Author: New From NAP

Recent well documented reductions in the thickness and extent of Arctic sea ice cover, which can be linked to the warming climate, are affecting the global climate system and are also affecting the global economic system as marine access to the Arctic region and natural resource development increase. Satellite data show that during each of the past six summers, sea ice cover has shrunk to its smallest in three decades. The composition of the ice is also changing, now containing a higher fraction of thin first-year ice instead of thicker multi-year ice.

Understanding and projecting future sea ice conditions is important to a growing number of stakeholders, including local populations, natural resource industries, fishing communities, commercial shippers, marine tourism operators, national security organizations, regulatory agencies, and the scientific research community. However, gaps in understanding the interactions between Arctic sea ice, oceans, and the atmosphere, along with an increasing rate of change in the nature and quantity of sea ice, is hampering accurate predictions. Although modeling has steadily improved, projections by every major modeling group failed to predict the record breaking drop in summer sea ice extent in September 2012.

Establishing sustained communication between the user, modeling, and observation communities could help reveal gaps in understanding, help balance the needs and expectations of different stakeholders, and ensure that resources are allocated to address the most pressing sea ice data needs. Seasonal-to-Decadal Predictions of Arctic Sea Ice: Challenges and Strategies explores these topics.

During the past century the major causes of morbidity and mortality in the United States have shifted from those related to communicable diseases to those due to chronic diseases. Just as the major causes of morbidity and mortality have changed, so too has the understanding of health and what makes people healthy or ill. Research has documented the importance of the social determinants of health (for example, socioeconomic status and education) that affect health directly as well as through their impact on other health determinants such as risk factors. Targeting interventions toward the conditions associated with today’s challenges to living a healthy life requires an increased emphasis on the factors that affect the current cause of morbidity and mortality, factors such as the social determinants of health. Many community-based prevention interventions target such conditions.

Community-based prevention interventions offer three distinct strengths. First, because the intervention is implemented population-wide it is inclusive and not dependent on access to a health care system. Second, by directing strategies at an entire population an intervention can reach individuals at all levels of risk. And finally, some lifestyle and behavioral risk factors are shaped by conditions not under an individual’s control. For example, encouraging an individual to eat healthy food when none is accessible undermines the potential for successful behavioral change. Community-based prevention interventions can be designed to affect environmental and social conditions that are out of the reach of clinical services.

Four foundations – the California Endowment, the de Beaumont Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation – asked the Institute of Medicine to convene an expert committee to develop a framework for assessing the value of community-based, non-clinical prevention policies and wellness strategies, especially those targeting the prevention of long-term, chronic diseases. The charge to the committee was to define community-based, non-clinical prevention policy and wellness strategies; define the value for community-based, non-clinical prevention policies and wellness strategies; and analyze current frameworks used to assess the value of community-based, non-clinical prevention policies and wellness strategies, including the methodologies and measures used and the short- and long-term impacts of such prevention policy and wellness strategies on health care spending and public health. An Integrated Framework for Assessing the Value of Community-Based Prevention summarizes the committee’s findings.

Scientific evidence shows that most glaciers in South Asia’s Hindu Kush Himalayan region are retreating, but the consequences for the region’s water supply are unclear, this report finds. The Hindu Kush Himalayan region is the location of several of Asia’s great river systems, which provide water for drinking, irrigation, and other uses for about 1.5 billion people. Recent studies show that at lower elevations, glacial retreat is unlikely to cause significant changes in water availability over the next several decades, but other factors, including groundwater depletion and increasing human water use, could have a greater impact. Higher elevation areas could experience altered water flow in some river basins if current rates of glacial retreat continue, but shifts in the location, intensity, and variability of rain and snow due to climate change will likely have a greater impact on regional water supplies.

Himalayan Glaciers: Climate Change, Water Resources, and Water Security makes recommendations and sets guidelines for the future of climate change and water security in the Himalayan Region. This report emphasizes that social changes, such as changing patterns of water use and water management decisions, are likely to have at least as much of an impact on water demand as environmental factors do on water supply. Water scarcity will likely affect the rural and urban poor most severely, as these groups have the least capacity to move to new locations as needed. It is predicted that the region will become increasingly urbanized as cities expand to absorb migrants in search of economic opportunities. As living standards and populations rise, water use will likely increase-for example, as more people have diets rich in meat, more water will be needed for agricultural use. The effects of future climate change could further exacerbate water stress.

Himalayan Glaciers: Climate Change, Water Resources, and Water Security explains that changes in the availability of water resources could play an increasing role in political tensions, especially if existing water management institutions do not better account for the social, economic, and ecological complexities of the region. To effectively respond to the effects of climate change, water management systems will need to take into account the social, economic, and ecological complexities of the region. This means it will be important to expand research and monitoring programs to gather more detailed, consistent, and accurate data on demographics, water supply, demand, and scarcity.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each.

One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience–the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation’s resilience to disasters. This book defines “national resilience”, describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation’s resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book’s authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States.

Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation’s resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

In anticipation of future environmental science and engineering challenges and technologic advances, EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the overall capabilities of the agency to develop, obtain, and use the best available scientific and technologic information and tools to meet persistent, emerging, and future mission challenges and opportunities. Although the committee cannot predict with certainty what new environmental problems EPA will face in the next 10 years or more, it worked to identify some of the common drivers and common characteristics of problems that are likely to occur.

Tensions inherent to the structure of EPA’s work contribute to the current and persistent challenges faced by the agency, and meeting those challenges will require development of leading-edge scientific methods, tools, and technologies, and a more deliberate approach to systems thinking and interdisciplinary science. Science for Environmental Protection: The Road Ahead outlines a framework for building science for environmental protection in the 21st century and identified key areas where enhanced leadership and capacity can strengthen the agency’s abilities to address current and emerging environmental challenges as well as take advantage of new tools and technologies to address them. The foundation of EPA science is strong, but the agency needs to continue to address numerous present and future challenges if it is to maintain its science leadership and meet its expanding mandates.

The number of new drug approvals has remained reasonably steady for the past 50 years at around 20 to 30 per year, while at the same time the total spending on health-related research and development has tripled since 1990. There are many suspected causes for this trend, including increases in regulatory barriers, the rising costs of scientific inquiry, a decrease in research and development efficiency, the downstream effects of patient expirations on investment, and the lack of production models that have successfully incorporated new technology. Regardless, this trajectory is not economically sustainable for the businesses involved, and, in response, many companies are turning toward collaborative models of drug development, whether with other industrial firms, academia, or government. Introducing greater efficiency and knowledge into these new models and aligning incentives among participants may help to reverse the trends highlighted above, while producing more effective drugs in the process.

Genome-Based Therapeutics explains that new technologies have the potential to open up avenues of development and to identify new drug targets to pursue. Specifically, improved validation of gene-disease associations through genomics research has the potential to revolutionize drug production and lower development costs. Genetic information has helped developers by increasing their understanding of the mechanisms of disease as well as individual patients’ reactions to their medications. There is a need to identify the success factors for the various models that are being developed, whether they are industry-led, academia-led, or collaborations between the two.

Genome-Based Therapeutics summarizes a workshop that was held on March 21, 2012, titled New Paradigms in Drug Discovery: How Genomic Data Are Being Used to Revolutionize the Drug Discovery and Development Process. At this workshop the goal was to examine the general approaches being used to apply successes achieved so far, and the challenges ahead.

The aim of this report is to encourage enhanced richness and relevance of the undergraduate engineering education experience, and thus produce better-prepared and more globally competitive graduates, by providing practical guidance for incorporating real world experience in US engineering programs. The report, a collaborative effort of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), builds on two NAE reports on The Engineer of 2020 that cited the importance of grounding engineering education in real world experience. This project also aligns with other NAE efforts in engineering education, such as the Grand Challenges of Engineering, Changing the Conversation, and Frontiers of Engineering Education.

This publication presents 29 programs that have successfully infused real world experiences into engineering or engineering technology undergraduate education. The Real World Engineering Education committee acknowledges the vision of AMD in supporting this project, which provides useful exemplars for institutions of higher education who seek model programs for infusing real world experiences in their programs. The NAE selection committee was impressed by the number of institutions committed to grounding their programs in real world experience and by the quality, creativity, and diversity of approaches reflected in the submissions. A call for nominations sent to engineering and engineering technology deans, chairs, and faculty yielded 95 high-quality submissions. Two conditions were required of the nominations: (1) an accredited 4-year undergraduate engineering or engineering technology program was the lead institutions, and (2) the nominated program started operation no later than the fall 2010 semester. Within these broad parameters, nominations ranged from those based on innovations within a single course to enhancements across an entire curriculum or institution.

Infusing Real World Experiences into Engineering Education is intended to provide sufficient information to enable engineering and engineering technology faculty and administrators to assess and adapt effective, innovative models of programs to their own institution’s objectives. Recognizing that change is rarely trivial, the project included a brief survey of selected engineering deans concern in the adoption of such programs.

In 1996, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its report Telemedicine: A Guide to Assessing Telecommunications for Health Care. In that report, the IOM Committee on Evaluating Clinical Applications of Telemedicine found telemedicine is similar in most respects to other technologies for which better evidence of effectiveness is also being demanded. Telemedicine, however, has some special characteristics-shared with information technologies generally-that warrant particular notice from evaluators and decision makers.

Since that time, attention to telehealth has continued to grow in both the public and private sectors. Peer-reviewed journals and professional societies are devoted to telehealth, the federal government provides grant funding to promote the use of telehealth, and the private technology industry continues to develop new applications for telehealth. However, barriers remain to the use of telehealth modalities, including issues related to reimbursement, licensure, workforce, and costs. Also, some areas of telehealth have developed a stronger evidence base than others.

The Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) sponsored the IOM in holding a workshop in Washington, DC, on August 8-9 2012, to examine how the use of telehealth technology can fit into the U.S. health care system. HRSA asked the IOM to focus on the potential for telehealth to serve geographically isolated individuals and extend the reach of scarce resources while also emphasizing the quality and value in the delivery of health care services. This workshop summary discusses the evolution of telehealth since 1996, including the increasing role of the private sector, policies that have promoted or delayed the use of telehealth, and consumer acceptance of telehealth. The Role of Telehealth in an Evolving Health Care Environment: Workshop Summary discusses the current evidence base for telehealth, including available data and gaps in data; discuss how technological developments, including mobile telehealth, electronic intensive care units, remote monitoring, social networking, and wearable devices, in conjunction with the push for electronic health records, is changing the delivery of health care in rural and urban environments. This report also summarizes actions that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) can undertake to further the use of telehealth to improve health care outcomes while controlling costs in the current health care environment.

TRB\’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Legal Research Digest 39: Competition Requirements of the Design/Build, Construction Manager at Risk, and Public-Private Partnership Contracts—Seven Case Studies explores the use of various project delivery methods, including design-build, construction management at risk, and a number of options considered public-private partnerships, through the examination of seven separate construction projects in various parts of the United States.

The examinations of the seven selected projects are designed to show how particular, and often unique, problems were addressed in each project by utilizing a wide variety of procurement and delivery methods.

TRB\’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 152: Guidelines for Ferry Transportation Services examines the history and characteristics of ferry systems throughout North America and offers guidelines for planning, marketing, operating, and managing a ferry system as a component of an overall transportation network.

The report also explores the potential benefits of and impediments to ferry transportation services and identifies potential planning, operational, and management benchmarks.

TRB\’s Commercial Truck and Bus Safety Synthesis Program (CTBSSP) Synthesis 22: Safety Management in Small Motor Carriers explores small motor carriers’ strengths and weaknesses in safety management, and identifies potentially effective safety practices.

TRB\’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Results Digest 369: AASHTO T 209: Effect of Agitation Equipment Type on Theoretical Maximum Specific Gravity Values evaluates the effect of using various devices and methods on measured values of theoretical maximum specific gravity (Gmm) used to determine the air void content and the in-place density of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) as described by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) T 209, Theoretical Maximum Specific Gravity and Density of Bituminous Paving Mixtures.

According to the report, AASHTO T 209 describes a test method for determination of the theoretical maximum specific gravity (Gmm) and density of uncompacted HMA. The Gmm and the density of HMA are fundamental properties whose values are influenced by the composition of the HMA mixtures in terms of types and amounts of aggregates and asphalt materials.

Gmm is used to calculate percent air voids in compacted HMA and to provide target values for the compaction of HMA. Gmm also is essential when calculating the amount of asphalt binder absorbed by the internal porosity of the individual aggregate particles in HMA.

TRB\’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Report 60: Guidelines for Integrating Alternative Jet Fuel into the Airport Setting identifies the types and characteristics of alternative jet fuels; summarizes potential benefits; addresses legal, financial, environmental, and logistical considerations and opportunities; and aids in evaluating the feasibility of alternative jet fuel production facilities.

The report also summarizes issues and opportunities associated with locating on- or off-airport alternative jet fuel production facilities and their fuel storage and distribution requirements.

TRB\’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Synthesis 30: Airport Insurance Coverage and Risk Management Practices identifies both the variables that affect insurance purchasing for airport operators and the range of risk management practices that exist among U.S. airports. The report is designed to help airport officials confronted with risk-financing and insurance-purchasing decisions.

TRB\’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Results Digest 359: Models to Support State-Owned Park and Ride Lots and Intermodal Facilities addresses the needs and issues associated with state park and ride lots and intermodal commuter facilities and programs. The report identifies deficiencies, best practices, and promising innovations.

TRB\’s Commercial Truck and Bus Safety Synthesis Program (CTBSSP) Research Results Digest 9: A Status Report describes the progress and status of the Commercial Truck and Bus Safety Synthesis Program (CTBSSP). CTBSSP is a cooperative research program sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and administered by the Transportation Research Board. The program was authorized in late 2001 and began in 2002 in support of the FMCSA\’s safety research programs.

TRB\’s National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Research Results Digest 3, NCFRP: A Status Report is a staff digest of the progress and status of the program. The NCFRP is a cooperative research program sponsored by the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) and administered by the Transportation Research Board. The program was authorized in 2005 with the passage of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU).

TRB\’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Results Digest 104: Synthesis of Information Related to Transit Problems is a digest of the progress and status of TCRP Project J-7, “Synthesis of Information Related to Transit Problems,” for which the Transportation Research Board is the agency conducting the research.

TRB\’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Research Results Digest 13: Synthesis of Information Related to Airport Practices is a digest of the progress and status of ACRP Project 11-03, Synthesis of Information Related to Airport Practices.

TRB\’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Synthesis 423: Long-Term Performance of Polymer Concrete for Bridge Decks addresses a number of topics related to thin polymer overlays (TPOs).

Those topics include previous research, specifications, and procedures on TPOs; performance of TPOs based on field applications; the primary factors that influence TPO performance; current construction guidelines for TPOs related to surface preparation, mixing and placement, consolidation, finishing, and curing; repair procedures; factors that influence the performance of overlays, including life-cycle cost, benefits and costs, bridge deck condition, service life extension, and performance; and successes and failures of TPOs, including reasons for both.