft breweries in enhancing community and economic development, offering insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.
Sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems impose stringent requirements on antenna performance, including ultra-high data rates, ultra-lowlatency, massive connectivity, high-frequency operation, advanced beamforming, and long-term reliability. Achieving these goals at mm-wave and sub-terahertz frequencies introduces major challenges such as severe path loss, hardware complexity, thermal stress, limited flexibility, and performance degradation under mechanical and environmental variations. This review presents a comprehensive overview of 6G antenna requirements, key antenna technologies, material platforms, fabrication techniques, AI/ML integration, and reliability assessment. Advanced antenna solutions, including hybrid antenna arrays, antenna collocation, metasurfaces and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and mm-wave and terahertz antennas are discussed alongside their limitations in flexibility and robustness. Flexible antennas are highlighted as a promising solution, enabled by emerging materials and additive fabrication methods such as inkjet printing, aerosol jet printing, screen printing, and additive manufacturing. In addition, standardized testing and reliability evaluation under harsh environments, such as bending, thermal cycling, humidity, and aging are reviewed. Finally, the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning for antenna design optimization, fabrication control, and performance enhancement is discussed, outlining future directions for reliable and scalable 6G antenna systems.
The difficulty of particle picking in cryo-electron tomography remains a barrier to routine in situ structure determination. Machine learning is well-suited to overcome this bottleneck with efficient algorithms that generalize across molecular species. To spur new algorithm development, we held a three-month Kaggle challenge that tasked contestants with annotating five molecular species across hundreds of experimental tomograms. This competition successfully engaged >1000 participants from diverse fields and delivered particle pickers that outperformed existing state-of-the-art. Systematic comparisons of the contestants' submissions revealed the tolerance of subtomogram averaging to moderate but not severe over-picking and underscored the need for more robust measures of annotation quality. The winning models also highlighted the importance of data augmentation to overcome limited training data. All competition tomograms along with the ground truth and winning teams' annotations have been released on the CryoET Data Portal as a resource to benchmark current and future tools for particle picking.
The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a key driver of global climate variability. Through its teleconnections, ENSO influences precipitation and temperature worldwide, yet its influence on compound extremes across agricultural systems is less well explored. Here, we examine ENSO’s influence on co-occurring hot-dry (HD) and hot-wet (HW) extreme events across global croplands, given their potential risks for food production. HD events can intensify crop water stress, while HW events can increase risks of pests, pathogens, and post-harvest losses. Using the Niño 3.4 index, high-resolution climate data (1901–2024), and crop extent and calendar data, we quantify the localized risk of these compound heat events and assess exposure for all croplands as well as staple crops of maize, rice, soybeans, and wheat. We show increased risk of both HD and HW events across global croplands during El Niño years. For example, the localized risk of HD events more than doubles across parts of global croplands including India, Australia, the Sahel, Brazil and Mexico during El Niño relative to ENSO-Neutral years, resulting in a significantly elevated global cropland HD exposure during developing El Niño summers. Localized risk of HW events also more than doubles particularly across India, Argentina, Brazil, and parts of Sahel with significantly elevated cropland exposure in decaying El Niño summers. Of the four staple crops, rice shows the strongest link to ENSO, with global exposure increasing >30% and >40% above Neutral years for HD and HW, respectively. These findings demonstrate that ENSO is associated with shifts in multi-crop exposure to compound heat extremes, highlighting the need to integrate ENSO-conditioned compound event risks into early warning systems and country- and crop-specific adaptation strategies to safeguard climate-related agricultural risks.
The oculocutaneous albinism 2 protein is required for melanin synthesis in vertebrates and its loss of function leads to one of the most common forms of skin and eye albinism, Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA). Using a zebrafish disease model for OCA2, we explore developmental explanations for pleiotropic traits observed in humans with OCA2. At multiple stages, we find that oca2 mutant zebrafish exhibit abnormal number and location of iridophores, an accessory pigment cell type that arises from neural crest cells in fish and amphibians. In addition, oca2 mutants display defects during eye development including delayed choroid fissure closure and significant changes in retinal cell differentiation and organization. Our transcriptomic analysis of oca2 mutants revealed alterations in gene networks involved in differentiation of neural crest cells, retinal neurons, and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) including Notch and Wnt/β-catenin pathway genes. Together, our data provide information about developmental consequences of oca2 mutation and support the possibility that the Oca2 protein may function in neural crest differentiation and eye development.
