These 3 lessons are for high ABE/low ASE students at a level D-E Reading level to practice identifying key points in video and text and analyzing the causes and effects of social issues, and identifying solutions to these problems. By watching two short videos and reading EPA materials on the effects of lead exposure and a short article on the specific drinking water crisis in Flint, MI, students will examine key issues, analyze the problem and its causes, identify approaches to solving this problem and ones like it in other locations, and apply this approach to other scenarios that are relevant to their immediate lives.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Research is increasingly showing the impact of the microbiome -- the diverse microbial communities living within the gut -- on human health. But, _when_ and _how_ is the microbiome established? Two opposing hypotheses have been put forward. For over a century, the prevailing thought has been that the human fetal environment is sterile and that microbes are acquired during and after birth. If this view is correct, the microbiome of infants born via C-section should differ from those born vaginally. Recent studies using molecular techniques, however, suggest that bacterial communities may be present in the placenta, amniotic fluid, and the baby’s first stool. They posit that the acquisition of the gut microbiome, therefore, begins _in utero_. If this is the case, delivery method should have less of an effect on early microbiome assembly..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Students learn how to manipulate the behavior of water by using biochar—a soil amendment used to improve soil functions. As a fluid, water interacts with soil in a variety of ways. It may drain though a soil’s non-solid states, or its “pores”; lay above the soil; or move across cell membranes via osmosis. In this experiment, students solve the specific problem of standing water by researching, designing, and engineering solutions that enable water to drain faster. This activity is designed for students to explore how biochar helps soils to act as “sponges” in order to retain more water.

How can you tell if harmful bacteria are in your food or water that might make you sick? What you eat or drink can be contaminated with bacteria, viruses, parasites and toxins—pathogens that can be harmful or even fatal. Students learn which contaminants have the greatest health risks and how they enter the food supply. While food supply contaminants can be identified from cultures grown in labs, bioengineers are creating technologies to make the detection of contaminated food quicker, easier and more effective.

Student groups are given captioned photographs of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant facility and surrounding towns taken before and 28 years after the 1986 disaster. Based on the captions and clues in the images, they arrange them in sequential order. While viewing the completed sequence of images, students reflect on what it might have been like to be there, and ask themselves: what were people thinking, doing and saying at each point? This activity assists students in gaining an understanding of how devastating nuclear meltdowns can be, which underscores the importance of responsible engineering. It is recommended that this activity be conducted before the associated lesson, Nuclear Energy through a Virtual Field Trip.

To increase students' awareness of possible invisible pollutants in drinking water sources, students perform an exciting lab requiring them to think about how solutions and mixtures exist even in unsuspecting places such as ink. They use alcohol and chromatography paper to separate the components of black and colored marker ink. Students witness first-hand how components of a solution can be separated, even when those individual components are not visible in solution.

The levels of contaminants found in particular animals vary widely depending on where they fit into the Arctic food chain, as described in this video segment adapted from LOKE Films and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.

In this video segment adapted from LOKE Films and the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, learn how human populations in the Arctic are affected by industrial contaminants in the food chain.

Students are introduced to the fundamentals of environmental engineering as well as the global air, land and water quality concerns facing today's environmental engineers. After a lesson and activity to introduce environmental engineering, students learn more about water chemistry aspects of environmental engineering. Specifically, they focus on groundwater contamination and remediation, including sources of contamination, adverse health effects of contaminated drinking water, and current and new remediation techniques. Several lab activities provide hands-on experiences with topics relevant to environmental engineering concerns and technologies, including removal efficiencies of activated carbon in water filtration, measuring pH, chromatography as a physical separation method, density and miscibility.

In this activity, students will use a tutorial on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn about how surface water is treated to make it safe to drink.

Students take part in a hypothetical scenario that challenges them to inform customers at a local restaurant of how their use and disposal of plastics relates/contributes to the Great Pacific garbage patch (GPGP). What students ultimately do is research information on the plastics pollution in the oceans and present that information as a short, eye-catching newsletter suitable to hand out to restaurant customers. This activity focuses on teaching students to conduct their own research on a science-technology related topic and present it in a compelling manner that includes citing source information without plagiarism. By doing this, students gain experience and skills with general online searching as well as word processing and written and visual communication.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Buried within glaciers is a history of ancient ecosystems, including microbes and viruses past. Some of the airborne microbes and viruses that populate our atmosphere are often carried by snowflakes or dust onto the surface of glaciers. By studying glacial ice cores, scientists can reconstruct histories of microbes and viruses and the climatic and environmental conditions they experienced. Two problems that plague current methods of analyzing ice cores are contamination and low microbe biomass. To address these challenges, researchers recently developed a method for decontaminating ice core surfaces and extracting clean inner ice to study microbes and viruses. When applied to ice from the Guliya ice cap on the Tibetan Plateau in China, the method revealed a unique viral community of mostly novel taxa, providing the first window into viral genomes, communities, and functions in ancient glacier environments..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The next time you swat away that fly buzzing around your head, consider this: an international team of researchers has shown that common houseflies and blowflies are more than just annoying insects. Covered with hundreds of different bacterial species, they’re also a type of airborne delivery service, transporting pathogens from organic decaying matter right to your countertops, food…and body. Although flies have been long known to spread disease, the researchers show that we’ve previously underestimated both the number and diversity of microbes that each insect can transmit. The team devised a new optimized way to collect flies without cross-contaminating them with other microorganisms and used the method to amass 116 flies from urban, rural, and natural sites on three continents..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Recent advances in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to investigate community-wide changes in microbes that live on and within the human body. Unfortunately, different studies can have different results, often due to systemic biases introduced at various stages of sequence-based microbiome studies. Sample collection can introduce biases depending on the source site and method of collection. Consistent collection methods are essential, and care must be taken when choosing storage methods, times, and reagents. Increasing the usage of benchmark samples and technical replicates may also help to mitigate batch effects during sample collection and processing. Additional bias can arise during DNA extraction due to differing extraction efficiencies, contamination, and the introduction of DNA from non-living organisms. Introducing steps to this process to reduce contamination and measure inter-plate and inter-assay variability will help to reduce these effects..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Students are presented with examples of the types of problems that environmental engineers solve, specifically focusing on water quality issues. Topics include the importance of clean water, the scarcity of fresh water, tap water contamination sources, and ways environmental engineers treat contaminated water.

In the wake of Katrina the entire gulf coast is embroiled in a struggle over what constitutes “appropriate” rebuilding and redevelopment efforts. This practicum will engage students in a set of work groups designed to assist local community based institutions and people in shaping the policy and practices that will guide the redevelopment and rebuilding efforts in the city of New Orleans.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"In the discipline of planetary protection, spacecraft are assembled in unique cleanrooms to prevent microbe transfer between planets. The cleanliness of these rooms has traditionally been assessed with the NASA standard spore assay (NSA), but advanced molecular techniques have revealed that this assay may be insufficient for contamination control. To learn more, researchers recently analyzed floor samples collected over 6 months from the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The NSA coupled with Sanger sequencing identified 16 genera of bacteria, 97% of which were spore-formers, primarily Bacillus subtilis and Virgibacillus pantothenticus. However, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing detected 51 additional bacterial genera. When viable and dead organisms were differentiated, amplicon sequencing identified 46 viable non-spore-forming genera (86% of bacteria) and 8 viable spore-forming genera (14% of bacteria)..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This video adapted from KTOO explores the impact of oil contamination on the herring population of Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1999, 10 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Students learn about contamination and pollution, specifically in reference to soil in and around rivers. To start, groups use light sensors to take light reflection measurements of different colors of sand (dyed with various amounts of a liquid food dye), generating a set of "soil" calibration data. Then, they use a stream table with a simulated a river that has a scattering of "contaminated wells" represented by locations of unknown amounts of dye. They make visual observations and use light sensors again to take reflection measurements and refer to their earlier calibration data to determine the level of "contamination" (color dye) in each well. Acting as engineers, they determine if their measured data is comparable to visual observations. The small-scale simulated flowing river shows how contamination can spread.

EPA has many data sources available, these cover topics including but not limited to air, climate change, health risks, pollutants and contaminants, waste, and water. The data are downloadable and available through the Environmental Dataset Gateway (EDG). The EDG is a source of Web-based geospatial information and information services. It enables data consumers to discover, view, and access geospatial resources made available by EPA's program offices, regions, and labs.