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The following essay examines Anthony Hernandez’s photographic work from the early 1970s to the present. The essay addresses how Hernandez reimagines the genre of street photography in Los Angeles, countering the misconception that the genre, so dominant in the history of the medium, is nearly inexistent in California.

1- The Alaskan Matanuska-Susitna Basin (MSB) provides habitat for all five Pacific salmon species, and their large seasonal spawning runs are important both ecologically and economically. However, the encroachment of human development through urbanization and extractive industries poses a serious risk to salmon habitat in the MSB. 2- Using systematic conservation planning techniques, different methods of incorporating anthropogenic risks were assessed to determine how to cost-effectively conserve salmon habitat in the area. 3- The consequences of four distinct conservation scenarios were quantified: no consideration of either urbanization or extractive industries (‘Risk ignored’ scenario); accounting for the risk of urbanization, and avoiding conservation in all fossil fuel rich areas (‘Urbanization accounted, all extraction avoided’ scenario); accounting for urbanization and oil and gas development, but avoiding conservation in coal rich areas (‘Urbanization accounted, coal areas avoided’ scenario); and accounting for all anthropogenic risks to habitat, and allowing conservation in oil, gas, or coal rich areas (‘All risks accounted’ scenario). To compare conservation success and resiliency, the impact of these risks were estimated using Monte Carlo simulations. The final cost of each solution was then divided by the number of conservation targets met to determine a return on investment. 4- Results from scenarios that avoided all extractive activities, or just coal, suggest that conservation targets cannot be met by simply avoiding fossil fuel rich areas, and these scenarios resulted in lower returns on investment than when risks from extraction were incorporated into the solution. 5- By providing economically rooted conservation prioritization, this study provides a method for local managers and conservation groups to identify conservation opportunities in MSB river basins.

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a widely used polymeric material. In this work, the microstructural features before and after the solid-state polymerization (SSP) of several DuPont PET products were investigated by low-voltage scanning electron microscopy (LV-SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The microstructural features on the cross section of various PET samples included crystallites, voids, boundaries, defects, and amorphous phases. The SEM images revealed layered and stepped structural features at the micron and 10-micron scales that are highly crystallized at the near-edge region of the cross section for both linear and branched PET samples after the SSP process. The AFM images demonstrate that the degree of crystallization for the linear and branched PET samples increases gradually from the central area to the edge on the cross section. The linear crystallized PET has a higher degree of orientation than the branched crystallized PET in the 10-micron to micron scales, but their crystalline structures have no significant differences in the submicron to nanometer scales. The PET crystallization process occurs when the molecular chains in the amorphous phase are aligned and folded to form straight molecular chains at the nanometer scale, and small crystallites are formed. The crystallites aggregate and align together into a polygon rod-like-shaped crystallites at the submicron scale. Finally, large crystallites at the micron size are formed that appear on the edge area of the cross section.