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Recent Submissions

Access status: Open Access ,
Can we assess whether national wellbeing is globally sustainable? Examining the environmental domains of eight national wellbeing measurement frameworks
(2026-04-24) Pontefract, Claire N.
Access status: Open Access ,
Beyond the Bucket: Renewable Desalination in Water-Scarce Regions — Life Cycle Assessment of a Plasmonic Titanium Carbide Solar Still
(2026-04-29) Ashall, William (Aidan)
Water scarcity is a problem that has long evaded sustainable solutions in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where the gendered burden of water collection falls disproportionately on women and children. Across 24 SSA countries, 13.54 million adult females and 3.36 million children spend over 30 minutes daily collecting water, resulting in physical injuries, psychological distress, spousal violence, and socioeconomic loss. Traditional reverse osmosis (RO) desalination technology requires high energy and centralized infrastructure impractical for SSA regions. However, the advent of portable renewable desalination technology attempts to address this challenge, offering a low infrastructure alternative for decentralized water access. This thesis conducts a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a 3kg plasmonic titanium carbide (TiC) floating solar still that uses upcycled waste tire rubber and passive interfacial solar evaporation to produce clean water. The LCA uses openLCA software and the Ecoinvent 3.12 database, influenced by ISO 14040 standards, to evaluate six ReCiPe 2016 impact categories. The results validate the Hotspot Shift Hypothesis (H2), as the environmental burden shifts from the operational phase to material synthesis and manufacturing. The device generates 20.88 kg CO2-eq per unit, with a carbon intensity of 9.30 g CO2-eq/L. This upfront carbon debt enables 640 days of near-zero operational emissions, producing over 2150 litres of potable water that meets World Health Organization (WHO) standards. The Levelized Cost of Water (LCOW) ranges from $0.005 to $0.0086 per litre. Critically, the device carries a net “water debt” of 2942.5 litres due to the cotton wicks that it uses to facilitate evaporation, though substituting other materials such as polyester would reduce this to just 149 litres. Thus, the TiC solar still offers a defensible intervention for water-scarce SSA communities, where its environmental trade-offs are outweighed by its social utility and economic accessibility.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Bump in Sustainability: Climate Change's Effects on the Coca Plant Industry
(2026) Black, Naomi
Latin American agriculture will experience changes in viability due to climate change. The coca plant remains one of the more tolerant crops amidst increasing risks of drought and rising temperatures, particularly compared to alternative cash crops such as the coffee plant. Coca, the primary constituent of the highly addictive nervous stimulant cocaine, is an illicit crop due to its relationship to drug markets. While often framed as a socially harmful crop, it also functions as a key economic adaptation strategy for farmers facing climate stress and declining viability of licit crops. Using a qualitative content analysis, existing literature was surveyed to determine how climate change shapes possible agricultural transitions and decision-making. The findings show that coca’s drought tolerance and adaptability make it more resilient than alternative crops, particularly coffee, which is highly vulnerable to changing climatic conditions. As a result, coca becomes an increasingly rational livelihood strategy. However, this stability coexists with risks of structural violence and criminalization. These findings highlight the need for long-term, sustainable and climate-adaptive agricultural policies that can offer livelihood stability comparable to coca.
Access status: Open Access ,
Traduire dans le domaine des technologies transformatrices: enjeux et difficultés, théorie et méthodologie
(2026-05-12) Toukam, Dieudonné; Not Applicable; Doctor of Philosophy; Department of French; Not Applicable; Patrick Drouin; Not Applicable; Raymond Mopoho; René Tondji-Simen; Jasmina Milićević; Yannick Marchand
This doctoral thesis aims to study the specialized language of disruptive technologies (Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain), their terminology, and the challenges and opportunities related to English-French translation in this field. In order to familiarize linguists and translators with this specialized discourse and provide them with a reliable terminological resource, we built 5-million-word text corpus hosted by Sketch Engine, and adopted an ECL-augmented lexicosemantic approach, with the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (ECL) enriching terminology by leveraging the Government Pattern for describing the syntactic cooccurrence of terms, Lexical Functions for describing the lexical relationships of terms, and a more rigorous methodology for formulating lexicographic definitions. We then created an English-French glossary (the GLOTECHT, also available online) based on our corpus and a fine-tuned methodology. Finally, we tackled translation challenges, as well as issues regarding semantic taxonomic classification, lexicographic definitions, neology, polysemy, etc.
Access status: Open Access ,
S-acylation of ATGL at Cys15: mechanism of activation and its relationship to ABHD5 coactivation
(2026-05-06) Afshari, Arezoo; Not Applicable; Master of Science; Department of Pathology; Not Applicable; Dr. Graham Dellaire; Not Applicable; Dr. Neale Ridgway; Dr. Barbara Karten; Dr. Gregory D. Fairn
Adipose triglyceride lipase (ATGL) catalyzes the first and rate-limiting step of triacylglycerol hydrolysis and is therefore a central regulator of lipid droplet catabolism in hepatocytes. Recent work identified S-acylation of ATGL at Cys15 as essential for lipase activity and lipid droplet homeostasis, but the mechanism by which this modification supports ATGL function remained unresolved. In particular, it was unknown whether Cys15 S-acylation influences ATGL activation through its major coactivator, α/β-hydrolase domain-containing protein 5 (ABHD5), and whether the requirement at Cys15 reflects a chemically specific need for cysteine modification or a more general requirement for local hydrophobicity. This thesis investigated the role of Cys15 S-acylation in ATGL activation and its relationship to ABHD5 coactivation. First, the effect of the S-acylation-deficient mutant C15S on ATGL interaction with and coactivation by ABHD5 was examined using confocal microscopy, co-immunoprecipitation, fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy–Förster resonance energy transfer (FLIM-FRET), and cell-free lipase assays. Second, hydrophobic substitutions at Cys15 (C15F, C15L, and C15W) were tested to determine whether local hydrophobicity could partially substitute for S-acylation. Third, a preliminary microscopybased screen of candidate acyl-protein thioesterases was performed to identify potential negative regulators of ATGL deacylation. C15S retained localization to lipid droplets and co-immunoprecipitated with ABHD5, indicating that loss of S-acylation did not abolish association between the two proteins. However, FLIM-FRET showed that C15S did not exhibit the same degree of close-range proximity to ABHD5 observed for wild-type ATGL. Wild-type ATGL showed robust ABHD5-dependent activation, whereas C15S exhibited only weak stimulation, indicating that Cys15 S-acylation is required for full catalytic activation. Hydrophobic substitutions preserved lipid droplet localization and reduced lipid droplet retention relative to C15S, consistent with partial functional rescue. C15F mutant particularly restored FRETdetectable proximity to ABHD5 and partially recovered lipase activity, supporting the idea that hydrophobicity at position 15 contributes to ATGL activation, although it does not fully replace the effect of S-acylation. Finally, the thioesterase screen did not identify an obvious candidate regulator under the conditions tested. Together, these findings support a model in which Cys15 S-acylation promotes ATGL activation not by controlling lipid droplet targeting, but by enabling a productive functional relationship with ABHD5 and by contributing local hydrophobic character near the Nterminal catalytic region. This work refines the mechanistic understanding of ATGL regulation in hepatocytes and provides new insight into how defective ATGL activation may contribute to hepatic lipid accumulation and steatotic liver disease.
Access status: Open Access ,
'Bringing Information Literacy Into Your Clinical Teaching' Instructor Package
(2026-05-08) Phinney, Jackie
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is an important component of undergraduate and postgraduate medical training, and health sciences librarians may be called to teach this given their expertise. Yet, learners refine their EBM skills in the real-world setting, where they are guided by clinical educators who may not recognize that EBM exists as part of a wider information literacy (IL) ecosystem. The continuing professional development program Bringing Information Literacy into your Clinical Teaching was designed to train clinical educators (specifically physicians) on the importance of information literacy skills, and how to incorporate discussions about this into their teaching at the bedside. It was first launched in March 2026 in the Canadian medical education setting. This instructor package offers the compiled materials from this program. Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, it is available for health sciences librarians who wish to recycle its content in their own teaching of healthcare faculty and/or learners. The materials are in Microsoft Word format to facilitate copying/pasting, and handouts are available as Canva templates for easy customization. While this program was designed to run in a learning management system, the materials can be used/combined in various formats and do not require access to a learning platform to be useful to instructors.