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Figures S1–S9

Selection of high-quality sperm is critical to the success of assisted reproductive technologies. Clinical screening for top sperm has long focused on sperm swimming ability when following boundaries or when fully free of constraints. In this work, we demonstrate a sperm selection approach with parallel 2 μm tall confined selection channels that prohibit rotation of the sperm head and require planar swimming. We demonstrate that a planar swimming subpopulation of sperm capable of entering and navigating these channels has DNA integrity superior to the freely-swimming motile or raw sperm populations over a wide range of semen sample qualities. The DNA integrity of the selected sperm was significantly higher than that of the corresponding raw samples for donor samples and clinical patient samples, respectively. In side-by-side testing, this method outperforms current clinical selection methods, density gradient centrifugation and swim-up, as well as sperm selected via general motility. Planar swimming represents a viable sperm selection mechanism with the potential to improve outcomes for couples and offspring.

The ubiquitous presence of microplastics in the environment makes it imperative to understand their effects. In particular, we must understand exposure, i.e., how many microplastics are ingested by organisms. This has proved difficult because counting microplastics in an organism’s gut content provides only a snapshot in time. Here, we show a method that uses a digestible fluorescent coating (DFC) to quantify cumulative microplastic ingestion. Our method enables precise and automated enumeration of cumulative microplastic ingestion with the flexibility to track different microplastic types and sizes with distinct fluorescent tracers. We confirm the coating is not acutely toxic and is not preferentially ingested by several invertebrate species. This method provides a unique and reliable approach to quantify cumulative microplastic ingestion in laboratory exposure studies, and can be used to advance our understanding of the impact of microplastics to wildlife.

Cultivating microalgae has the potential to produce biofuels and bioproducts from solar energy with low land use and without competing with food crops. However, despite these key advantages, barriers remain to widespread, economical production from microalgae including: the relatively low solar energy conversion efficiency of photosynthesis, unknown optimal cultivation conditions, and the high energy and economic costs of cultivation and processing microalgal biomass. Thus, recent technological developments seek to address these barriers. To optimize cultivation conditions, devices taking advantage of advanced fluid and light handling techniques are being developed. These approaches drastically increase experimental throughput to find the ideal cultivation parameters. To apply optimal conditions, a range of cultivation approaches are being developed to deliver light and nutrients to microalgae to achieve high productivities. Finally, to extract maximal value out of microalgal biomass, downstream processing technology, such as hydrothermal liquefaction, is replacing costly conventional processes to produce fuels and high-value products from microalgae. Taken together, these technologies can allow microalgae to become competitive in the sustainable energy landscape – particularly to produce complex, high-value molecules.

Infertility is a growing global health issue with far-reaching socioeconomic implications. A downward trend in male fertility highlights the acute need for affordable and accessible diagnosis and treatment. Assisted reproductive technologies are effective in treating male infertility, but their success rate has plateaued at ∼33% per cycle. Many emerging opportunities exist for microfluidics - a mature technology in other biomedical areas - in male infertility diagnosis and treatment, and promising microfluidic approaches are under investigation for addressing male infertility. Microfluidic approaches can improve our fundamental understanding of sperm motion, and developments in microfluidic devices that use microfabrication and sperm behaviour can aid semen analysis and sperm selection. Many burgeoning possibilities exist for engineers, biologists, and clinicians to improve current practices for infertility diagnosis and treatment. The most promising avenues have the potential to improve medical practice, moving innovations from research laboratories to clinics and patients in the near future.

Nanostructured CO2 reduction catalysts now achieve near-unity reaction selectivity at increasingly improved Tafel slopes and low overpotentials. With excellent surface reaction kinetics, these catalysts encounter CO2 mass transport limitations at current densities ca. 20 mA cm–2. We show here that – in addition to influencing reaction rates and local reactant concentration – the morphology of nanostructured electrodes enhances long-range CO2 transport via their influence on gas-evolution. Sharper needle morphologies can nucleate and release bubbles as small as 20 μm, leading to a 4-fold increase in the limiting current density compared to a nanoparticle-based catalyst alone. By extending this observation into a diffusion model that accounts for bubble-induced mass transport near the electrode’s surface, diffusive transport can be directly linked to current densities and operating conditions, identifying efficient routes to >100 mA cm–2 production. We further extend this model to study the influence of mas...

The spectral distribution of light influences microalgae productivity; however, development of photobioreactors has proceeded largely without regard to spectral optimization. Here, we use monochromatic light to quantify the joint influence of path length, culture density, light intensity, and wavelength on productivity and efficiency in Synechococcus elongatus. The productivity of green light was ∼4× that of red at the highest levels of culture density, depth, and light intensity. This performance is attributed to the combination of increased dilution and penetration of this weakly absorbed wavelength over a larger volume fraction of the reactor. In contrast, red light outperformed other wavelengths in low-density cultures with low light intensities. Low-density cultures also adapted more rapidly to reduce absorption of longer wavelengths, allowing for prolonged cultivation. Taken together, these results indicate that, particularly for artificially lit photobioreactors, wavelength needs to be included as a critical operational parameter to maintain optimal performance. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 1160-1169. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are conserved areas for reproduction of marine species. Conflicts in the utilization of MPAs had been a challenge for many years. Fishing activities within the MPAs are real threat for the sustainability of marine resources. In the Philippines, direct visual observation of the responsible agencies is the only method to identify the entry of fishing vessels in the MPAs. This paper presents an IoT-based system for monitoring the fishing vessels’ entry in the MPA. The system uses Haversine method for computing the distance between the fishing vessel and the MPA. The distance had been classified to provide different location status to the fishing vessel and Web interface. LoRa communications module was utilized in the study and was able to transmit geographical information from the fishing vessel to the base station within few kilometers. The Web interface with Google Maps API allows the end user to remotely monitor clearly the entry of fishing vessel in the MPA.

Optimizing bioproduct generation from microalgae is complicated by the myriad of coupled parameters affecting photosynthetic productivity. Quantifying the effect of multiple coupled parameters in full-factorial fashion requires a prohibitively high number of experiments. We present a simple hydrogel-based platform for the rapid, full-factorial mapping of light and nutrient availability on the growth and lipid accumulation of microalgae. We accomplish this without microfabrication using thin sheets of cell-laden hydrogels. By immobilizing the algae in a hydrogel matrix we are able to take full advantage of the continuous spatial chemical gradient produced by a diffusion-based gradient generator while eliminating the need for chambers. We map the effect of light intensities between 0 μmol m(-2) s(-1) and 130 μmol m(-2) s(-1) (∼28 W m(-2)) coupled with ammonium concentrations between 0 mM and 7 mM on Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Our data set, verified with bulk experiments, clarifies the role of ammonium availability on the photosynthetic productivity Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, demonstrating the dependence of ammonium inhibition on light intensity. Specifically, a sharp optimal growth peak emerges at approximately 2 mM only for light intensities between 80 and 100 μmol m(-2) s(-1)- suggesting that ammonium inhibition is insignificant at lower light intensities. We speculate that this phenomenon is due to the regulation of the high affinity ammonium transport system in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as well as free ammonia toxicity. The complexity of this photosynthetic biological response highlights the importance of full-factorial data sets as enabled here.

This paper develops a new implementation coupling optimisation-based anisotropic mesh adaptivity algorithms to a moving mesh numerical scour model, considering both turbulent suspended and bedload sediment transport. The significant flexibility over mesh structure and resolution, in space and time, that the coupling of these approaches provides makes this framework highly suitable for resolving individual marine structure scales with larger scale ocean dynamics. The use of mesh optimisation addresses the issue of poor mesh quality and/or inappropriate resolution that have compromised existing modelling approaches that apply mesh movement strategies alone, especially in the case of extreme scour. Discontinuous Galerkin finite element-based discretisation methods and a Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes-based turbulent modelling approach are used for the hydrodynamic fluid flow. In this work the model is verified in two dimensions for current-dominated scour near a horizontal pipeline. Combined adaptive mesh movement and anisotropic mesh optimisation is found to maintain both the quality and validity of the mesh in response to morphological bed evolution changes, even in the case where it is severely constrained by nearby structures.

Microalgal biofuel is an emerging sustainable energy resource. Photosynthetic growth is heavily dependent on irradiance, therefore photobioreactor design optimization requires comprehensive screening of irradiance variables, such as intensity, time variance and spectral composition. Here we present a microfluidic irradiance assay which leverages liquid crystal display technology to provide multiplexed screening of irradiance conditions on growth. An array of 238 microreactors are operated in parallel with identical chemical environments. The approach is demonstrated by performing three irradiance assays. The first assay evaluates the effect of intensity on growth, quantifying saturating intensity. The second assay quantifies the influence of time-varied intensity and the threshold frequency for growth. Lastly, the coupled influence of red-blue spectral composition and intensity is assessed. Each multiplexed assay is completed within three days. In contrast, completing the same number of experiments using conventional incubation flasks would require several years. Not only does our approach enable more rapid screening, but the short optical path avoids self-shading issues inherent to flask based systems.

The spectral distribution of light influences microalgae productivity; however, development of photobioreactors has proceeded largely without regard to spectral optimization. Here, we use monochromatic light to quantify the joint influence of path length, culture density, light intensity, and wavelength on productivity and efficiency in Synechococcus elongatus. The productivity of green light was ∼4× that of red at the highest levels of culture density, depth, and light intensity. This performance is attributed to the combination of increased dilution and penetration of this weakly absorbed wavelength over a larger volume fraction of the reactor. In contrast, red light outperformed other wavelengths in low-density cultures with low light intensities. Low-density cultures also adapted more rapidly to reduce absorption of longer wavelengths, allowing for prolonged cultivation. Taken together, these results indicate that, particularly for artificially lit photobioreactors, wavelength needs to be included as a critical operational parameter to maintain optimal performance. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2017;114: 1160-1169. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The following study investigates splashing of impinging water droplets on superhydrophobic surfaces with and without the presence of a stagnation flow. Droplets were accelerated by either gravity or gravity and co-flow. By changing the height and the air flow velocity different combinations of stagnation flow and droplet velocity were created. The spreading diameter, spreading velocity and contact time were studied for different air and droplet speeds. It was clearly observed that for a fixed impact velocity (i.e. constant Weber number), the presence of the stagnation flow promotes splashing and formation of satellite droplets. Consequently, for the co-flow droplet impact experiments, the mass of the recoiled droplet is significantly smaller than that of the impinging droplet in still air.

Sperm migration through the female tract is crucial to fertilization, but the role of the complex and confined structure of the fallopian tube in sperm guidance remains unknown. Here, by confocal imaging microchannels head-on, we distinguish corner- vs. wall- vs. bulk-swimming bull sperm in confined geometries. Corner-swimming dominates with local areal concentrations as high as 200-fold that of the bulk. The relative degree of corner-swimming is strongest in small channels, decreases with increasing channel size and plateaus for channels above 200 μm. Corner-swimming remains predominant across the physiologically-relevant range of viscosity and pH. Together, boundary-following sperm account for over 95% of the sperm distribution in small rectangular channels, which is similar to the percentage of wall swimmers in circular channels of similar size. We also demonstrate that wall-swimming sperm travel closer to walls in smaller channels (~100 μm), where the opposite wall is within the hydrodynamic interaction length-scale. The corner accumulation effect is more than the superposition of the influence of two walls and over 5-fold stronger than that of a single wall. These findings suggest that folds and corners are dominant in sperm migration in the narrow (sub-mm) lumen of the fallopian tube and microchannel-based sperm selection devices.

the need for better and more reliable security measures is prevalent today especially as the commonly existing security measures are getting less reliable. The study was conducted to create a solution to the said problem using the very versatile and relatively inexpensive Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. The system incorporates the unique frequency content of every individual as a more reliable and difficult to replicate, replacing the conventional security keys and passwords. The user's frequency content or voice model was extracted using signal processing in FPGA and stored in the system as the basis for comparison for the different speech signals. Input speech signals were matched to the stored voice model and the authentication system shows a locked or unlocked status through an on-board LEDs. LEDs which lights up indicates unlocked and doesn't otherwise. The system was successfully implemented in Altera DE2-115 board, allowing the correct user in unlocking the system while the other incorrect users can't, with a best system identification accuracy of 86%.

A platform compatible with microtiter plates to parallelize environmental treatments to test the complex impacts of multiple stressors, including parameters relevant to climate change and point source pollutants is developed. This platform leverages (1) the high rate of purely diffusive gas transport in aerogels to produce well‐defined centimeter‐scale gas concentration gradients, (2) spatial light control, and (3) established automated liquid handling. The parallel gaseous, aqueous, and light control provided by the platform is compatible with multiparameter experiments across the life sciences. The platform is applied to measure biological effects in over 700 treatments in a five‐parameter full factorial study with the microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Further, the CO2 response of multicellular organisms, Lemna gibba and Artemia salina under surfactant and nanomaterial stress are tested with the platform.

The education of the deaf and hard of hearing has been the aim and inspiration of many technological discoveries and developments. Since the early work of Alexander Graham Bell, a visionary in special education for the deaf, many relevant innovations have considerably improved the quality of life and the professional opportunities for deaf people of all ages, especially recent advances in cochlear implants. In this article, based on our experience at the Instituto Oral Modelo (IOM) in Buenos Aires, we explain how the digital technology of today has radically changed the education of the deaf and the expectations we may have in the digital era for the next generation of children with auditory deficiencies.

Coalescence of a falling droplet with a stationary sessile droplet on a superhydrophobic surface is investigated by a combined experimental and numerical study. In the experiments, the droplet diameter, the impact velocity, and the distance between the impacting droplets were controlled. The evolution of surface shape during the coalescence of two droplets on the superhydrophobic surface is captured using high speed imaging and compared with numerical results. A two-phase volume of fluid (VOF) method is used to determine the dynamics of droplet coalescence, shape evaluation, and contact line movement. The spread length of two coalesced droplets along their original center is also predicted by the model and compared well with the experimental results. The effect of different parameters such as impact velocity, center to center distance, and droplet size on contact time and restitution coefficient are studied and compared to the experimental results. Finally, the wetting and the self-cleaning properties of superhydrophobic surfaces have been investigated. It has been found that impinging water drops with very small amount of kinetic impact energy were able to thoroughly clean these surfaces.

This paper is based on the research study ?Housing and supportneeds of older people with visual impairment ? experiences andchallenges? (Hanson et al, 2002).1The full findings of this study are reported in another occasionalpaper produced by Thomas Pocklington Trust.2 It is, however, usefulto state that this study found evidence that sight loss in later life hassignificant emotional consequences, often unacknowledged byprofessionals. It also showed how older people with visionimpairment often have their own coping strategies, but are less ablethan sighted peers to carry out certain daily tasks.The study suggested that professionals should offer sensitive andtimely support, in a more collaborative manner, and that serviceshave to be monitored and evaluated to avoid wide-ranging needsremaining unmet. In respect of the home environment, researchindicated that adequate and accessible domestic space in which todo housework safely, low vision equipment and the provision ofovernight accommodation for guests and carers was required.Most participants in the study wished to stay in their homes andneighbourhoods. When asked about possible alternative options,participants emphasised the importance of location and sufficientspace. If they were considering supported housing, they requiredfull information about how it addressed their particular needs.This paper focuses on whether older people with visual impairmentare vulnerable to social exclusion if their social care needs are unmet. In particular, this paper argues that:? Greater professional collaboration is required to improve eyeclinic and community support services.? Relevant staff should aim to provide timely and holisticassessments of need.? Older people with vision impairment have significant needs asregards home care support, access to information, psychologicalstress and social isolation.? Initiatives such as peer support groups and resource centres offeropportunities to tackle social exclusion arising from unmetneeds. This paper is based on the research study ?Housing and supportneeds of older people with visual impairment ? experiences andchallenges? (Hanson et al, 2002).1The full findings of this study are reported in another occasionalpaper produced by Thomas Pocklington Trust.2 It is, however, usefulto state that this study found evidence that sight loss in later life hassignificant emotional consequences, often unacknowledged byprofessionals. It also showed how older people with visionimpairment often have their own coping strategies, but are less ablethan sighted peers to carry out certain daily tasks.The study suggested that professionals should offer sensitive andtimely support, in a more collaborative manner, and that serviceshave to be monitored and evaluated to avoid wide-ranging needsremaining unmet. In respect of the home environment, researchindicated that adequate and accessible domestic space in which todo housework safely, low vision equipment and the provision ofovernight accommodation for guests and carers was required.Most participants in the study wished to stay in their homes andneighbourhoods. When asked about possible alternative options,participants emphasised the importance of location and sufficientspace. If they were considering supported housing, they requiredfull information about how it addressed their particular needs.This paper focuses on whether older people with visual impairmentare vulnerable to social exclusion if their social care needs are unmet. In particular, this paper argues that:? Greater professional collaboration is required to improve eyeclinic and community support services.? Relevant staff should aim to provide timely and holisticassessments of need.? Older people with vision impairment have significant needs asregards home care support, access to information, psychologicalstress and social isolation.? Initiatives such as peer support groups and resource centres offeropportunities to tackle social exclusion arising from unmetneeds.

The Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper (WHAM) has surveyed the distribution and kinematics of ionized gas in the Galaxy above declination -30 degrees. The WHAM Northern Sky Survey (WHAM-NSS) has an angular resolution of one degree and provides the first absolutely-calibrated, kinematically-resolved map of the H-Alpha emission from the Warm Ionized Medium (WIM) within ~ +/-100 km/s of the Local Standard of Rest. Leveraging WHAM's 12 km/s spectral resolution, we have modeled and removed atmospheric emission and zodiacal absorption features from each of the 37,565 spectra. The resulting H-Alpha profiles reveal ionized gas detected in nearly every direction on the sky with a sensitivity of 0.15 R (3 sigma). Complex distributions of ionized gas are revealed in the nearby spiral arms up to 1-2 kpc away from the Galactic plane. Toward the inner Galaxy, the WHAM-NSS provides information about the WIM out to the tangent point down to a few degrees from the plane. Ionized gas is also detected toward many intermediate velocity clouds at high latitudes. Several new H II regions are revealed around early B-stars and evolved stellar cores (sdB/O). This work presents the details of the instrument, the survey, and the data reduction techniques. The WHAM-NSS is also presented and analyzed for its gross properties. Finally, some general conclusions are presented about the nature of the WIM as revealed by the WHAM-NSS., Comment: 42 pages, 14 figures (Fig 6-9 & 14 are full color); accepted for publication in 2003, ApJ, 149; Original quality figures (as well as data for the survey) are available at http://www.astro.wisc.edu/wham/

Coalescence of a falling droplet with a sessile droplet on solid surface with various wettabilities is investigated by a combined experimental and numerical study. In the experiments, the droplet diameter, the impact velocity, and the distance between the impacting droplets were controlled. The evolution of surface shape during the coalescence of two droplets on various surfaces is captured using high speed imaging and compared with numerical results. A two-phase volume of fluid method is used to determine the dynamics of droplet coalescence, shape evaluation, and contact line movement. The spreading length of two coalescing droplets along their original centers is also predicted by the model and compared well with the experimental results. The effect of different parameters such as impact velocity, center to center distance, droplet size, and surface wettability on maximum spreading length are studied and compared to the experimental results. Finally, correlations are developed for predicting the maximum...

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