Expanding Reach of Occupational Health Knowledge: Contributing Subject-Matter Expertise to Wikipedia as a Class Assignment.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and several university programs have collaborated on a large effort to expand and improve occupational safety and health content in Wikipedia using a platform developed by Wiki Education. This article describes the initiative, student contributions, and evaluations of this effort by instructors from two universities between 2016 and 2020. The Wiki Education platform allowed instructors to set timelines and track students' progress throughout the semester while students accessed training to best expand health content in Wikipedia. Students chose topics in occupational health based on their interests and by a set of topics deemed as a priority by the "WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health." Students' contributions were peer-reviewed by instructors, NIOSH Wikipedians-in-Residence, and traditional Wikipedians. Students presented their projects in class at the end of the semester. Students from both schools expanded 55 articles, created 8 new articles, and translated 2 articles to Spanish, adding 1270 references; these articles were viewed over 8 million times by May 2020. Feedback received from the implementation suggested that students learned about science communication and digital literacy-providing valuable content on occupational health while reducing misinformation in the public domain. The process of identifying and addressing gaps in occupational health in Wikipedia requires participation and engagement toward improving access to information that otherwise would be restricted to the scientific literature, often behind a paywall. The Wikipedia assignment proved to be an engaging approach for instruction and information literacy. It helped students improve their science communication skills and digital literacy, tools that are likely to be critical for successful communication of science in their future careers.

Developmental self-assembly of a DNA tetrahedron.

Kinetically controlled isothermal growth is fundamental to biological development, yet it remains challenging to rationally design molecular systems that self-assemble isothermally into complex geometries via prescribed assembly and disassembly pathways. By exploiting the programmable chemistry of base pairing, sophisticated spatial and temporal control have been demonstrated in DNA self-assembly, but largely as separate pursuits. By integrating temporal with spatial control, here we demonstrate the "developmental" self-assembly of a DNA tetrahedron, where a prescriptive molecular program orchestrates the kinetic pathways by which DNA molecules isothermally self-assemble into a well-defined three-dimensional wireframe geometry. In this reaction, nine DNA reactants initially coexist metastably, but upon catalysis by a DNA initiator molecule, navigate 24 individually characterizable intermediate states via prescribed assembly pathways, organized both in series and in parallel, to arrive at the tetrahedral final product. In contrast to previous work on dynamic DNA nanotechnology, this developmental program coordinates growth of ringed substructures into a three-dimensional wireframe superstructure, taking a step toward the goal of kinetically controlled isothermal growth of complex three-dimensional geometries.