Freshwater availability is the major constraint to agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions. Worldwide, agricultural irrigation is the leading sector in the overall water consumption. As the largest agricultural region in the United States and the leading exporter of many commodities, California was chosen as a spatial domain to model the carbon footprint reduction and resource savings (water and energy) when applying reclaimed water to crop irrigation. An extensive compilation of the most recent publicly available datasets was used to calculate the energy intensity for each water supply source, associated carbon footprint reduction and monetary savings for employing reclaimed water versus traditional groundwater application. Furthermore, a quantification of water exported through agricultural trades was performed. Exported water is defined as the physical water content contained in crops plus the associated induced evapotranspiration due to their irrigation. Exported water differs from virtual water in that the former is the physical water exported outside of a geographical boundary and the latter is cumulative water footprint required to reach the final product. Therefore, the exported water is permanently lost and is no longer available for the natural hydrologic cycle from its origin.

Our calculations indicate that on an average basis for the time domain 1998-2010, the fractional water use for agriculture, and urbanized consumption in California was 0.81 and 0.19 respectively. Annually, crop irrigation consumed an average of 4.2 x 1010 m3 of fresh water, of which 1%, 46.8% and 52.2% came from reclaimed water, groundwater, and surface water, respectively. Each of these three main water sources is associated with a range of energy intensity (in kWh m-3), depending on the process and environmental characteristics of the end-use location. The analysis of multiple process and environmental configurations produced a detailed energy intensity database, with the associated carbon intensities (in kgCO2,eq kWh-1). The overall exported water (i.e., contained in and evaporated/transpired from crops) in California's agricultural commodities was 2.88 x 1010 m3 yr-1, equivalent to 68.3% of the total water used in irrigation. The majority of the exported water was in the form of induced evapotranspiration, amounting to 67.7% of the irrigation water use, whereas approximately 2.32 x 108 m3 yr-1 or 0.6% of the water used for irrigation leaves the agricultural spatial domain as content of the crops. Our results show that the physical water content contained in crops is minor relative to the associated evapotranspiration of the irrigated crops, confirming the hypothesis that for each unit of water exported, the loss of water via evapotranspiration induced by each crop far outweighs the crop water content.

War Material: Vietnam and Transpacific Imaginaries of Capital and Transition argues that the slaughtered Vietnamese body and Vietnam more generally – both as material substance and fantasy-driven imaginary – were conscripted to inflate, deflate, and consolidate the making of permanent war as global structure and the permanent war subject as its capture. I observe how Vietnamese slaughter as signifier, because of its idiosyncratic location within the auto-recuperative mythology of U.S. empire, has been used as the material and ideological infrastructures of U.S. asymmetrical warfare domestically and abroad from the Cold War to the present – what I refer to as war material. By thinking the Vietnamese body as war material, this dissertation also seeks to understand the machinations of permanent war as part and parcel of the crisis cycle of racial capitalism, where narratives of Vietnam, or Vietnamese subjects themselves, are deployed to enable the stagnating nation-state to revitalize itself through the invention of new necropolitical targets elsewhere. At the same time, I examine how Vietnam has been used as a global signifier to mobilize anti-imperial and anti-capitalist resistance by Internationalist actors at the geographic and social interstices of empire, despite the obfuscation of this work by anticommunism within the United States.

I divide these concerns of Vietnam across two frames: the counterinsurgent and the insurgent. Based on photojournalistic images of massacre, refugee memoirs, and white ethnostate manifestos, I examine how the evocation of a slaughtered Vietnam was continually deployed for the counter-insurgent and racist exigencies of the capitalist-cum-permanent war state. On the other hand, I examine how those very same histories, images, and narratives of slaughter were used in radical Cuban film and race radical thought to amplify insurgency and radical visions of futurity within the belly of the beast. Altogether, I mark the urgency of revisiting the afterlives of U.S. warfare across Vietnam as a story of racial capitalism in the hopes of uncovering its ongoing reverberations of psychic and material violence in the present and re-enliven its otherwise vexed histories of anti-capitalist solidarities from the past. By turning to these histories, my hope is that a study of Vietnam in a way that centers a materialist genealogy of race will offer resources that can be salvaged to pry open more expanded conditions and imaginaries of collective thriving beyond the capitalist and permanent war state.

This thesis explores how queer subjecthood is structured by homonormative investments in national incorporation and proliferated life against unevenly valorized racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference at the same time that the digital has promised to homogenize these differences. I examine visual cultural objects of new media, queer cultural productions, and interfaces of connectivity in order to suggest that the digital colludes with national culture to not only produce and maintain unevenly valorized differences, but to construct a queer subject mobilized to construct, uphold, and repair the modern nation under the vexed rubrics of freedom, rights, and democracy.

Element-to-calcium (X/Ca) ratios within biogenic calcium carbonate minerals are used as proxies to reconstruct past seawater temperature and composition. This study focuses on examining Li/Ca, B/Ca, and Mg/Ca ratios in sea urchins cultured at different temperatures and pCO₂ levels.

In situ secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) analyses were conducted on two species of sea urchins cultured under controlled conditions and several species of paleo-echinoderms. A temperate species, Arbacia punctulata, was cultured at various pCO₂ levels (400, 600, 900, 2850 ppmv) with temperature held constant at 25°C. A tropical species, Echinometra viridis, was cultured in variable pCO₂ (400 and 1000 ppmv) and temperature (20°C and 30°C) conditions.

In the tropical species, a positive correlation was found between temperature and the analyzed (Li, B, Mg) element-to-calcium ratios of the spines, while variable responses to pCO₂ were observed. In the temperate species, a variable response to increasing pCO₂ was observed, with B/Ca having a similar trend to the calcification rate found in a previous study by Ries et al. (2009). Paleo-echinoderm samples varied in age from 518 to 53 Ma, and have a global distribution. The X/Ca ratios from paleo-echinoderms were used, along with the full range of observed partition coefficients (D^cX/Ca=X/Ca_carbonate/X/Ca_fluid, with X=Li, B, or Mg in this study) from the cultured sea urchins, to model element-to-calcium ratios of paleo-seawater.

Recently, dental implants have become a popular treatment to replace missing dentition. Peri-implant hard tissue, such as bone dimensional changes, has been widely investigated. New research regarding peri-implant soft tissue has emerged in the recent years focusing on the association between peri-implant soft tissue phenotype and implant health. Current evidence shows that thin gingival phenotype and a lack of adequate keratinized mucosa around dental implants are associated with recession and peri-implant diseases. However, there is still a lack of evidence evaluating the remodeling process of peri-implant soft tissue during implant treatment. This prospective pilot study aimed to investigate the change of peri-implant soft tissue phenotype and keratinized tissue width at three specific timepoints during implant treatment. Gingival thickness at 2, 4, and 6 mm from the free gingival margin and keratinized tissue width were measured in six patients receiving single implant placement in the maxillary esthetic zone at the time of tooth extraction and ridge preservation, implant placement, and implant restoration. Data analysis showed no statistically significant differences in peri-implant soft tissue measurements among the three timepoints during implant treatment. The present pilot study did not find significant changes in gingival thickness or keratinized tissue width in sites receiving dental implants throughout the different treatment timepoints.

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