Oil in subsurface reservoirs is biodegraded by resident microbial communities. Water-mediated, anaerobic conversion of hydrocarbons to methane and CO2, catalyzed by syntrophic bacteria and methanogenic archaea, is thought to be one of the dominant processes. We compared 160 microbial community compositions in ten hydrocarbon resource environments (HREs) and sequenced twelve metagenomes to characterize their metabolic potential. Although anaerobic communities were common, cores from oil sands and coal beds had unexpectedly high proportions of aerobic hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria. Likewise, most metagenomes had high proportions of genes for enzymes involved in aerobic hydrocarbon metabolism. Hence, although HREs may have been strictly anaerobic and typically methanogenic for much of their history, this may not hold today for coal beds and for the Alberta oil sands, one of the largest remaining oil reservoirs in the world. This finding may influence strategies to recover energy or chemicals from these HREs by in situ microbial processes.
Sensors have become ubiquitous in their reach and scope of application. They are a technological cornerstone for various modes of health surveillance and participatory medicine—such as quantifying oneself; they are also employed to track people with certain as impairments perceived ability differences. This paper presents quantitative and qualitative data of an exploratory, non-generalizable study into the perceptions, attitudes and concerns of staff of a disability service organization, that mostly serve people with intellectual disabilities, towards the use of various types of sensor technologies that might be used by and with their clients. In addition, perspectives of various types of privacy issues linked to sensors, as well data regarding the concept of quantified self were obtained. Our results highlight the need to involve disabled people and their support networks in sensor and quantified-self discourses, in order to prevent undue disadvantages.
People increasingly can and want to obtain and generate health information themselves. With the increasing do-it-yourself sentiment comes also the desire to be more involved in one’s health care decisions. Patient driven health-care and health research models are emerging; terms such as participatory medicine and quantified-self are visible increasingly. Given the health consumer’s desire to be more involved in health data generation and health care decision making processes the authors submit that it is important to be health policy literate, to understanding how health policies are developed, what themes are discussed among health policy researchers and policy makers, to understand how ones demands would be discussed within health policy discourses. The public increasingly obtains their knowledge through the internet by searching web browsers for keywords. Question is whether the “health consumer” to come has knowledge of key terms defining key health policy discourses which would enable them to perform targeted searches for health policy literature relevant to their situation. The authors found that key health policy terms are virtually absent from printed and online news media which begs the question how the “health consumer” might learn about key health policy terms needed for web based searches that would allow the “health consumer” to access health policy discourses relevant to them
So far, the very meaning of health and therefore, treatment and rehabilitation is benchmarked to the normal or species-typical body. We expect certain abilities in members of a species; we expect humans to walk but not to fly, but a bird we expect to fly. However, increasingly therapeutic interventions have the potential to give recipients beyond species-typical body related abilities (therapeutic enhancements, TE). We believe that the perfect storm of TE, the shift in ability expectations toward beyond species-typical body abilities, and the increasing desire of health consumers to shape the health system will increasingly influence various aspects of health care practice, policy, and scholarship. We employed qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate among others how human enhancement, neuro/cognitive enhancement, brain machine interfaces, and social robot discourses cover (a) healthcare, healthcare policy, and healthcare ethics, (b) disability and (c) health consumers and how visible various assessment fields are within Neuro/Cogno/Human enhancement and within the BMI and social robotics discourse. We found that health care, as such, is little discussed, as are health care policy and ethics; that the term consumers (but not health consumers) is used; that technology, impact and needs assessment is absent; and that the imagery of disabled people is primarily a medical one. We submit that now, at this early stage, is the time to gain a good understanding of what drives the push for the enhancement agenda and enhancement-enabling devices, and the dynamics around acceptance and diffusion of therapeutic enhancements.
Wolbring and Leopatra, Climate change, water, sanitation and energy insecurity CJDS 1.3 (August 2012) 66 Climate change, water, sanitation and energy insecurity: Invisibility of people with disabilities
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