Anonymous Reporting Systems for School-Based Violence Prevention: A Systematic Review.

Anonymous reporting systems (ARS) have been used as a violence prevention strategy in schools by providing a means for individuals within a school community to safely and securely report information about potential violence or concerns about mental health, for example, through an anonymous hotline or reporting app. Despite widespread implementation of ARS in schools, as well as mandates for reporting systems in schools in 21 states, there is limited evidence on the effectiveness of ARS for school violence prevention, and information about best practices for ARS implementation is lacking. This systematic review aims to summarize the current research on the effectiveness of ARS as a school safety and violence prevention strategy, which is an important step in building an evidence-base to guide schools and policymakers about best practices.

Crisis Interventions in Schools: A Systematic Review.

This systematic review synthesizes research on school-based crisis intervention protocols, descriptions, and evaluations. We performed a comprehensive literature search, and 60 studies met the inclusion criteria for this review. We found an overwhelming lack of evaluation studies (n=3), suggesting that interventions are being administered post-crises without evaluation.

Heat strain in chemical protective ensembles: Effects of fabric thermal properties.

An ongoing challenge in material science has been to reduce heat strain experienced by individuals wearing chemical protective ensembles. The objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between the thermal properties of eight chemical protective fabrics and heat strain in ten chemical protective ensembles constructed with those fabrics. The fabric samples were tested on a sweating guarded hot plate to measure fabric thermal and evaporative resistance.

Air, Water Vapor, and Aerosol Transport through Textiles with Surface Functional Coatings of Metal Oxides and Metal-Organic Frameworks.

Currently, air permeable chemical/biological (CB) protective garments are based on activated carbon technology, which reduces moisture vapor transport needed for evaporative cooling and has potential to absorb and concentrate toxic materials. Researchers are exploring classes of sorbent materials that can selectively accumulate and decompose target compounds for potential to enhance protective suits and allow for novel filtration devices. Here, the metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) UiO-66-NH and HKUST-1 have been identified as such materials.

Highly conductive anion exchange membrane for high power density fuel-cell performance.

Anion exchange membrane fuel cells (AEMFCs) are regarded as a new generation of fuel cell technology that has the potential to overcome many obstacles of the mainstream proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) in cost, catalyst stability, efficiency, and system size. However, the low ionic conductivity and poor thermal stability of current anion exchange membranes (AEMs) have been the key factors limiting the performance of AEMFCs. In this study, an AEM made of styrenic diblock copolymer with a quaternary ammonium-functionalized hydrophilic block and a cross-linkable hydrophobic block and possessing bicontinuous phases of a hydrophobic network and hydrophilic conduction paths was found to have high ionic conductivity at 98 mS cm(-1) and controlled membrane swelling with water uptake at 117 wt % at 22 °C.