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Browsing by Subject "communication"

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  • Climate change memes to prevent anxious dreams : using humor as a coping mechanism for climate change anxiety 
    Peters, Dana (2021)
    Concern about global warming can lead to climate change anxiety, a form of anxiety characterized by excessive worry about the climate crisis and associated consequences on the natural world and human society. It has been suggested by previous research that humor can be used to manage feelings of anxiety. This study seeks to determine if this phenomenon can be applied specifically to climate change anxiety. The research combines a comprehensive literature review with an online survey that leveraged climate change themed internet memes as a proxy for humor to gather opinions about the intersections between these two topics. The survey data supplemented claims made by existing literature, indicating that climate change themed internet memes and humor in general can be useful coping mechanisms to mitigate feelings of climate anxiety. The survey was completed by 93 respondents; most of these participants were women, located in the US, and/or between the ages of 20 and 29. Results from the survey showed that people tend to feel best about their environmental anxiety when they are taking active steps to solve the problem. Conscious decisions such as reducing waste or participating in activist movements are easier to recognize and self-report than more passive coping skills. Reliance on humor was reported as a supplementary coping skill, but many respondents indicated that looking at humorous climate change themed memes did influence their feelings about climate change overall. The scope of this study was relatively small in scale, therefore the results presented in this thesis may not be indicative of broader social trends and likely require further research.
  • Engineering Cellular Communication Systems for Synthetic Biology 
    Kaya, Meryem Ecem (2019)
    Synthetic biology is an emerging interdisciplinary field of biology that aims to system-atically design artificial biological systems. As synthetic biologists seek increasingly complex control over cellular processes to achieve robust and predictable systems. A new frontier in synthetic biology is engineering synthetic microbial consortia. This ap-proach employs the concept of division of labor, instead of introducing large genetic cir-cuitry to homogenous cell populations. In this approach, different cell types are assigned to execute a portion of the overall circuit. Each cell type communicates with their co-worker subpopulations to complete the circuit. The main advantage of this strategy is the reduced metabolic burden on each cell type. Thus, leading to more reliable and stable overall performance. In this work, to simplify cellular communication between the mem-bers of the consortium, we used the simple architecture of quorum sensing machinery. We constructed a toolbox that contains promoter, receptor and quorum sensing signal synthase genes along with fluorescent reporters. Using this toolbox, we constructed dif-ferent cell types that can be used in synthetic consortia forming various communication topologies. We characterized the constructed cell types individually and in co-cultures.

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