37495 research outputs found
Sort by
“Why Would You Make a Comment Like That?”: Engaging College Students as Allies through an Evidence-Based Intervention
Get PDFBackground: Women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals often experience subtle acts of prejudice (microaggressions) in college settings, which negatively impacts mental health and academic outcomes (Keels et al., 2017). To help improve campus climate, we developed and implemented a 75-minute theoretically grounded workshop to provide students with evidence-based ally strategies. We hypothesized that participants would be more willing to engage in ally behaviors towards LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color experiencing a microaggression after completing the workshop. In follow-up interviews, we examined attendees’ retention of the workshop.
Method: We surveyed 168 workshop attendees about their attitudes and ally behaviors before and after attendance. Three months later, we conducted in-depth interviews with eleven randomly selected participants (nine women; two men). In the interviews, we provided one case study where a nonbinary individual was greeted by another person saying, “hey man!” and, in another, a White male student was shocked when an Afro-Cuban female student received an A+ on a research class midterm.
Results: Preliminary results from the pre-post surveys indicate participants felt more confident engaging as an ally and reported more ally behaviors after attending the workshop (small to moderate effect sizes, all pvalues \u3c .05). Across the interviews, participants who connected with the identity of the victim or perpetrator were likely to speak up. In the misgendering scenario, seven out of eleven participants claimed they were unsure if they would intervene during a real situation. However, in the racism and sexism case study, nearly all participants agreed that they would intervene if the situation were real.
Conclusion: Given the current targeting of college campuses’ DEI programming, it is critical to foster ally engagement to improve the well-being of marginalized students. This project tested a theoretically informed educational initiative that could be beneficial to other campuses
EcoDrone: Autonomous Environmental Monitoring
Get PDFThis project presents EcoDrone, an autonomous aerial drone designed for continuous and automated environmental monitoring. Current environmental monitoring methods rely on stationary sensors or manual data collection, limiting real-time response capabilities. This reliance leads to delayed, incomplete, and spatially limited data and restricts the ability to capture real-time changes. Another challenge includes the difficulty of environmental monitoring in challenging terrain, whether it be wildfire areas, dense forestry, or mountainous terrain. EcoDrone overcomes these challenges by autonomously navigating difficult terrain to collect real-time data, offering more flexible and timely monitoring than stationary or manual methods. The central research question investigates integrating standard consumer components and open-source software to create a drone system to improve real-time data collection. EcoDrone integrates a suite of onboard sensors to measure temperature, humidity, pressure, and CO2 concentration, transmitting real-time data to a ground station for analysis. The research methodology includes hardware and software systems integration and preliminary flight testing. System integration includes implementing the base DJI Tello drone\u27s flight control and status logging onto a separate onboard ESP32 microcontroller. The controller, living on top of the drone, sends pre-programmed flight path commands to the drone and records the drone\u27s status (i.e. battery, height, velocity, acceleration). Simultaneously, the external sensors take measurements and are logged locally on the microcontroller\u27s built-in storage and transmitted in real time. Expected results include successful flight control and environmental sensing integration, reliable real-time data transmission, and improved spatial coverage in difficult terrain. EcoDrone is expected to demonstrate the feasibility of low-cost, autonomous monitoring solutions for capturing dynamic ecological data with greater efficiency and adaptability than conventional methods
The Legacy of William M. Pardridge (1947–2024) on the Science and Fields Concerned with the Physiology of the Blood-Brain Barrier and the Transport of Drugs to the Brain
Get PDFThis article highlights the scientific achievements and professional career of William M. Pardridge, who passed away on 18th of June 2024. He was born in 1947 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. William, known affectionately as Bill, was one of the most influential researchers in the blood-brain barrier (BBB) field. Bill’s research contributions to the field spun over 6 decades at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it was focused on the molecular physiology of the BBB, including the carrier-mediated transport of nutrients and small molecule drugs, the receptor-mediated transport of peptides and molecular Trojan horses, gene therapy of the brain with Trojan horse liposomes, and BBB genomics and proteomics. He founded ArmaGen Inc. in 2004, a biotech company that provided the basis for the treatment of CNS disorders with the molecular Trojan horse technology. This technology continues to be widely used in academia and in the biotech industry. He has been a cherished friend and mentor to many within the BBB community
Remotely Sensed High-Resolution Soil Moisture and Evapotranspiration: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Society
Get PDFThis paper reviews the current state of high-resolution remotely sensed soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration (ET) products and modeling, and the coupling relationship between SM and ET. SM downscaling approaches for satellite passive microwave products leverage advances in artificial intelligence and high-resolution remote sensing using visible, near-infrared, thermal-infrared, and synthetic aperture radar sensors. Remotely sensed ET continues to advance in spatiotemporal resolutions from MODIS to ECOSTRESS to Hydrosat and beyond. These advances enable a new understanding of bio-geo-physical controls and coupled feedback mechanisms between SM and ET reflecting the land cover and land use at field scale (3–30 m, daily). Still, the state-of-the-science products have their challenges and limitations, which we detail across data, retrieval algorithms, and applications. We describe the roles of these data in advancing 10 application areas: drought assessment, food security, precision agriculture, soil salinization, wildfire modeling, dust monitoring, flood forecasting, urban water, energy, and ecosystem management, ecohydrology, and biodiversity conservation. We discuss that future scientific advancement should focus on developing open-access, high-resolution (3–30 m), sub-daily SM and ET products, enabling the evaluation of hydrological processes at finer scales and revolutionizing the societal applications in data-limited regions of the world, especially the Global South for socio-economic development
Application of Bioactive Materials Primary Cilia as a Novel Delivery Vehicle
Get PDFPrimary cilia are hair-like structured cell organelles functioning as cellular antennae with chemosensory and mechanosensory roles. Dysfunction of cilia results in ciliopathies, including renovascular diseases (polycystic kidneys, hypertension, aneurysm), mental impedances (Alzheimer\u27s disease, Parkinson\u27s disease, dementia), metabolic diseases (obesity, developmental skeleton defects), blindness, and so on. With a diameter of 150 nm, cilia can be cleaved, released and circulated in the body as injury biomarkers. We here assessed the potential use of isolated cilia as a novel delivery vehicle. Cilia were isolated from renal epithelial cells, and a specific-targeting chemotherapeutic was designed on the cilia. The data show a remarkable property of cilia to significantly inhibit disease progression with reduced toxicity. These findings emphasize the prospective biomedical applications of primary cilia in generating novel drug, gene, protein, and other delivery systems to treat diverse pathological conditions. While there are many synthetic drug delivery vehicles, our studies demonstrate for the first time that physiologically produced primary cilia can be adapted as a unique carrier system
Large-Scale Groundwater System Characterization Using Pressure Responses to Barometric Perturbations Caused by the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha\u27apai Volcanic Eruption
No full textHunga Tonga-Hunga Ha\u27apai volcanic erupted on 15 January 2022, causing Lamb waves to propagate throughout the global troposphere. However, reports on volcanic eruptions–pressure fluctuations and water level dynamics are lacking. We quantified the propagation processes of Lamb waves induced by the Tonga volcanic eruption. Barometric pressure data collected at 1-min intervals at 485 meteorological stations in China showed that the eruption induced an atmospheric pressure event with an amplitude of ∼2 hPa over an hour and a wave speed of 295 m/s. Concomitant groundwater levels were available at 338 wells to find the barometric response to the volcanic event. The resulting functions were unique to each well to determine the nature of the aquifer, whether it is confined or unconfined, and the permeability of the aquifers. For confined aquifers with high permeability, there was no delay in the barometric pressure of groundwater level response as the barometric response function converged quickly, and the correlation between the Lamb wave and groundwater level was stronger; for confined aquifers with low permeability, there was a delay in the barometric pressure of the groundwater level that showed a step-change. In this case, the correlation between the Lamb wave and groundwater level was weaker. For confined aquifers with wellbore storage effects, superimposed characteristics of wellbore storage and confined aquifer properties were observed. For unconfined aquifers, the ability of the groundwater level to respond to Lamb waves was greater than the barometric response. A unified, well-aquifer model provides a theoretical explanation for the phenomena
Social Media, Populism, and Militant Democracy: An Argument for a Change in First Amendment Doctrine
Get PDFThe First Amendment is often hailed as the cornerstone of American self-government, but the digital age has transformed the public discourse it was meant to protect. Social media platforms, once envisioned as a modern marketplace of ideas, now amplify misinformation, entrench echo chambers, and enable mass manipulation, threatening the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry.
While the current First Amendment doctrine rightly emphasizes the importance of public discourse, that discourse must be inclusive, rational, and reliable to serve its democratic function. Drawing on the concept of militant democracy, this Article argues that contemporary doctrine has lost sight of free speech’s dual purpose—not only to protect individual liberty, but also to safeguard the democratic process—and that it must be reoriented to reflect this foundational balance
A Preliminary Study on the Role of Personal History of Infectious and Parasitic Diseases on Self-Reported Health Across Countries
Get PDFObjectives
Infectious diseases are often associated with decline in quality of life. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between personal history of communicable, i.e., infectious and parasitic diseases and self-rated health. Study design
Secondary analysis of a large dataset multi-country observational study. Methods
We used a four-pronged analysis approach to investigate whether personal history of infectious and parasitic diseases is related to self-reported health, measured with a single item. Results
Three of the four analyses found a small positive effect on self-reported health among those reporting a history of pathogen exposure. The meta-analysis found no support but large heterogeneity that was not reduced by two classifications of countries. Conclusion
Personal history of infectious and parasitic diseases does not reduce self-reported health across a global sample