Challenges, Volume 11, Issue 2

Most of the research related to Peruvian Amazon fungi is focused on edible mushrooms and pathogens. Other important fungi, such as the spalting type (decay fungi that pigment wood internally), are not broadly studied, as most of them do not produce f...

The mass influx of refugees into Europe since 2013 and their educational challenges have increased the need for high-quality refugee education. One proposal for addressing these challenges was to leverage mobile devices for educational purposes (mobi...

In the midst of continuous changes in working life, finding a way to balance organizational demands and the needs of employees has become an important task. This task has highlighted the significance of agency and social interaction, as influencing f...

Indigenous Peoples associate their own laws with the laws of the natural world, which are formally known as or translated as Natural or First Law. These laws come from the Creator and the Land through our ancestral stories and therefore, they are sac...

Capacity and resilience are two closely aligned concepts in human development. They both contribute to increasing the ability of societies to cope with and adapt to challenging and adverse perturbations that may affect systems the societies depend up...

Cascading Tank Village Systems (CTVSs) of Sri Lanka historically provided a resilient community-based social-ecological water management system in the rural dry zone of Sri Lanka After being abandoned for many centuries, their restoration is now bein...

Cold brew coffee has emerged as a new trend over the last decade. However, “cold brew” is an extraction style of ground roasted coffee with water at lower than body temperature (typically 8 °C or room temperature), rather than a bever...

The regulation of innate immunity is substantially more ‘plastic’ than previously appreciated. Innate immune memory (manifested through trained immunity and tolerance) is a recently described epigenetic phenomenon that is a model example,...

A concept for an interdisciplinary summer school for “multiscale processes in oceans and the atmosphere” is presented. It aims to deepen students’ understanding of scientific issues as well as their experience in multicultural commu...

Conventional cultivation works to control weeds between the rows, but it ignores the weeds in crop rows which are most competitive with crops. Many vegetable crops still require manual removal of intra-row weeds not otherwise controlled by herbicides...

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a novel disease pandemic that emerged in late 2019 in China, and later spread to other parts of the world, including Nigeria. This review analyzes the preparedness of Nigeria to the COVID-19 pandemic and recomme...

The future of food is one of the major world-wide challenges. In this perspective paper, we set-up a framework for a multi-disciplinary future food systems approach, building on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We hereby combine a truly sustaina...

COVID-19, a novel coronavirus, was deemed a pandemic during mid-March 2020. In response, lockdowns were imposed for an indefinite period world-wide. Academic institutions were no exception. Continuing meetings of academic groups consequently necessit...

The concept of planetary health blurs the artificial lines between health at scales of person, place and planet. At the same time, it emphasizes the integration of biological, psychological, social and cultural aspects of health in the modern environ...

Video games are sometimes used as environments to evaluate AI agents’ ability to develop and execute complex action sequences to maximize a defined reward. However, humans cannot match the fine precision of the timed actions of AI agents; in ga...

In arid and semi-arid parts of the world, river exploitation is intensive, involving water storage for irrigation or hydropower generation. In Greece, 100 small hydropower plants (SHPs) take advantage of less than 10% of the hydropower potential of l...

A new and universal theoretical approach to the dynamics of the transient state in elementary physico-chemical processes, called dozy-chaos mechanics (Egorov, V.V. Heliyon Physics2019, 5, e02579), is introduced to a wide general readership.

The current emerging COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global impact on every major aspect of our societies. It is known that SARS-Cov-2 can endure harsh environmental conditions for up to 72 h, which may contribute to its rapid spread. Therefore, effec...

We examined the degradation of nuclear waste borosilicate and phosphate glasses containing strong alpha-emitter ²³⁸Pu at a specific activity of 6.33 × 10⁵ MBq/g in comparison with similar non-radioactive, non-radioactive irradiated and radioact...

This paper explores the applicability of the agent-based (AB) and system dynamics (SD) methods to model a case study of the management of water field services. Water borehole sites are distributed over an area and serve the water needs of a populatio...