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Diverse Microbial Prey in the Guts of Gelatinous Grazers Revealed by Microscopy
Get PDFMucous mesh grazers including pelagic tunicates and thecosome pteropods play a key role in oceanic food webs. They are taxonomically and morphologically diverse and can be highly abundant. Using their fine mucous meshes, these pelagic grazers ingest a wide range of plankton prey and link pelagic and benthic marine ecosystems. Characterizing the diet of this group is central to fully understanding marine food webs and developing accurate food web models. However, gelatinous grazers are challenging to study owing to their physically delicate composition so studying their feeding ecology requires numerous complementary techniques. Microscopy has largely been supplanted by other methods, but it remains valuable for its precision in determining cell size and morphology, which are key to characterize the diet and feeding mechanics of grazers. We use environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM) to examine the gut contents of several mucous mesh grazers from the Northern California Current (NCC) including Dolioletta gegenbauri, Limacina helicina, Pegea socia, Pyrosoma atlanticum, and Thetys vagina. Our findings provide taxonomic resolution of the prey of these grazers, which includes dinoflagellates, silicoflagellates, centric and pennate diatoms, coccolithophores, tintinnids, foraminiferans, and copepods. Our results show that these gelatinous grazers ingest prey ranging in size from 0.4 µm to 91.0 µm and expands the known prey size range for Thetys vagina. This work underscores the advantages of using microscopy, including insights into prey morphology and integrity, which enhances our understanding of feeding selectivity, prey defenses, and the pathways of grazed plankton through the marine ecosystem
Inheriting Perpetrator Trauma: Intergenerational memory of the Sino‑Japan War
Get PDFThe legacy of a perpetrator past has always occupied a troubling place in Japan’s national culture. As in many post-confict societies, remembering dark history has been shrouded in uneasy trepidation, reticence, and remorse. Almost eight decades after World War II ended, the task of remembering Japan’s perpetrator past has now passed to the postwar generations who have become the carrier groups of perpetrator trauma. This paper explores the cultural trauma of war inherited by the children of veterans who fought in the Sino-Japan War, whose lives were indelibly marked by their fathers’ legacy of violence and guilt. I examine three recent memoirs by the second generation that probe their fathers’ broken lives. The memory work of these writers—Murakami Haruki, Henmi Yō, and Itō Hideko—show that haunting legacies of war can be transmitted across generations even when they are shrouded in silence. This study points a new direction in cultural trauma research that foregrounds intergenerational memory in the cultural trauma process
Working Paper No. 89, Towards a Veblenian View of the Digital Realm
Get PDFThis inquiry seeks to establish that Thorstein Veblen’s writings offered insights that could assist us in understanding the digital realm in contemporary times. Through advancing his thinking for dealing with the instincts of idle curiosity and workmanship, in particular, Veblen provided an understanding of capital as technologies, especially, that should be valued as contributions to the common and joint stocks of knowledge. Back in his day, Veblen’s understanding of capital, ownership, and private property offered ways for us to think of some of the potential usages of technology as well as a range of possibilities for sabotage. What is more, the understanding that Veblen advanced in the first decades of the twentieth century could be viewed as offering insights as well as ways for approaching currently available digital technologies taking forms as software and digital media, in particular. With this inquiry it shall be argued that in contemporary times Veblen’s legacy does indeed assist us in understanding diverse forms of softwaresuch as open source, proprietary, and freeas well as approaches to their ownership, production, and applications
Consumption Pressure in Estuaries Peaks at Intermediate Salinities
Get PDFThe nature and strength of biotic interactions change along stress gradients, but the importance of these interactions across estuarine gradients is under studied. Here, we examined how consumption varies across estuarine salinity gradients by deploying standardized baits (‘squidpops’) to measure consumption pressure along the gradients of five estuaries in Oregon, USA. The relationship between consumption and stress was nonlinear: consumption pressure peaked slightly at mid salinity and decreased at low salinity, especially as temperature increased, in the five estuaries studied. This finding does not support either of two existing models for consumption across gradients, including the Consumer Stress Model and a consumer extension of the Salinity Range Model. The pattern of consumption aligns better with the Prey Stress Model or the Invasion Stress Model, and the latter predicts that successful invasion by stress-tolerant predators extends consumption pressure further upstream along estuarine stress gradients than the Consumer Stress Model. Although these estuaries have been invaded by the crab Carcinus maenas, our catch data did not support the expected greater numbers of these invasive, stress-tolerant predators mid estuary or an expected relationship with native predators, as C. maenas was trapped in low abundance throughout each estuary. While our catch data did not directly support the Invasion Stress Model, we found that individual C. maenas ate more squid in lab experiments when at intermediate salinities than fresher salinities. Overall, our field and lab results suggest consumption peaked at mid estuary, at intermediate to high stress, in these temperate estuaries. The Invasion-Stress Model needs more testing to evaluate whether it, the Prey Stress Model, or a new model is best supported and can predict ecological impacts from changes in precipitation patterns and biological invasions, as well as other environmental stressors for estuarine food webs
Reflecting Life Back: The Influence of Mirrors on Human World History
Get PDFTen thousand years ago, humans first created mirrors. They were developed simultaneously all over the world, reflecting the innate human desire to see something so close to us, yet so hard to view. Our own face. While this invention had a simple initial purpose, it quickly became tied to many of the more complicated developments of human life, including, but not limited to, religion, power, and technology. We see this reflected in everything from the polished obsidian mirrors of Mesoamerica, used to commune with the gods and revered for their reflectiveness, to the bronze mirrors of Greece used in early tales of morality and vanity, to the glass mirrors that became symbols of power all over early modern Europe and its empire. More recently mirrors have also become a crucial aspect in several major technological developments, ranging from the periscopes of WWI to the optical space telescopes of the modern day, an invention that is allowing humans to empirically understand the massive scope and origin of the universe. All of these mirror related developments, from the spiritual to the scientific, have grown out of a simple technology our ancient ancestors invented 10,000 years ago in order to see their own faces. By examining Mirrors, we can gain a deeper and more complex understanding of the history of humanity all around the world, where things came from, and how they came to be as they are.
Part of the panel: Reflections of HumanityModerator: Professor Katrine Barbe
Advanced Machine Learning Techniques for Social Support Detection on Social Media
Get PDFThe widespread use of social media highlights the need to understand its impact, particularly the role of online social support. In this study, we present a dataset of YouTube comments, initially comprising 66,272 entries, which was refined to 42,695, with a subset of 10,000 comments selected for detailed analysis without additional filtering. The dataset is annotated for three classification tasks: (1) distinguishing supportive from non-supportive comments, (2) determining whether the support is directed at an individual or a group, and (3) further categorizing group support into six subtypes (Nation, LGBTQ, Black Community, Women, Religion, and Other). To address data imbalances in these tasks, we employed K-means clustering to balance the dataset and compared the results with the original unbalanced data. We use state-of-the-art transformer models and zero-shot learning techniques—including GPT-3, GPT-4, and GPT-4o. Our approach, evaluated using macro F1-scores, demonstrates strong performance on the imbalanced dataset, with our transformer-based model (roberta-base) achieving scores of 0.78, 0.84, and 0.80, respectively, across the three classification tasks. These results also demonstrate a macro F1-score improvement of 0.2% for Task 2 and 0.7% for Task 3 compared to previous work that used CNN with GloVe embeddings and traditional machine learning baselines based on TF-IDF and LIWC features
An Equitable End: Meeting the Needs of Queer Families Within Deathcare
Get PDFThis thesis seeks to explore end-of-life care experiences of queer families, focusing on interactions with palliative and hospice caregivers. Currently, end-of-life (EOL) practitioners in institutional and medical care settings are often poorly equipped to interact with queer families due to inadequate cultural training models, personal biases, and ignorance regarding the queer identities of their clients. This manifests in substantial inequities within deathcare systems regarding the accommodation of the unique needs of queer familial structures. Drawing upon multidisciplinary scholarship, I sought to examine these needs, which diverge from that of heterosexual families due to queer families’ absence of legal protections and diverse structures which often decenter biological family as well as romantic partnerships. Having established the existence of this gap in equitable care, I then utilized prior research to explore alternative EOL care modalities, namely community care models and the introduction of supplemental caregivers such as end-of-life doulas (EOLDs). This scholarship emphasizes the need for continued reform of current mainstream institutional as well as medical EOL care settings and provider training programs to improve the experiences of queer clients. Furthermore, I argue that alternative EOL care modalities may uniquely lend themselves to the care of queer families and invite further inquiry into the integration of such care structures with more conventional institutional EOL care practices
Increasing Soil Respiration in a Northern Hardwood Forest Indicates Symptoms of a Changing Carbon Cycle
Get PDFSoil carbon dioxide (CO2) flux, or soil respiration, is a critical control on net ecosystem carbon (C) balance. Using long-term (2002-2020) measurements at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (New Hampshire, U.S.), we show that soil respiration rates have notably increased since ~2015. In 2020, cumulative summer respiration flux was approximately 90% higher than the average summer flux over the 2002–2015 period. The increase in soil respiration cannot be explained directly by temperature or pH change alone. We also found that heterotrophic microbial C mineralization and microbial biomass C have also increased rapidly since ~2015, pointing towards an increase in the bioavailability of organic C substrates. We suggest that these observations are consistent with a hypothetical increase in plant allocation of C belowground in response to changing climatic and soil conditions. Quantification of interactions among co-occurring global change factors (e.g., warming temperatures, increasing atmospheric CO2, and nutrient limitation) is needed to predict how the soil C reservoir will continue to respond to global environmental changes
How the U.S. Can Protect Taiwan in the 21st Century
Get PDFWhat U.S. policy would deescalate cross-strait tensions, while maintaining Taiwan’s security? This article is supported by the information and perspectives received from 12, one-on-one, semi-structured interviews with a variety of thought leaders in Taiwan. The goal of this proposal is to provide policymakers in the United States with a path for protecting Taiwan, while responsibly managing the U.S.-China relationship. The paper begins with a short background of the complex policy problem facing Taiwan and a review of the current official U.S. policy of “strategic ambiguity. The article then provides an evaluation of the U.S. policy by comparing its stated goals with current outcomes. Finally, three different policy options are proposed (Taiwan militarization, Taiwan internationalization, and U.S. Constructivism) and Taiwan internationalization is recommended as a successful “quiet, yet substantive” policy option for the U.S. in the 21st century
Digesting the Details: How Cooking Shapes the Microbiome and Influences Obesity
Get PDFObesity is a growing global health concern linked to chronic diseases and changes in the gut microbiome. While diet is known to affect gut microbes, less attention has been given to how food processing methods, such as heating, fermentation, and cold processing, change food in ways that influence the gut microbiome and health. This thesis reviews research on how different cooking and preparation techniques affect the availability of nutrients for microbial fermentation and the resulting effects on microbial diversity and metabolism. The findings show that fermentation and cold processing are the most supportive of gut health. These methods help preserve important compounds like polyphenols and resistant starches, which feed beneficial microbes and lead to the production of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). These SCFAs help reduce inflammation, improve insulin response, and support a healthy metabolism. In contrast, high-heat methods like boiling and frying can reduce these beneficial compounds or create harmful byproducts that may disturb the microbiome and contribute to metabolic issues. Overall, this review highlights that food processing has a significant impact on how food supports gut microbes. Recognizing the role of food processing can help improve dietary guidelines, support obesity prevention, and guide future research in public health and nutrition