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Reunion with a Peer Partner Reduces PVN Oxytocin Neuron Immunoreactivity in Socially Selective Voles
Full text linkFriendships—i.e. selective peer relationships—are an important aspect of human behavior, but are rare in rodent species. Meadow voles are seasonally social rodents that form non-reproductive social groups in winter/short day lengths that are selective in nature. Across rodents, oxytocin neurons in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus are typically active during socially salient events, including interaction with novel individuals as well as social separation. To assess whether familiar and novel peer interactions produce different patterns of immunolabeling in a species that forms bonds with familiar individuals, we measured oxytocin neuron immunoreactivity and colabeling with the immediate early gene product cFos. Oxytocin labeling and oxytocin/cFos colabeling were higher after interaction with a novel same-sex conspecific than after reunion with a peer partner. Colabeling was also high after 24 h separation without reunion. Circulating corticosterone concentrations paralleled PVN oxytocin neuron activity. We also investigated whether oxytocin signaling was photoperiod dependent and could contribute to seasonal differences in meadow vole social behavior. Oxytocin receptor densities are known to be higher in multiple brain regions in short day lengths in meadow voles, but we found no concomitant change in PVN oxytocin positive cell count. Together these studies indicate that seasonal changes in behavior correlate with oxytocin signaling at the receptor level, while short term experiences modulated oxytocin neuron activity differentially by social context
Educational Opportunities of Participatory GIS for Accessibility on a College Campus
Full text linkThe educational benefits of Participatory GIS (PGIS) in geographic higher education have received limited direct attention, often because of the complexities of integrating PGIS into university curricula. While a few exceptions found important educational benefits of PGIS, extant studies focused primarily on the educational benefits for students who worked in the research teams, instead of participants who contributed their local knowledge and perspectives to mapping. Our research aims to understand the educational benefits of PGIS for participants in a campus accessibility mapping project using the modes of experiential learning, positionality, and service learning. Through this, we also provide strategies for effectively integrating PGIS projects into undergraduate geographical curricular education. Through independent participation in two spatial surveys (a mapping survey and a questionnaire on campus accessibility) via Survey123, group participation in a guided workshop, and the follow-up focus groups/interviews, we identify the educational benefits of PGIS for participants: (1) building knowledge/skills about accessible technological features of PGIS; (2) building content knowledge about accessibility; (3) transforming pre-constructed knowledge by learning from one another; (4) building awareness of positionality as disabled and non-disabled individuals; (5) building awareness of positionality as a community; and (6) enabling localized and place-based insights and empowerment
Bat Genomes Illuminate Adaptations to Viral Tolerance and Disease Resistance
Full text linkZoonoses are infectious diseases transmitted from animals to humans. Bats have been suggested to harbour more zoonotic viruses than any other mammalian order1. Infections in bats are largely asymptomatic2,3, indicating limited tissue-damaging inflammation and immunopathology. To investigate the genomic basis of disease resistance, the Bat1K project generated reference-quality genomes of ten bat species, including potential viral reservoirs. Here we describe a systematic analysis covering 115 mammalian genomes that revealed that signatures of selection in immune genes are more prevalent in bats than in other mammalian orders. We found an excess of immune gene adaptations in the ancestral chiropteran branch and in many descending bat lineages, highlighting viral entry and detection factors, and regulators of antiviral and inflammatory responses. ISG15, which is an antiviral gene contributing to hyperinflammation during COVID-19 (refs. 4,5), exhibits key residue changes in rhinolophid and hipposiderid bats. Cellular infection experiments show species-specific antiviral differences and an essential role of protein conjugation in antiviral function of bat ISG15, separate from its role in secretion and inflammation in humans. Furthermore, in contrast to humans, ISG15 in most rhinolophid and hipposiderid bats has strong anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity. Our work reveals molecular mechanisms that contribute to viral tolerance and disease resistance in bats
A Study of Conceptual Primitive Elimination: Embedding Ingest into Ptrans
Full text linkIn cognitive systems and cognitive linguistics, primitive decomposition systems attempt to explain cognitive phenomena by breaking things down into conceptual building blocks and provide rich and flexible representations for systems. A prime example is the Schank–Minsky Conceptual Dependency Trans-frames system, which maintains a commitment to keeping the number of primitives small and allowing them to be combined in complex ways in representing meaning, knowledge, and dynamic episodic memory. Motivated by the desire to keep the set of primitives small, this paper describes an effort to eliminate the Conceptual Dependency INGEST primitive and reconstitute its uses through combinations of the CD PTRANS primitive and CD\u27s representations of containment. The implementation is performed in BABEL, an automated paraphrase generation system which generates English realizations of CD structures and which has been used in multiple natural language understanding and story understanding systems. The implementation combines the discrimination nets used for selecting word senses for the INGEST primitive with those for the PTRANS primitive. Once the implementation was complete, we also ran BABEL using the new structures to generate paraphrases of CD structures and to determine the degree of success in our primitive re-expression endeavor
Self-rated pain and Observed Pain Behavior in Black and White Americans with Chronic Low Back Pain
No full textBlack Americans report more intense and disabling pain than White Americans, but differences in pain behavior have rarely been studied. The Structured Pain Behavior Test (SPBT), a standardized, video-recorded series of pain-inducing movements, assesses the behavioral expression of pain. We conducted the first test of whether Black Americans with chronic low back pain (CLBP) have greater pain behavior and increased self-reported pain intensity during the SPBT, compared to White Americans. Adults (N = 267) with CLBP (174 Black, 93 White; 57% female) rated their clinical pain severity and interference (Multidimensional Pain Inventory; MPI) and their current pain intensity (Numerical Rating Scale; NRS) both before and after engaging in the SPBT, which was coded for observed pain behavior. Consistent with prior research, Black participants reported greater MPI clinical pain severity and interference (large effect). More importantly, during the SPBT, Black participants had greater pain behavior (medium effect) and reported a greater increase in pain intensity (NRS; small-medium effect) than did Whites. Racialized differences in all pain measures remained significant after controlling for multiple variables (including depressive symptoms and pain catastrophizing), and differences in observed pain behavior remained after also controlling for self-reported pain intensity (NRS) or MPI clinical pain severity. We conclude that greater self-reported pain severity and interference among Black Americans is accompanied by greater pain behavior and increased pain intensity in response to pain-inducing movements. Research should examine possible mechanisms of this racialized difference, including differential access and care, racism as pain exacerbator, and the social communication of pain
Spatiotemporal Interpolation of Wildfire Smoke-Derived PM2.5 Using Deep Neural Networks
No full textAs the planet warms, wildfires are expected to become a major contribution to air pollution levels, specifically across the western United States (Calvin et al. 2023; Abatzoglou and Williams 2016). The burning of vegetation releases particulate matter–a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets that hang in the air and can be inhaled (US EPA 2016). Around 90% of this particulate matter is less than 2.5 microns in diameter, referred to as PM2.5 (Vicente et al. 2013). Unfortunately, studies attempting to investigate associations between such health outcomes and wildfiresmoke-derived PM2.5 are plagued by low statistical power and data with poor spatial resolution (Reid et al. 2016). This thesis explores a recently proposed, Deep Learning-enabled interpolation method (Amato et al. 2020) to predict ground-level smoke-derived PM2.5 (SPM2.5) concentrations. I use a AutoEncoder to allow the inclusion of important meteorological covariates, expanding on the previously proposed methodology. The AutoEncoder shows a promising ability to reconstruct SPM2.5, with a post-reconstruction unnormalized MSE of 0.295. However, the interpolation proposed by (Amato et al. 2020) does not handle discontinuous data well, suggesting that further study of machine learning on discontinuous and non-differentiable data is warranted
“I Wish These Damned People Would Stay Put”: The Political Ambivalence of US Archaeologists in Guatemala, 1931–1956
No full textThis article traces the history of how two generations of US archaeologists navigated their relationship with the Guatemalan government, from the Jorge Ubico dictatorship in the 1930s through the democratic opening of the 1940s and 1950s and the subsequent CIA-sponsored coup. Critiques of modern archaeology have focused on the discipline’s history of ideological and material collusion with different projects of US and European imperialism in the Global South. While the archaeologists discussed here benefited from US hegemony in the region, their own correspondence reflects an ambivalent relationship to formal frameworks of international law and a desire to function as autonomous nonstate actors. Rather than reflecting the political context of a given moment, the archaeologists’ behavior was often determined by a generations-old professional culture based on pragmatism and collective entitlement to the control of antiquities.
Este artículo documenta las formas en que dos generaciones de arque ´ ologos estadounidenses navegaron sus relaciones con gobiernos guatemaltecos desde la dictadura de Jorge Ubico en la década de los 30, hasta la apertura democrática de los a˜ nos 40 y 50 y los gobiernos que siguieron al golpe de estado de 1954. Estudios críticos de la arqueología moderna han dado énfasis a la colusi´ on ideol ´ ogica y econ´ omica de dicha disciplina con diferentes proyectos de imperialismo europeo o estadounidense dirigidos hacia Latinoamérica. Ciertamente, los arque´ ologos cuyas experiencias documento aquí se beneficiaron de la hegemonía estadounidense en la regi ´ on. Pero su propia correspondencia indica una relaci´ on más ambivalente hacia las redes de ley internacional, y un deseo de funcionar como actores aut´ onomos en el escenario global. En vez de ser un reflejo de las políticas internacionales de un dado momento, el comportamiento de estos arque´ ologos reflejaba una cultura profesional formada en el transcurso de generaciones, que daba énfasis al pragmatismo y al deseo de controlar antigüedades en países ajenos
Characterizations of Stability via Morse Limit Sets
No full textSubgroup stability is a strong notion of quasiconvexity that generalizes convex cocompactness in a variety of settings. In this paper, we characterize stability of a subgroup by properties of its limit set on the Morse boundary. Given H \u3c G, both finitely generated, H is stable exactly when all the limit points of H are conical, or equivalently when all the limit points of H are horospherical, as long as the limit set of H is a compact subset of the Morse boundary for G We also demonstrate an application of these results in the settings of the mapping class group for a finite type surface, Mod(S)
Constructive Memory and Conscious Experience
Full text linkEpisodic memory relies on constructive processes that support simulating novel future events by flexibly recombining elements of past experiences, and that can also give rise to memory errors. In recent studies, we have developed methods to characterize the cognitive and neural processes that support conscious experiences linked to this process of episodic recombination, both when people simulate novel future events and commit recombination-related memory errors. In this Per-spective, we summarize recent studies that illustrate these phe-nomena, and discuss broader implications for characterizing the basis of conscious experiences associated with constructive memory from a cognitive neuroscience perspective
