Climate and health benefits of a transition from gas to electric cooking.

Household electrification is thought to be an important part of a carbon-neutral future and could also have additional benefits to adopting households such as improved air quality. However, the effectiveness of specific electrification policies in reducing total emissions and boosting household livelihoods remains a crucial open question in both developed and developing countries. We investigated a transition of more than 750,000 households from gas to electric cookstoves-one of the most popular residential electrification strategies-in Ecuador following a program that promoted induction stoves and assessed its impacts on electricity consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and health.

Optimization of microfibrillated cellulose isolation from cocoa pod husk via mild oxalic acid hydrolysis: A response surface methodology approach.

L. species, cultivated worldwide for its valuable beans, generates up to 72% weight of the fruit as waste. The lack of reutilization technologies in the cocoa agroindustry has hindered the exploitation of valuable bio-components applicable to the generation of high value added bioproducts.

Resilient clean cooking: Maintaining household clean cooking in Ecuador during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Decades of government subsidies for LPG and electricity have facilitated near-universal clean cooking access and use in Ecuador, placing the nation ahead of most other peer low- and middle-income countries. The widespread socio-economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has threatened the resilience of clean cooking systems globally, including by altering households' ability to purchase clean fuels and policymakers' considerations about continuing subsidy programs. As such, assessing the resilience of clean cooking in Ecuador during the pandemic can offer important lessons for the international community, especially other countries looking to ensure resilient transitions to clean cooking.

Widespread Clean Cooking Fuel Scale-Up and under-5 Lower Respiratory Infection Mortality: An Ecological Analysis in Ecuador, 1990-2019.

Background: Nationwide household transitions to the use of clean-burning cooking fuels are a promising pathway to reducing under-5 lower respiratory infection (LRI) mortality, the leading cause of child mortality globally, but such transitions are rare and evidence supporting an association between increased clean fuel use and improved health is limited.

Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the association between increased primary clean cooking fuel use and under-5 LRI mortality in Ecuador between 1990 and 2019.

Methods: We documented cooking fuel use and cause-coded child mortalities at the canton (county) level in Ecuador from 1990 to 2019 (in four periods, 1988-1992, 1999-2003, 2008-2012, and 2015-2019).

Simple Preparation of Metal-Impregnated FDM 3D-Printed Structures.

Modifying the natural characteristics of PLA 3D-printed models is of interest in various research areas in which 3D-printing is applied. Thus, in this study, we describe the simple impregnation of FDM 3D-printed PLA samples with well-defined silver nanoparticles and an iron metal salt. Quasi-spherical and dodecahedra silver particles were strongly attached at the channels of 3D-printed milli-fluidic reactors to demonstrate their attachment and interaction with the flow, as an example.

Concordance between two intrapersonal psychological resilience scales: how should we be measuring resilience?

Background: While resilience has generated a lot of interest in mental health, operationalizing the construct of resilience remains an important challenge. This study aims to evaluate the concordance of two resilience scales that evaluate intrapersonal aspects of resilience in adolescents.

Methods: Cross-sectional evaluation of internal consistency, concordance, and correlation of the Individual Protective Factors Index Questionnaire (IPFI) and the Adolescent Resilience Scale (ARS) in sixth grade students of three low-income public schools in Colombia.

Long-standing LPG subsidies, cooking fuel stacking, and personal exposure to air pollution in rural and peri-urban Ecuador.

Ecuador presents a unique case study for evaluating personal air pollution exposure in a middle-income country where a clean cooking fuel has been available at low cost for several decades. We measured personal PM exposure, stove use, and participant location during a 48-h monitoring period for 157 rural and peri-urban households in coastal and Andean Ecuador. While nearly all households owned a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stove and used it as their primary cooking fuel, one-quarter of households utilized firewood as a secondary fuel and 10% used induction stoves secondary to LPG.