Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Estimations Of Flood Waste From Rural Dumpsites Located On Floodplains From Neamţ, County, Romania, Florin C. Mihai

Florin C MIHAI

Waste dumping is a serious environmental threat to major rivers from extra- Carpathian Region of Neamţ county in the proximity of villages because the lack of waste collection services. In this context, floodplains are frequently susceptible to such bad practices, these areas being also exposed to stronger floods. The paper aims to calculate the potential waste taken from these areas in order to assess a quantitative impact of these bad practices.

Preliminary Summary Of Water Resource Investigations During 2012 At Timpanogos Cave National Monument, Utah, Lee J. Florea, Chelsie R. Dugan, Camille Mckinney

Lee J Florea, PhD, P.G.

This manuscript considers the hydrology and geochemistry of water resources within Timpanogos Cave National Monument in American Fork, Utah. In particular, data are presented for five cave pools within the Monument and the American Fork River that flows through the Monument. Two independent dye trace attempts in this study have not established a connection between the surface near the canyon rim at the south border of the Monument and the cave pools or the river. Ion chemistry of the pools reveals elevated sulfate concentrations. Analysis of sulfate and other reaction products suggests the possibility of combined carbonic and sulfuric acids …

Long-Term Environmental Problems And Strategic Intergenerational Transfers, Timo Goeschl, Daniel Heyen, Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

Juan B. Moreno-Cruz

The impacts of long-lived stock pollutants and the measures supposed to address them link current and future generations. Altruism towards successor generations is a prerequisite for resolving the resulting inter-generational equity issues. Preference asymmetry and imperfect altruism introduce strategic conflicts between generations. Here, a current generation decides on a combination of abatement and whether to provide an imperfect backstop. The future generation decides whether to use the backstop or not. We identify three outcomes: (1) Technology denial, in which the current generation deliberately rejects the imperfect backstop to avoid misuse by the future generation. (2) Under-abatement, in which the current …

Characterization Of Extended And Simplified Intelligent Water Drop (Siwd) Approaches And Their Comparison To The Intelligent Water Drop (Iwd) Approach, Jeremy Straub, Eunjin Kim

Jeremy Straub

This paper presents a simplified approach to performing the Intelligent Water Drops (IWD) process. This approach is designed to be comparatively lightweight while approximating the results of the full IWD process. The Simplified Intelligent Water Drops (SIWD) approach is specifically designed for applications where IWD must be run in a computationally limited environment (such as on a robot, UAV or small spacecraft) or where performance speed must be maximized for time sensitive applications. The SWID approach is described and compared and contracted to the base IWD approach.

Joint Estimation Of Multiple Graphical Models From High Dimensional Time Series, Huitong Qiu, Fang Han, Han Liu, Brian Caffo

Johns Hopkins University, Dept. of Biostatistics Working Papers

In this manuscript the problem of jointly estimating multiple graphical models in high dimensions is considered. It is assumed that the data are collected from n subjects, each of which consists of m non-independent observations. The graphical models of subjects vary, but are assumed to change smoothly corresponding to a measure of the closeness between subjects. A kernel based method for jointly estimating all graphical models is proposed. Theoretically, under a double asymptotic framework, where both (m,n) and the dimension d can increase, the explicit rate of convergence in parameter estimation is provided, thus characterizing the strength one can borrow …

Defining The Value Of Injection Current And Effective Electrical Contact Area For Egain-Based Molecular Tunneling Junctions, Felice C. Simeone, Hyo Jae Yoon, Martin M. Thuo, Jabulani R. Barber, Barbara Smith, George M. Whitesides

Martin M. Thuo

Analysis of rates of tunneling across self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of n-alkanethiolates SCn (with n = number of carbon atoms) incorporated in junctions having structure AgTS-SAM//Ga2O3/EGaIn leads to a value for the injection tunnel current density J0 (i.e., the current flowing through an ideal junction with n = 0) of 103.6±0.3 A·cm–2 (V = +0.5 V). This estimation of J0 does not involve an extrapolation in length, because it was possible to measure current densities across SAMs over the range of lengths n = 1–18. This value of J0 is estimated under the assumption that values of the geometrical contact area …

Hydraulic Conductivity Imaging From 3-D Transient Hydraulic Tomography At Several Pumping/Observation Densities, Michael Cardiff, Warren Barrash, Peter K. Kitanidis

CGISS Publications and Presentations

3-D Hydraulic tomography (3-D HT) is a method for aquifer characterization whereby the 3-D spatial distribution of aquifer flow parameters (primarily hydraulic conductivity, K) is estimated by joint inversion of head change data from multiple partially penetrating pumping tests. While performance of 3-D HT has been studied extensively in numerical experiments, few field studies have demonstrated the real-world performance of 3-D HT. Here we report on a 3-D transient hydraulic tomography (3-D THT) field experiment at the Boise Hydrogeophysical Research Site which is different from prior approaches in that it represents a “baseline” analysis of 3-D THT performance using …

Gathering “Wild” Food In The City: Rethinking The Role Of Foraging In Urban Ecosystem Planning And Management, Rebecca J. Mclain, Patrick T. Hurley, Marla R. Emery, Melissa R. Poe

Institute for Sustainable Solutions Publications and Presentations

Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views about the roles of humans in urban green spaces, has potential to also support sustainability goals. Drawing on research from Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle, we show that foraging is a vibrant and ongoing practice among diverse urban residents in the USA. At the same time, as reflected in regulations, planning practices, …

Isosteric And Nonisosteric Base Pairs In Rna Motifs: Molecular Dynamics And Bioinformatics Study Of The Sarcin Ricin Internal Loop, Marek Havrila, Kamila RéBlová, Craig L. Zirbel, Neocles B. Leontis, JiřÍ ŠPoner

Chemistry Faculty Publications

The sarcin-ricin RNA motif (SR motif) is one of the most prominent recurrent RNA building blocks that occurs in many different RNA contexts and folds autonomously, that is, in a context-independent manner. In this study, we combined bioinformatics analysis with explicit-solvent molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to better understand the relation between the RNA sequence and the evolutionary patterns of the SR motif. A SHAPE probing experiment was also performed to confirm the fidelity of the MD simulations. We identified 57 instances of the SR motif in a nonredundant subset of the RNA X-ray structure database and analyzed their base pairing, …

The Catalytic Behaviour Of Nanoag@Montmorillonite Composite Materials, Martina Karlíková, Libor Kvítek, Robert Prucek, Aleš Panáček, Jan Filip, Jirí Pechoušek, Nathaniel F. Adegboyega

Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Faculty Publications

The preparation of nanoAg@montmorillonite composite materials and their catalytic activity is reported in this article. The nanoAg@montmorillonite composite materials were prepared by the adsorption of silver NPs, with an average size about 30 nm, from their aqueous dispersion onto two types of montmorillonite with different chemical composition. Silver NPs were prepared via modified Tollens process, which involves the reduction of [Ag(NH 3)2]+complex cation by maltose. The amount of silver NPs anchored onto the MMT surfaces was determined by UV-VIS spectroscopy; the decrease in absorbance of the dispersion after the adsorption was monitored. Prepared nanocomposite materials were subsequently characterized by means …

Effects Of Pd On Catalysis By Au: Co Adsorption, Co Oxidation, And Cyclohexene Hydrogenation By Supported Au And Pd−Au Catalysts, Timothy Ward, L. Delannoy, Ruth Hahn, Shane Kendell, Christopher J. Pursell, C. Louis, Bert D. Chandler

Chemistry Faculty Research

Incorporating small amounts of Pd into supported Au catalysts has been shown to have beneficial effects on selective hydrogenation reactions, particularly 1,3-butadiene hydrogenation and the hydrogenation of nitroaromatics, especially p-chloronitrobenzene. Appropriate Pd incorporation enhances hydrogenation activity while maintaining the desirable high selectivity of supported Au catalysts. To better understand this phenomenon, a series of alumina- and titania-supported Au and dilute Pd–Au catalysts were prepared via urea deposition–precipitation. The catalysts were studied with infrared spectroscopy of CO adsorption, CO oxidation catalysis, and cyclohexene hydrogenation catalysis with the goal of understanding how Pd affects the catalytic properties of Au. CO adsorption …

Co Oxidation Over Au/Tio2 Catalyst: Pretreatment Effects, Catalyst Deactivation, And Carbonates Production, Johnny Saavedra, Camilah Powell, Basu Panthi, Christopher J. Pursell, Bert D. Chandler

Chemistry Faculty Research

A commercially available Au/TiO₂ catalyst was subjected to a variety of thermal treatments in order to understand how variations in catalyst pretreatment procedures might affect CO oxidation catalysis. Catalytic activity was found to be inversely correlated to the temperature of the pretreatment. Infrared spectroscopy of adsorbed CO experiments, followed by a Temkin analysis of the data, indicated that the thermal treatments caused essentially no changes to the electronics of the Au particles; this, and a series of catalysis control experiments, and previous transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies ruled out particle growth as a contributing factor to the activity loss. …

Pcaanalyser: A 2d-Image Analysis Based Module For Effective Determination Of Prostate Cancer Progression In 3d Culture, Md Tamjidul Hoque, Louisa C. E. Windus, Carrie J. Lovitt, Vicky M. Avery

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Three-dimensional (3D) in vitro cell based assays for Prostate Cancer (PCa) research are rapidly becoming the preferred alternative to that of conventional 2D monolayer cultures. 3D assays more precisely mimic the microenvironment found in vivo, and thus are ideally suited to evaluate compounds and their suitability for progression in the drug discovery pipeline. To achieve the desired high throughput needed for most screening programs, automated quantification of 3D cultures is required. Towards this end, this paper reports on the development of a prototype analysis module for an automated high-content-analysis (HCA) system, which allows for accurate and fast investigation of …

Combining Functions And The Closure Principle For Performing Follow-Up Tests In Functional Analysis Of Variance, Olga A. Vsevolozhskaya, Mark C. Greenwood, G. J. Bellante, S. L. Powell, R. L. Lawrence, K. S. Repasky

Olga A. Vsevolozhskaya

Functional analysis of variance involves testing for differences in functional means across kk groups in nn functional responses. If a significant overall difference in the mean curves is detected, one may want to identify the location of these differences. Cox and Lee (2008) proposed performing a point-wise test and applying the Westfall–Young multiple comparison correction. We propose an alternative procedure for identifying regions of significant difference in the functional domain. Our procedure is based on a region-wise test and application of a combining function along with the closure multiplicity adjustment principle. We give an explicit formulation of how to implement …

Microbial Natural Products: Molecular Blueprints For Antitumor Drugs, Lesley Ann Giddings, David J. Newman

Chemistry: Faculty Publications

Microbes from two of the three domains of life, the Prokarya, and Eukarya, continue to serve as rich sources of structurally complex chemical scaffolds that have proven to be essential for the development of anticancer therapeutics. This review describes only a handful of exemplary natural products and their derivatives as well as those that have served as elegant blueprints for the development of novel synthetic structures that are either currently in use or in clinical or preclinical trials together with some of their earlier analogs in some cases whose failure to proceed aided in the derivation of later compounds. In …

Science Goals And Overview Of The Radiation Belt Storm Probes (Rbsp) Energetic Particle, Composition, And Thermal Plasma (Ect) Suite On Nasa’S Van Allen Probes Mission, Harlan E. Spence, G. D. Reeves, D. N. Baker, J. B. Blake, M. Bolton, S. Bourdarie, A. A. Chan, S. G. Claudepierre, J. H. Clemmons, J. P. Cravens, S. R. Elkington, J. F. Fennell

Physics & Astronomy

The Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP)-Energetic Particle, Composition, and Thermal Plasma (ECT) suite contains an innovative complement of particle instruments to ensure the highest quality measurements ever made in the inner magnetosphere and radiation belts. The coordinated RBSP-ECT particle measurements, analyzed in combination with fields and waves observations and state-of-the-art theory and modeling, are necessary for understanding the acceleration, global distribution, and variability of radiation belt electrons and ions, key science objectives of NASA’s Living With a Star program and the Van Allen Probes mission. The RBSP-ECT suite consists of three highly-coordinated instruments: the Magnetic Electron Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS), the …

The Magnetic Electron Ion Spectrometer (Mageis) Instruments Aboard The Radiation Belt Storm Probes (Rbsp) Spacecraft, J. B. Blake, P. A. Carranza, S. G. Claudepierre, J. H. Clemmons, W. R. Crain, Y. Dotan, J. F. Fennell, F. H. Fuentes, R. M. Galvan, J. S. George, M. G. Henderson, M. Lalic

Physics & Astronomy

This paper describes the Magnetic Electron Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS) instruments aboard the RBSP spacecraft from an instrumentation and engineering point of view. There are four magnetic spectrometers aboard each of the two spacecraft, one low-energy unit (20–240 keV), two medium-energy units (80–1200 keV), and a high-energy unit (800–4800 keV). The high unit also contains a proton telescope (55 keV–20 MeV). The magnetic spectrometers focus electrons within a selected energy pass band upon a focal plane of several silicon detectors where pulse-height analysis is used to determine if the energy of the incident electron is appropriate for the electron momentum selected …

Helium, Oxygen, Proton, And Electron (Hope) Mass Spectrometer For The Radiation Belt Storm Probes Mission, H. O. Funsten, R. M. Skoug, A. A. Guthrie, E. A. Macdonald, J. R. Baldonado, R. W. Harper, K. C. Henderson, K. H. Kihara, J. E. Lake, B. A. Larsen, A. D. Puckett, V. J. Vigil, Harlan E. Spence

Physics & Astronomy

The HOPE mass spectrometer of the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission (renamed the Van Allen Probes) is designed to measure the in situ plasma ion and electron fluxes over 4π sr at each RBSP spacecraft within the terrestrial radiation belts. The scientific goal is to understand the underlying physical processes that govern the radiation belt structure and dynamics. Spectral measurements for both ions and electrons are acquired over 1 eV to 50 keV in 36 log-spaced steps at an energy resolution ΔE FWHM/E≈15 %. The dominant ion species (H+, He+, and O+) of the magnetosphere are identified using foil-based …

Extracellular Calcium Modulates Actions Of Orthosteric And Allosteric Ligands On Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 1alpha, Jason Y. Jiang, Mulpuri Nagaraju, Rebecca C. Meyer, Li Zhang, Donald Hamelberg, Randy A. Hall, Edward M. Brown, P. Jeffrey Conn, Jenny J. Yang

Chemistry Faculty Publications

SUMMARY: Metabotropic glutamate receptor 1α (mGluR1α), a member of the family C G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), is emerging as a potential drug target for various disorders including chronic neuronal degenerative diseases. In addition to being activated by glutamate, mGluR1α is also modulated by extracellular Ca2+. However, the underlying mechanism is unknown. Moreover, it has long been challenging to develop receptor-specific agonists due to homologies within the mGluR family, and the Ca2+-binding site(s) on mGluR1α may provide an opportunity for receptor-selective targeting by therapeutics. In the present study, we show that our previously predicted Ca2+-binding site in the hinge region of …

Application Of The Rasch Model To Measure Five Dimensions Of Wellness In Community-Dwelling Older Adults, Kelley A. Strout Dr

Nursing Faculty Scholarship

Background and Purpose: Nurse researchers and practicing nurses need reliable and valid instruments to measure key clinical concepts. The purpose of this research was to develop an innovative method to measure dimensions of wellness among older adults. Method: A sample of 5,604 community-dwelling older adults was drawn from members of the COLLAGE consortium. The Wellness Assessment Tool (WEL) of the COLLAGE assessment system provided the data used to create the scores. Application of the Rasch analysis and Masters' partial credit method resulted in logit values for each item within the five dimensions of wellness as well as logit values for …

Melt Inclusion Evidence For Magma Evolution At Mutnovsky Volcano, Kamchatka, K. Robertson, A. Simon, T. Pettke, Sean R. Mulcahy, E. Smith, O. Selyangin, A. Kiryukhin, J. D. Walker

Geology Faculty Publications

Mutnovsky Volcano, located in Kamchatka, Russia, is a young volcano that has formed a series of four overlapping stratocones over its approximately 80 ka history. Erupted products at Mutnovsky range in composition from basalts to dacites; basalts are the most common. In this study, melt inclusions from representative samples of all erupted compositions from all four eruptive centers were analyzed to investigate the causes of the compositional heterogeneity, melt evolution, and pre-eruptive magma dynamics. Melt inclusions from Mutnovsky were sampled in olivine, plagioclase, orthopyroxene, and clinopyroxene. The melt inclusion data represent a wide range of melt compositions, from basalt through …

Enseñanza De Las Ciencias Y Contextos Culturales: Un Testimonio De Vida, William W. Cobern, Adela Molina-Andrade, Gonzalo Peñaloza-J.

Scientific Literacy and Cultural Studies Project

William W. Cobern es PhD en Educación en Ciencias, de la Universidad de Colorado Boulder. En la actualidad es profesor en la Western Michigan University. Su trabajo ha girado en torno a la relación entre cultura tradicional y enseñanza-aprendizaje de las ciencias. Por varios años trabajó en Nigeria y desarrolló propuestas de formación de profesores y de programas educativos dirigidos a grupos nómadas. A partir de su experiencia propuso su concepto de “visión del mundo”, que es tanto un marco teórico como metodológico para entender y abordar el vínculo entre ciencia y cultura. Su trabajo ha motivado investigaciones en diferentes …

Tracking Transmission Of Apicomplexan Symbionts In Diverse Caribbean Corals, Nathan L. Kirk, Raphael Ritson-Williams, Mary Alice Coffroth, Margaret W. Miller, Nicole D. Fogarty, Scott R. Santos

Marine & Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles

Symbionts in each generation are transmitted to new host individuals either vertically (parent to offspring), horizontally (from exogenous sources), or a combination of both. Scleractinian corals make an excellent study system for understanding patterns of symbiont transmission since they harbor diverse symbionts and possess distinct reproductive modes of either internal brooding or external broadcast spawning that generally correlate with vertical or horizontal transmission, respectively. Here, we focused on the under-recognized, but apparently widespread, coral-associated apicomplexans (Protista: Alveolata) to determine if symbiont transmission depends on host reproductive mode. Specifically, a PCR-based assay was utilized towards identifying whether planula larvae and reproductive …

Cosm News, Georgia Southern University

College of Science and Mathematics News (2012-2019)

• Marshall Ransom receives the 2013 John Neff Award

The Behavior Of Normality When Iteratively Finding The Normal To A Line In An Lp Geometry, David L. Farnsworth, Joshua M. Fitzhugh

Articles

The normal direction to the normal direction to a line in Minkowski geometries generally does not give the original line. We show that in lp geometries with p > 1 repeatedly finding the normal line through the origin gives sequences of lines that monotonically approach specific lines of symmetry of the unit circle. Which lines of symmetry that are approached depends upon the value of p and the slope of the initial line.

Modeling Acute Respiratory Illness During The 2007 San Diego Wildland Fires Using A Coupled Emissions-Transport System And General Additive Modeling, Brian Thelen, Nancy H. F. French, Benjamin W. Koziol, Michael Billmire, Robert Chris Owen, Jeffrey Johnson, Michele Ginsberg, Tatiana Loboda, Shiliang Wu

Michigan Tech Research Institute Publications

Background

A study of the impacts on respiratory health of the 2007 wildland fires in and around San Diego County, California is presented. This study helps to address the impact of fire emissions on human health by modeling the exposure potential of proximate populations to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) from vegetation fires. Currently, there is no standard methodology to model and forecast the potential respiratory health effects of PM plumes from wildland fires, and in part this is due to a lack of methodology for rigorously relating the two. The contribution in this research specifically targets that absence by modeling …

Top Quark Working Group Report, Nikolaos Kidonakis, Et. Al.

Faculty Articles

The top quark was discovered in 1995 [1, 2] and it is still the heaviest elementary particle known today. Thanks to its large mass, and the related strength of its coupling to the Higgs boson, the top quark may be a key player in understanding the details of electroweak symmetry breaking. Studies of the top quark properties at the Tevatron and Run I of the LHC have given us a detailed understanding of many properties of this particle, including its mass, production and decay mechanisms, electric charge and more. With the exception of the large forward-backward asymmetry in tt¯ production …

Top Quark Production, Nikolaos Kidonakis

Faculty Articles

I discuss top quark production in hadronic collisions. I present the soft-gluon resummation formalism and its derivation from factorization and renormalization-group evolution, and two-loop calculations of soft anomalous dimensions in the eikonal approximation. I discuss the contributions of next-to-next-to-leading order (NNLO) soft-gluon corrections to the total cross sections and top-quark transverse momentum and rapidity distributions for top-antitop pair production, and for single-top production in the t and s channels and in association with a W boson or a charged Higgs boson.

Bailey’S Eastern Woodrat (Neotoma Floridana Baileyi): Species Conservation Assessment, Melissa J. Panella

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission: Publications

The primary goal in development of at-risk species conservation assessments is to compile biological and ecological information that may assist conservation practitioners in making decisions regarding the conservation of species of interest. The Nebraska Natural Legacy Project recognizes the Bailey’s eastern woodrat (Neotama floridana baileyi) as a Tier I at-risk species. Provided are some general management recommendations regarding Bailey’s eastern woodrats. Conservation practitioners will need to use professional judgment for specific management decisions based on objectives, location, and site-specific conditions. This resource was designed to provide an overview of our current knowledge of Bailey’s eastern woodrats and may aid in …

Ce-Qual-W2 Model And Model Set-Up, Scott A. Wells

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Conference presentation that provides background information on the CE-QUAL-W2 water modeling software, with examples of its use and instructions on set-up and application.