Habitat Restoration Member—Pinnacles National Park

American Conservation Experience (ACE), a nonprofit Conservation Corps, in partnership with Pinnacles National Park, is seeking one habitat restoration member to contribute to habitat restoration projects alongside National Park Service (NPS) staff.

Start Date: March 6,2024

Estimated End Date: July 21,2024

Location Details/ Description: Pinnacles National Park in Paicines, California

Position Overview: The ACE members will directly serve within the Division of Research and Resource Management at Pinnacles National Park. The members will serve as part of a crew conducting invasive (入侵的) plant treatment and habitat restoration efforts (80%). Additional duties (<20%) may include projects on other resource-related projects.

Living Allowance (津贴): The ACE member is expected to contribute 40 hours / week and will receive a living allowance of $600/week to offset (抵消) the costs of foo and incidental expenses, distributed every two weeks.

Housing: Housing is the responsibility of the member and not provided by ACE or NPS.

A personal vehicle is highly recommended.

Qualifications:

*Members must be a U. S. citizen or permanent resident.

*Ability to be both self-directed, and be a positive, contributing member of a group.

*A driver’s license.

*Ability to perform the essential duties of the position with or without reasonable accommodation.

*Must be able to hike up to ten miles per day carrying equipment weighing up to 40 pounds

*Must be willing to mix, load, and apply herbicides (除草剂) with the direct guidance of a licensed applicator.

Preferred:

*Practical knowledge of a wide range of field restoration skills and invasive plant control techniques.

*Bilingual (双语的) applicants are encouraged and welcome.

Inside the low lighting of Gather East Rock, the smell of coffee beans swirls (打旋) through the air. Art adorns (装点) the blue walls, but one painting stands out among the others. The painting’s name is “Mother Divine”, by the artist Sarahi Zacatelco. The mother in question is a green woman, with colorful plants adorning her head and water dripping (滴下) down her neck. In every brushstroke, Zacatelco pays homage to the man who taught her how to paint: her grandfather Agustin.

Born in 1982, Zacatelco learned how to create art from her grandfather in Oaxaca. At the time, her grandfather lived with her while her mother worked. Together, the two spent hours going out to the central plaza in Juchitán, where she let her senses take over. “You can see the food, you can smell it, you can see the lady selling flowers, and you can see everything,” she recalled excitedly. When she was six years old, her grandfather gave her a piece of paper and watercolors and showed her how to put the colors on it. She hasn’t stopped making art since.

Zacatelco’s grandparents made chess pieces out of rocks and wood to sell. They also made Talavera pottery (陶器) pieces, which Zacatelco described as “a Baroque tradition” that one might see in old colonial (殖民地的) homes. She no longer has any of her grandparent’s Talavera —“the tradition was lost due to being poorly paid and a lot of effort going into each piece.”

In the 1990s, Zacatelco’s mother decided to move her family to give them a better life. She moved her children to Mexico City, then to the Bronx, and then to the Brownsville neighborhood in Eastern Brooklyn. The family moved to Fair Haven, where Zacatelco still lives, in 2001. She called it the perfect place to raise two boys and two girls. Her family did not keep any of her grandfather’s old art before he died. But his artistic spirit did not die with him. Zacatelco carries on his legacy today with her art.

A lack of scientific evidence has led some to question whether herbs used in traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) actually relieve people’s illnesses. A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, might start to challenge that view. Scientists have developed a new tool that could be used to predict the effectiveness of these herbs. They’ve begun to confirm some of its predictions using clinical data from patients treated in a traditional Chinese medicine hospital.

“To our knowledge, this is the first scientific theory to explain how a traditional medicine system works,” lead study author Xiao Gan, a researcher at the Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology in China said.

In the new study, the authors looked at genes (基因) thought to be responsible for causing specific symptoms (症状) of disease. They relied on an already published dataset that connected the dots between disease symptoms and the underlying genes and proteins that give rise to those illnesses. Pulling this data together, the researchers were able to score how well these herbs might relieve specific symptoms of the disease. These scores were based on how close the herbs’ target proteins were to the proteins associated with various symptoms.

The authors then compared their predictions to herbs recognized by the Chinese Pharmacopoeia as effective against specific disease symptoms. They also used the model to review prescriptions(处方) that patients at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Wuhan received while being treated for liver disease. Gan said the herbs that they identified as effective from the two data sources supported their model’s predictions. The authors also used their model to identify potential new applications for the herbs, beyond what’s already recommended by the Chinese Pharmacopoeia.

Testing natural products in clinical trials can be costly, so it is helpful to use computer simulations (模拟) to identify potential drug targets, said Xiang-Qun Xie, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Xie pointed out more data are needed to support these findings and that it would be useful to study how TCM herbs and modern medications may interact in patients who take them at the same time.

What would you do if you were troubled by unfair hate comments online? Responding to hate comments in such situations, getting “cancelled” and the influencer industry are among the topics discussed by Secondary 4 students at Compassvale Secondary School, Singapore.

The lesson on cyber wellness is part of the new Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) curriculum that was rolled out to younger secondary students in 2021. It was extended to older secondary students in the following years.

“During the CCE lessons, we look at contemporary issues under different authentic scenarios (真实情况). When faced with this kind of scenario, students get to hear what their peers feel or believe in. And then they will learn from each other how to manage situations through collective discussions,” said Madam Wan Fazithahariani, a senior teacher at the school. “Teachers just facilitate discussion and bring up some interesting points or management skills that they can use. Hopefully, when they’re out there, they will be able to manage on their own.”

In a lesson, the students discussed negative comments received by an influencer. When asked how they would respond or whether they would choose to respond if they were an influencer, the class decided after some discussion that they would leave a positive comment in reply to a negative one. They then discussed their decision, how they felt about the comments, and how they would respond when their positive comment caused even more backlashes (抵制).

“It was shocking to them that even though they chose a positive comment, the backlash could be quite strong. We asked them, ‘How does that make you feel? Do you regret choosing to make a positive comment?’” said Madam Wan. “And we were pleased to note even though they received negative comments, they still decided to make a positive impact. Because they knew if they chose a negative comment, they would perpetuate (使持续) negativity among the cyber community.”

“Contrary to five years ago, students are now facing great pressure online,” Madam Wan said, adding that it was “imperative (迫切的)” to introduce these new situations because students must be able to address numerous challenges that previous generations of students did not encounter.