Recent increased wide-spread availability of large geologic data sets means that these data are available to educators at all levels to provide cutting-edge Earth Science opportunities for their students. Using open-source software, we aim to create functional tools to increase the accessibility and participation of underrepresented minorities and low-income populations in Geoscience research and education. Using data provided from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC), in conjunction with the Landlab Earth Science Modeling Ecosystem, we will create a coupled computational simulation of source-to-sink sediment transport to the Mariana Trench. The program will be created within the Jupyter Notebooks computing platform for ease of access for both educators and students, providing them with the opportunity to gain valuable coding skills and modeling experiences applicable to the Geosciences and related fields. We have developed Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) through QGIS for 3-D printing, and we present a workflow to share with educators to create a hands-on tool for in-classroom use. This combination of a tangible physical model with numerical modeling is consistent with Universal Design for Learning. Our plan is to bring these products to public schools in the Northern Kentucky area to offer teachers additional tools to increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes.

The present work studies the effect of the addition of silver nitrate on the morphological, thermal, structural, mechanical, and electrical conductivity properties of polycaprolactone-AgNO3 membranes obtained by electrospinning, with a potential application for electrical stimulation in tissue engineering. The pure PCL membrane presented beads and fine fibers, while the PCL-AgNO3 membranes presented bead-less and greater diameter fibers than the pure polymer. Polymer crystallinity was affected by the salt due to the formation of complexes between the ions and the polymer, which affects polymer chains organization. These changes in fiber morphology and polymer chain organization affected their mechanical properties, resulting in a greater Young's modulus and ultimate tensile strength with added salt. The ionic conductivity of the sample with 10% salt (2.02 center dot 10-3 S/m) is close to the conductivity of cortical bone (1.82 center dot 10-3-6.67 center dot 10-3 S/m), which indicates its potential application for electrical stimulation in bone tissue engineering.

The incorporation of nanoparticles inside polymeric matrices has led to the development of multifunctional composites necessary to repair human tissues. The addition of nanoparticles may improve the properties of the composite materials such as surface area, mechanical properties, flexibility, hydrophilicity, electrical conductivity, etc. These properties can help in cellular growth, proliferation and/or differentiation. In this work, scaffolds of polycaprolactone (PCL) and reduced graphite oxide (rGO) were built by electrospinning technique. The ratios of rGO/PCL employed were 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 and 1 wt%. Two different voltage setup (10 and 15 kV) and distance of 10 cm were used for electrospinning. Thermal, mechanical, morphological, electrical, porosity and absorption water tests were made to the scaffolds. Samples electrospun at 10 kV with rGO showed improvement in mechanical properties with an increase of 190% of Young's Modulus in comparison with sample without rGO. Furthermore, samples electrospun at 15 kV showed an important deterioration with the addition of rGO but had an increase in the electrical conductivity and porosity. Overall, the addition of 0.75 and 1 wt% of rGO led to a detriment on properties due to formation of aggregates. The voltage on the electrospinning process plays a very important role in the final properties of the nanocomposites scaffolds of PCL-rGO.

A polymer electrolyte system based on polycaprolactone and silver nitrate with different compositions has been prepared by slow solvent evaporation. The results demonstrate that a decrease in the crystallinity of the sample was evidenced when the salt content was increased. The impedance spectroscopy tests were performed wetting the samples in order to simulate bone water content. The highest conductivity (9.02x10(3) S/m) was found for PCL + 20% AgNO3 with water. The activation energy of this sample was calculated from the Arrhenius plot and it was 0.27 eV while the relative crystallinity obtained from thermal analysis was 74.9%. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this work and considering the conductivity of cortical bone between 2 x 10(3) S/ m and 7 x 10(3) S/ m, PCL + 10% AgNO3 and PCL + 14% AgNO3 may also be used. (C) 2017 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.