Financial, institutional, environmental, technical, and social (FIETS) aspects of water, sanitation, and hygiene conditions in indigenous - rural Indonesia

Background: There is increasing recognition of the complexity underlying WASH conditions in developing countries. This article explores the complexity by assessing the vulnerability of a specific area to poor WASH conditions using a qualitative approach. Methods: We present our findings for the district of East Sumba in Indonesia. This area...

Adaptive Strategies for Water Heritage: Past, Present and Future

This Open Access book, building on research initiated by scholars from the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for Global Heritage and Development (CHGD) and ICOMOS Netherlands, presents multidisciplinary research that connects water to heritage. Through twenty-one chapters it explores landscapes, cities, engineering structures and buildings from around...

Comparison of three 3D scanning techniques for paintings, as applied to Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’

A seventeenth-century canvas painting is usually comprised of varnish and (translucent) paint layers on a substrate. A viewer’s perception of a work of art can be affected by changes in and damages to these layers. Crack formation in the multi-layered stratigraphy of the painting is visible in the surface topology. Furthermore, the impact of...

Flagships of the Dutch Welfare State in Transformation: A Transformation Framework for Balancing Sustainability and Cultural Values in Energy-Efficient Renovation of Postwar Walk-Up Apartment Buildings

Increasing energy efficiency of the housing stock is one of the largest challenges in the built environment today. In line with the international Paris-Climate-Change-Conference 2015, Dutch municipalities and housing associations have embraced the ambition to achieve carbon neutrality for their social housing stock by 2050. However, most deep...

Lipid recovery from a vegetable oil emulsion using microbial enrichment cultures

Background Many waste streams have a relatively high vegetable oil content, which is a potential resource that should be recovered. Microbial storage compound production for the recovery of lipids from lipid-water emulsions with open (unsterilized) microbial cultures was investigated in a sequencing batch reactor using a diluted vegetable oil...

Feasibility study of an alkaline-based chemical treatment for the purification of polyhydroxybutyrate produced by a mixed enriched culture

This study focused on investigating the feasibility of purifying polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) from mixed culture biomass by alkaline-based chemical treatment. The PHB-containing biomass was enriched on acetate under non-sterile conditions. Alkaline treatment (0.2 M NaOH) together with surfactant SDS (0.2 w/v% SDS) could reach 99% purity, with more...

Functional characterization of a Penicillium chrysogenum mutanase gene induced upon co-cultivation with Bacillus subtilis

Background Microbial gene expression is strongly influenced by environmental growth conditions. Comparison of gene expression under different conditions is frequently used for functional analysis and to unravel regulatory networks, however, gene expression responses to co-cultivation with other microorganisms, a common occurrence in nature, is...