Single-Cell Genomics Reveals Complex Microbial and Viral Associations in Ciliates and Testate Amoebae

Protists play important roles in nutrient cycling across ecosystems, yet the composition and function of their associated microbiomes remain poorly studied. Here, we use cultivation-independent single-cell isolation and genome-resolved metagenomics to investigate the microbiomes and viromes of more than 100 uncultivated ciliates and amoebae from diverse environments. Our findings reveal unique microbiome structures and complex associations with bacterial symbionts and viruses, with stark differences between ciliates and amoebae. We recover 117 microbial genomes affiliated with known eukaryotic endosymbionts, including Holosporales, Rickettsiales, Legionellales, Chlamydiae, and Babelota, and 258 genomes linked to host-associated Patescibacteriota. Many show genome reduction and genes related to toxin-antitoxin systems and nucleotide parasitism, indicating adaptation to intracellular lifestyles. We also identify more than 80 giant viruses from diverse lineages, some actively expressing genes in single-cell transcriptomes, along with other viruses predicted to infect eukaryotes or symbiotic bacteria. The frequent co-occurrence of giant viruses and microbial symbionts, especially in amoebae, suggests multipartite interactions. Together, our study highlights protists as hubs of microbial and viral associations and provides a broad view of the diversity, activity, and ecological importance of their hidden partners

Classical Sanskrit for Everyone A Guide for Absolute Beginners

Surprisingly, Classical Sanskrit for Everyone is indeed for everyone. Playing tour guide to the \u27curious,\u27 the \u27Yoga aficionado,\u27 and the \u27scholar\u27 on an efficient itinerary through Sanskrit grammar and its philosophical cultures, Keating\u27s book is refreshingly accessible and useful. Replete with an excellent analysis of important features of Sanskrit with analogies to English usage and learned \u27pandit points,\u27 it also provides supplemental discussions of Sanskrit poetry and philosophy and up-to-date online resources. Pop culture references and a playfully funny tone, at turns, disarm the uninitiated reader and give the scholar a fresh perspective on how to teach this language to a new generation of eager learners. --Deven M. Patel, University of Pennsylvania Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/phi_books/1009/thumbnail.jp

River Valley Radical Futures

River Valley Radical Futures is a gallery exhibition that will be shown at A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton from May 2-25, 2025. This exhibit builds on 2 years of work, supported by a CEEDS Faculty Fellowship, the Humanities and Social Science Labs, and the Design Thinking Initiative. The exhibit will display an illustrated map of the Connecticut River Valley in a future 100 years beyond the fall of capitalism. This map has been co-created with about 13 local groups who build alternative economies in the Valley today. The exhibit will also include work from six local artists who are making artifacts that are excavated from the future envisioned by the map

“My Father Was a Wandering Aramean”: Biblical Conceptions of Migration and Their Relevance to Contemporary Immigration Debates in the United States

Ancient Israel’s foundational story enshrined the notion that its ancestors emigrated to the land of Canaan, a land that they were forced to leave repeatedly and to which they kept returning. Examples of this recurring biblical motif include: Abraham’s emigration from Mesopotamia and subsequent flight from Canaan to Egypt and return to Canaan; Jacob’s forced exile to Mesopotamia and his return to Canaan that is followed by his family’s eventual emigration to Egypt; the Israelites’ journey to Canaan from Egypt; the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem that resulted in forced migrations to Babylonia and Egypt; and the eventual return of some of the exiles to the Persian province of Judea. This national origin story left a significant imprint on a number of biblical laws and narratives that show a deep concern for resident aliens and certain foreigners. This chapter will explore the complexity of the biblical terrain surrounding ancient Israel’s self-perception as an immigrant people and the effect this had on the biblical understanding and treatment of various categories of non-Israelites. Along the way, we will interrogate in what ways the biblical materials and conceptual categories can or cannot be usefully mapped upon and applied to the contemporary immigration crisis in the United States.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/rel_books/1022/thumbnail.jp

Syrian Regime Resilience and State Power Through Contracting Stateness: The Cases of al-Hasakeh and Aleppo

This chapter challenges the concepts of state weakness and state fragility that treat territorial control and control over the means of violence as key indicators of state strength in the context of civil war. We demonstrate that during the years of civil war in Syria, including periods when its survival was most precarious, the Assad regime’scapacity to manage processes of state contraction and state reassertion played a critical role in its endurance.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/mes_books/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Binding of Cu2+ to Lipid Membranes Is Not Substantially Influenced by Electrostatic Screening

Gouy-Chapman theory predicts that salt screening and modulating the interfacial charge density should strongly influence the apparent dissociation constant, Kd,app, between Cu2+ and negatively charged phosphatidylserine (PS) lipids in supported lipid bilayers (SLBs). Specifically, Kd,app would be expected to increase (weaken binding) by a factor of 40 when 100 mM NaCl is introduced into the solution because of electrostatic screening between the membrane and Cu2+ cations. Surprisingly, however, fluorescence quenching measurements demonstrate that Kd,app increases by less than a factor of 2 when increasing the salt concentration in the presence of standard buffers, such as tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane (Tris). Moreover, increasing the negative surface charge density by a factor of 4 would be predicted to decrease (strengthen binding) Kd,app by 3 orders of magnitude. Instead, Kd,app increases slightly when 15 mol % phosphatidylglycerol (PG), a negatively charged lipid, is introduced into SLBs already containing 5 mol % PS. Such findings indicate that electrostatic double layer theory is not a useful approach for predicting the binding behavior of transition metal cations to negatively charged interfaces. The problem lies with the fact that standard buffers, such as Tris, form a wide variety of coordination complexes in bulk solution with transition metal cations like Cu2+. Typically, dozens of complexes are present simultaneously at any given pH value and the net charge on them ranges from positive to neutral to negative. Such variations in charge on the complexes result in electrostatic screening and interfacial potential effects that are substantially diminished or nonexistent. These results should generally apply to the binding behavior of first row transition metal ions, when the cations predominantly reside in complexes rather than as free ions. This includes in vivo conditions, where the concentration of free transition metal ions is often very low

The Making of Immigrant Labor: Inequality, Digital Capitalism, and Racialized Enforcement

Book abstract Offers a critique of the economic model of immigration. Most understandings of migration to the US focus on two primary factors. Either there was trouble in the home country, such as political unrest or famine, that pushed people out, or there was a general yearning for “a better life” or “more opportunity,” often conceptualized as the American Dream. Although many contemporary migrants in the United States have been driven by economic interests, the processes of immigration and integration are shaped also by the intersection of a range of noneconomic factors in both sending and receiving countries. The contributors to Beyond Economic Migration offer a nuanced look at a range of issues affecting motives to migrate and outcomes of integration, including US immigration policy and the visa system, labor market incorporation, employment precarity, identity and belonging, and transnationalism relating to female migrants, student migrants, and temporary foreign workers. Beyond Economic Migration argues that, for the dream of fair and equitable migration to be realized, analyses of cross-border movements, resettlement, and integration must pay attention to how migrants’ individual attributes interact with institutional mechanisms and social processes.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/soc_books/1023/thumbnail.jp

A Review of Research and Practices on Teaching Data Visualizations for Blind and Visually Impaired Students

Around 36 million people in the world are blind and an additional 217 million have moderate to severe vision impairment. In higher education, four percent of 54,204 undergraduates who participated in the 2022 American College Health Association survey reported to be blind or have low vision. Those students frequently do not have access to data visualizations we generally teach and use in postsecondary statistics and data science classes. The design of those visualizations is premised on implicit assumptions about the user’s visual ability. Making data visualizations accessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people would help improve equity in higher education and benefit them with data driven reasoning and communication. The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report lists creating and interpreting graphical displays as one of the nine central goals for introductory statistics. We, as statistics and data science educators, researchers, or practitioners, should practice how to design accessible data visualizations, teach and use them in a way that is inclusive to the BVI community. This short article is a review of research and practices on teaching data visualizations for BVI students. I collected resources from related email threads in the Isolated Statisticians email list server and published articles over time. While this article pays particular attention to the BVI community, I acknowledge that other types of disabilities such as cognitive and motor disabilities may affect access to data visualizations as well

Flowing, Carrying, Seeding, and Holding with Radical Care: A Transgenerational Confluence of Hope and Dreams Amid Wars

In this chapter, we embody the energy of our transnational and transgenerational co-authorship: a co-travelling where we commit to a lifelong process of unlearning and relearning for justice. Wording such a co-authorship is only possible in the form of a hungry translation, an endless poetry of striving, failing, and all the while being in relation to one another—music that is often better communicated in poetry and embodied expressions rather than academic arguments. Such co-authorship necessitates a collectively embraced radical vulnerability that transforms itself into a continuous and tumultuous journey of learning to surrender our authority, and becoming with the relationships and communities, the mistakes and lessons, and the joys and sorrows, which accompany that journey. We braid a tale of our own co-learning journey, embedded in lives lived in inherently collective spaces and dreams, rooted within diverse movements that strive to speak to one another, even as they find their meanings and possibilities in very different geographies.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/swg_books/1019/thumbnail.jp