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Unravelling the Mystery of Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Cause
No full textChronic Kidney disease of unknown cause (CKDu) is a leading cause of premature death in Nicaragua, primarily affecting young men in rural communities. Patients often suffer from acute kidney failure with no known cause, leaving the doctors clueless about prevention and treatment. Researchers have identified associations with CKDu, including exposure to agrichemicals, infectious disease, and working in sugarcane fields.
Using prospective longitudinal cohort data from Nicaragua, I estimated a multivariate three-state Hidden Markov model and a Markov model to examine the potential time-varying environmental, occupational, and lifestyle exposures that could impact kidney health and transition from healthy to unhealthy. The states in the Markov models reflect kidney health: healthy, borderline, and unhealthy. However, since the state of kidney health is unknown, we can model the distribution of the eGFR (estimated glomerular filtration rate), a measure of kidney function, and its annual rate of change. Multiple imputation is employed to impute the eGFR rate of change at baseline to estimate the state of kidney health at the start of the study. In addition to the data analysis, we ran a simulation study to analyze computation issues of the Hidden Markov model from the msm package.
The Hidden Markov model suggests that smoking regularly and sugarcane work maintain borderline kidney health. Drinking alcohol regularly both maintains and initiates transition to borderline and unhealthy kidney health. The Markov model also identified smoking regularly, sugarcane work, and drinking alcohol regularly as significant exposures that initiate the transition to unhealthy kidney state. The simulation study shows that rare exposures are responsible for some convergence issues even with larger sample size and longer study duration.
Women are less likely to be impacted by CKDu but social and cultural factors make it challenging to disentangle associations with sex from other environmental and occupational exposures. Future research is needed to further whether these exposures are proxies to the true underlying causes. Explaining the initiation of CKDu has great public health impacts. It can lead to developing prevention strategies and treatments, improving the understanding and awareness of this epidemic
Along For the Ride? Odocoileus virginianus as a potential driver for Alliaria petiolata invasion
No full textGarlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a non-native understory herb native to Eurasia. It is considered invasive and has spread throughout North American forests, notably forming dense monocultures with little to no native plant biodiversity. Previous studies have hypothesized that white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) facilitate garlic mustard expansion; as deer populations grow beyond carrying capacity, selective herbivory and disturbance could allow garlic mustard to infiltrate ecosystems while avoiding direct competition. Deer exclosures were constructed at Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area in 2018 to investigate how deer removal affects (i) garlic mustard growth and (ii) understory community composition, and (iii) how these effects differ across naturally occurring garlic mustard densities. Exclosures were placed in areas with high or low densities of garlic mustard and paired plots were selected inside and outside of the exclosures. Vegetation surveys were conducted in 2018, 2019, and 2022 to measure understory community response to deer removal across garlic mustard concentrations. Community composition, assessed by principal component analysis, changed significantly over time in exclosure areas; exclosed areas became more different over time, especially in high garlic mustard areas. Canadian wood nettle (Laportea canadensis) dominated two exclosures in high garlic mustard areas (\u3e90% coverage) with little cover in the respective paired plots (\u3c4%). Linear mixed models showed no significant effects of treatment for garlic mustard total cover, rosette cover, stem cover, or the number of stems within plots, although this could be confounded by its biennial phenology. Differences in the species represented in the five tallest plants in each plot were significant in 2020-2022 for high garlic mustard areas and for 2022 in low garlic mustard areas, supporting the hypothesis that treatment effects would be more significant in high garlic mustard areas. Overall, these results indicate that deer have a greater effect on community composition in high garlic mustard areas
Effects of leaf litter and road salt on aquatic macroinvertebrate colonization and survival
No full textAquatic macroinvertebrates are vital to lentic ecosystem functioning because of their importance in food webs, trophic interactions, and complex life cycles. Because adult aquatic macroinvertebrates are often highly mobile, colonization of new wetlands can happen often, and ecosystem characteristics can act as environmental filters on community composition. Road infrastructure located near or through wetlands also poses a significant threat to macroinvertebrates due to a multitude of stressors, including habitat fragmentation and degradation, barriers of movement and gene flow, noise pollution, direct mortality, and light and chemical pollution. Road salt application for deicing during the winter increases the salinity of freshwater ecosystems near roads, and many taxa of macroinvertebrates are extremely sensitive to this change in water quality. Human development can also reduce littoral inputs into aquatic systems via tree removal and deforestation, altering nutrient availability, and habitat spatial heterogeneity in wetlands. Although these disturbances have been studied previously in isolation, their interaction effects are unknown. Using a multi-factorial mesocosm design, it was found that treatment (control, +salt/CT litter, CT salt/+litter, +salt/+litter) had no significant statistical effects on macroinvertebrate community composition or individual family abundance. Additionally, treatment conditions did not alter taxa richness or functional diversity significantly. These results suggest that these taxa do not respond to salinity or leaf litter presence in newly colonized habitat patches and point towards the potential resilience of these communities under these anthropogenic disturbances. The growing alteration of these important wetland habitats requires more examination to fully understand the response of these species to current and future change
Solar Radio Bursts —Deployable Low-band Ionosphere and Transients Experiment (DLITE) Arrays
Get PDFSolar radio bursts, phenomenon that often accompany CME, solar flares and other solar events, can be detected on earth and used in the prediction of solar weather that affects earth systems in several ways. As part of the NREIP Program supporting the Naval Research Laboratory, Remote Sensing Division, approximately ten interns participated in the analysis of data collected by DLITE and WAVES radio data. Data from DLITE is often used as a complement to data from WAVES due to differences in frequency range and resolution. The analysis helps to correlate the DLITE data with the data collected from other sources. This is important because using data from solar weather to predict effects on earth will help mitigate the potential problems that solar weather can cause for earth-based systems such as power grids, GPS systems and electronic communication
How To Build A Socialist Government: Milwaukee and The Sewer Socialists
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As someone who has grown up in Milwaukee, the history of the city has always been important to the story of my family. As a Socialist, historian, and avid urbanist, the topic of Sewer Socialism became an inevitable project for study. The purpose of this project is to highlight the history of change and liberation in the United States. I see the Milwaukee Socialists as a prime example of that history and what a truly representative coalition-based government can be. This paper aims to be an introductory overview to the study of the history of German immigration, the socialist press, socialism in Milwaukee, and more. The topics discussed in the paper are highlighted with the hope of possible inspiration for the modern socialist movement in building coalitions. In this current era of American life, there is currently the largest push for unionization in the last fifty years. As always true in the history of the United States there are large immigrant populations all over the country. The advent of social media has opened the door to the press being used to advance the socialist cause. Looking back upon the history of a movement like the Sewer Socialists can teach valuable lessons to the next generation of leaders
Mapping the Madness, Making a Method: A critical reflection on living, learning, and organizing amidst chaos
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This is my first attempt at synthesizing my experience as a student of race and power during a time of total system failure, mass resistance to systems of racial capitalism and state violence, and settler desecration of the Earth. As a pre-service educator at a time when schools are a site of contestation over whether our children should be taught about power and oppression, whether or not all of our children should be allowed to learn freely, whether transgender children have the right to exist at all. As an organizer, human being, and young person who is coming into himself during a period of immense change and inescapably visible suffering. It is my attempt at testimony.
As my struggle to align my actions to my values continues, I hope I might return to this piece as a marker of my own development. At its core, I am taking this work as an opportunity to share what I have learned with all those who have aided me in the process of becoming more fully human; my mentors, educators, friends, and – most importantly – my family
A Note from the Tapestries Editors
Get PDFIntroduction to volume 11 of Macalester College\u27s journal Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities
The Ivory Tower is Burning: Colonialism, Neutrality, and the Future of America\u27s Art Museums
Get PDFIn this essay, I examine and problematize the myth of neutrality in America’s art museums by examining the colonialist, patriarchal, and capitalist foundations of museums in American culture, framing contemporary examples of museum neutrality—or the social and political detachment of many museums from the communities and issues they claim to speak to—within these historical contexts. Referring to the works of museum educators, scholars, and activists, this essay seeks to build on the existing commentary about the positionality and purpose of museums in their communities, using protest as a means of analyzing institutional capacity for change. Drawing on a number of contemporary examples, including the ongoing Strike MoMA efforts, I engage an open-ended discussion of how museums might reimagine themselves as institutions unbound from the colonial, patriarchal and capitalist values on which so many were founded
Polishing the American Dream: Vietnamese-Americans in the Nail Industry
Get PDFNail art is a site of cultural history in the US. This form of artistic and self expression has evolved greatly over the decades, with influences from different cultures and backgrounds, especially from Black-American and Vietnamese-American people. Growing up, it had never occurred to me why so many of my Vietnamese relatives and family friends worked as nail technicians. Turns out, over the years Vietnamese-Americans immigrants turned entrepreneurs have actually come to dominate this multi-billion dollar industry. But I had never taken my family members’ careers as nail techs seriously, and it seems that this is a popular opinion among many Americans. Jokes are often made about nail technicians, never without including ignorant “Asian” accents. Not only this, but many technicians face blatant disrespect, verbal and even physical abuse, and racism at their work or outside work. These instances of racism are a part of a larger, white-supremacist and imperialist issue of the US enacting violence onto Vietnamese bodies since the Vietnam War until today. They also essentialize Vietnamese-Americans into dehumanizing stereotypes, erasing their identity and complex history. Using nail art as a site of exploration, we can investigate more about the Vietnamese American working class experience, the history of the Vietnam War and critiques of the American Dream, the complex relationship between Vietnamese-American and Black-American communities, and finally how nail art has grown in such creative and beautiful ways
Species Effect on the Ecohydrology of a Floodplain Forest in the Upper Mississippi
Get PDFThe primary objective of this study is to understand how soil moisture is depleted underneath native and non-native Minnesotan tree species following a rain event. It is hypothesized that soil moisture will deplete more significantly and faster underneath drought intolerant, shallow rooted species native to Minnesota. This study also focuses on utilizing remote sensing techniques to calculate the soil moisture availability across a floodplain forest using Landsat 8 images to compare satellite-derived and field-recorded soil moisture values to assess the potential of these images to remotely estimate soil moisture in floodplains