1025 research outputs found
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How Will Climate Change Impact Local Streams
No full textAir temperatures are expected to increase 4 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years as a result of global climate change. As temperatures rise, the range of habitats will shift along the latitudinal gradients, potentially causing local species decline. This is especially true for less mobile species that are limited in their ability to disperse and colonize new habitats, for example specific fish species. Warmer temperatures will increasingly favor species with a higher thermal tolerance, including nonnative species. As they colonize new habitats, they are predicted to increase in population size and distribution, which could impact native species. Brook Trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) populations are native to headwater streams in the Appalachians of North America. This species is of high conservation need, with threats including stream temperature rise and competition with nonnative species, particularly Brown trout (Salmo trutta). Because Brown Trout have a have a higher thermal tolerance than Brook Trout, future competition is expected to decrease Brook Trout population sizes. Using an experimental stream system we evaluated the effects of Brown Trout on Brook Trout behavior, habitat use, and growth rates at three temperatures within the upper, lower, and intermediate thresholds for brook trout
Isolating Novel Actinomycetes from Centralia, Pennsylvania Soil
No full textCentralia, Pennsylvania has been facing an underground coalmine fire for over 50 years, which has changed the ecosystem quite a bit. This has increased the soil temperatures, and in turn selected for typically rare soil thermophiles. Actinomycetes are common soil bacteria that produce antibiotics that can be used in the medical field. New antibiotics are needed due to increasing antibiotic resistance, and extreme environments like Centralia may be important locations for new antibiotic discovery. Potentially novel thermophilic Actinomycetes have been isolated from surface soils (20, 21, 29, 35, and 38 degrees Celsius) in Centralia by growing them on Actinomycete Isolation Agar at 50 degrees Celsius. Gram staining has confirmed many isolates have the expected Gram positive filamentous growth. These are currently being identified using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, and novel isolates will be further characterized to determine if they produce new antibiotics that can be of use
The War Rooms: An Analysis and Collection of Short-Short Stories
No full textThe shortest form of fiction goes by many names, including short-short stories, flash fiction, and sudden fiction. These stories, short as they may be, fearlessly plunge readers directly into the lives of their characters, providing the reader with an immersive story experience in which every word carries great importance. While some of the first short-short stories by authors such as Chekhov and Tolstoy center on moral integrity, modern short-short stories by authors such as Jayne Anne Phillips and Lydia Davis are grounded in emotional integrity. These modern short-shorts, upon which I compile my own work, provide a more encompassing view of the human experience. I have composed a manuscript of short-short stories, in addition to several longer stories, in an effort to further explore themes such as grief, family, new beginnings, a sense of belonging, and Italian-American culture
The Effects of Safety and Materialism on Happiness: The Netherlands, The United States, and India
No full textMy research examines the relationship between the feeling of safety and value placed on materialism by citizens and the effect that has on people’s overall feeling of happiness; specifically in the Netherlands, the United States, and India. I treat the US and India as the materialistic countries and the Netherlands serves as their foil. My hypothesis is that a person who feels safe and is materialistic would be happier in the former countries, and a person who feels safe and is not materialistic would be happier in the latter. I test my hypothesis using regression analysis on data from the World Values Survey (Wave 6). I find that my hypothesis for the United States and India hold true, while materialism has no significance for the Netherlands. When controls are added, these results hold for the US and India, while materialism now has a positive correlation in the Netherlands
Byron\u27s nature : a romantic vision of cultural ecology
No full textThis book is a thorough, eco-critical re-evaluation of Lord Byron (1789-1824), claiming him as one of the most important ecological poets in the British Romantic tradition. Using political ecology, post-humanist theory, new materialism, and ecological science, the book shows that Byron\u27s major poems--Childe Harold\u27s Pilgrimage, the metaphysical dramas, and Don Juan--are deeply engaged with developing a cultural ecology that could account for the co-creative synergies in human and natural systems, and ground an emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics scaled to address globalized human threats to socio-environmental thriving in the post-Waterloo era. In counterpointing Byron\u27s eco-cosmopolitanism to the localist dwelling praxis advocated by Romantic Lake poets, Byron\u27s Nature seeks to enlarge our understanding of the extraordinary range, depth, and importance of Romanticism\u27s inquiry into the meaning of nature and our ethical relation to it.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1079/thumbnail.jp
Proving Ground: Expertise and Appalachian Landscapes
No full textThe Appalachian Mountains attracted an endless stream of visitors in the twentieth century, each bearing visions of the realm that they would encounter on high. The name Appalachia became shorthand for a series of moral and economic calculations and pop culture references. Well before large numbers of tourists took to the mountains in the latter half of the century, however, networks of missionaries, sociologists, folklorists, doctors, artists, and conservationists made Appalachia their primary site for fieldwork. Proving Ground studies a collection of these professionals in transit to show that the travelers\u27 tales were the foundation of powerful forms of insider knowledge. The visitors represented occupational and recreational groups that used Appalachia to gain precious expertise, and it was to these groups that they became insiders. They were not immersing themselves in a regional culture, but rather in their own professional cultures. These were people who used the mountains to help themselves. Proving Ground is a cultural history of expertise, an environmental history of the Appalachian Mountains, and a historical geography of spaces and places in the twentieth century. By using these frameworks to analyze the personal papers, professional records, and popular works of these budding experts, the book presents mountain landscapes as a fluid combination of embodied sensation, narrative fantasy, and class privilege. It will attract students of Appalachian Studies who are interested in the phenomena of cultural and environmental intervention, environmental historians concerned with the construction of hybrid landscapes, and mobility scholars who recognize the organizational power derived from access and movement.https://scholarlycommons.susqu.edu/facultybooks/1073/thumbnail.jp
Economic Determinants of U.S. Presidential Election Outcomes
No full textThis study analyzes the relationship between a variety of economic factors and outcomes in U.S. presidential elections from 1988 to 2008. Current research on this topic uses the success of incumbent candidates as the dependent variable when looking at election results. This study instead analyzes election results in terms of the success of Republican candidates. Findings suggest that GDP, disposable personal income, and unemployment all have a significant effect on the outcome of U.S. presidential elections
Sex differences in the effects of acute ethanol treatment on the mesolimbic dopamine system in mice
No full textAlcoholism is a societal concern, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We studied the effects of ethanol on the reward pathway in mice using tyrosine hydroxylase (TH), the rate limiting enzyme for dopamine production. We hypothesized ethanol would increase TH expression, especially in female mice. We tested this hypothesis by quantifying the number of positive TH cells in the ventral tegmentum area (VTA) and the percent positive area in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Data supported our hypothesis that ethanol increased TH production in the reward pathway. We found that TH expression in response to alcohol was higher in female mice compared to male mice. This suggests that females are more susceptible to the rewarding effects of ethanol and need to consume less to activate the reward pathway. Data from our study indicates that females could be more physiologically susceptible to alcohol addiction than males
Elevated soil temperatures from a Pennsylvania coal mine fire are associated with the altered presence of antibiotic resistance, cell wall biosynthesis, and quorum sensing genes
No full textCentralia, a former mining location in Eastern Pennsylvania, is now known for its uncontrollable underground mine fire that began in 1962. Due to the resulting 56 year exposure to elevated soil temperatures, Centralia’s bacterial communities provide unique insights into how bacterial competition and communication respond to environmental warming. Shotgun metagenomic analysis of soil samples from affected, recovered, and unaffected sites was completed and Cluster of Orthologous Gene (COG) data was used to identify genes involved in antibiotic resistance, cell wall biosynthesis and quorum sensing. These analyses showed that the prevalence of multi-drug transport, beta-lactamase, antiporter, and aminoglycoside phosphotransferase genes were significantly correlated to soil temperature. Penicillin-binding proteins genes were also significantly correlated to soil temperature, as were competence proteins related to quorum sensing. Covariance analysis further suggests that these three classes of genes are interrelated. These results suggest that bacterial competition and communication may increase during times of thermal stress, and may result in increased levels of horizontal gene transfer
A Green Chemistry Alternative to Toluene in an Organic Acid Partition Teaching Lab Experiment
No full textAn alternative green chemistry titration for an oil/water organic acid partition was developed. In an equilibrium system, an organic acid, is dissolved in both a polar and non-polar solvent has the ability migrate from one liquid to another until equilibrium has been reached. The distribution of the organic acid is a measure of the binding affinity that the organic acid exhibits for either solvent. Toluene, an expensive, carcinogenic non-polar chemical was substituted for a less toxic, environmentally safe non-polar substance, vegetable oil. The organic acids, acetic, caproic and butyric, in equilibrium involving a polar solvent, water, and a non-polar solvent, vegetable oil, was studied. As expected, experimental results indicated that butyric acid exhibited greater affinity for oil than water compared to acetic acid. These results were consistent with the known behavior of acetic and butyric acids in an equilibrium system involving toluene and water suggesting a successful substitution