Life without the Beach: Projected Sea Level Rise and its Impact on Barrier Islands Along the East Coast, USA

As climate change is becoming a global issue, the impact of sea level rise is increasingly becoming a threat to humans, wildlife, infrastructure, and ecosystems. To evaluate the effects of sea level rise on barrier islands and coastal regions, we studied future projections of sea level rise at Ocean City and Assateague Island, Maryland. We hypothesize that the sea levels at Assateague and Ocean City will have different beach profiles, and will show different levels of flooding through the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) simulations. We measured beach profiles at four locations, two at Ocean City and two at Assateague Island, to view the current beach profiles and found that Ocean City reveals a smaller average change in elevation compared to Assateague. We also used a LiDAR Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Ocean City and Assateague Island to run RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, and RCP 8.5 simulations using GIS to represent the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected sea level rise for the year 2100. We found that Ocean City has higher predicted percentages of flooded land but smaller areas of flooded land compared to Assateague. These results indicate that significant areas of both Ocean City and Assateague Island will be flooded by 2100 regardless of which RCP simulation might be true. However, it is projected that the RCP 2.6 simulation is an underestimation of potential flooding and the future will more closely resemble the RCP 8.5 simulation if drastic precautions are not taken now. This will severely impact ecosystems, economies, and human life

Impostorism on Campus: The Effects of Stereotype Threat on State Inauthenticity and State Anxiety in Two Samples of African American College Women

Despite the growing education levels of Black women, negative stereotypes of Black women persist and undermine the confidence of African American/Black college women in the classroom. Experimental evidence supports that stereotype threat, the fear of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group when being evaluated by others, undermines the performance of high achieving Black students (Steele & Aronson, 1995). Research has found the impostor phenomenon to be experienced as thoughts of inauthenticity, in conjunction with fear of failure and being exposed as a fraud (Ibrahim et al., 2020). Therefore, being continuously exposed to situations that create feelings of state inauthenticity, such as situations that create stereotype threat, could lead individuals to experience trait-like impostor fears. The primary purpose of the current research is to investigate a social-environmental causal factor of state impostor feelings in two samples of Black college women: stereotype threat. A second goal of the current research is to create original items from a culturally informed model of impostor feelings to assess trait levels of impostorism in two samples of Black female college students. Black female college students from a predominantly white institution (PWI) and a historically black college or university (HBCU) participated in this study. Due to the small sample size (N = 26), the current research results cannot be used to draw any conclusions about the effects of stereotype threat on state inauthenticity and state anxiety. However, the new culturally informed impostor items had high internal consistency (α = .81), showed promise of accurately measuring impostorism, and will contribute to creating a more culturally informed impostor feelings measure. Overall, this research will contribute to the body of work concerning Black women in college struggling with anxiety, experiencing impostor phenomenon, and coping with stereotype threat

No Hope For Rousseau in Tomorrowland: Limits of Civil Religion in E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel: A Novel (1971)

Current scholarly work on E.L. Doctorow’s (1931-2015) novel The Book of Daniel: A Novel (1971) often ignores the narrator Daniel Isaacson’s implicit critique of Rousseau’s civil religion. This paper will show the importance of civil religion within the novel despite its being overlooked by most scholars. In The Book of Daniel, Daniel frequently examines instances of American civil religion and even goes as far as to describe it as inevitable and intrusive on freedom. Daniel implies throughout the novel that the American government models their civil religion on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712-1778) conception as described in his treatise The Social Contract (1762). Daniel suggests that Rousseau’s approach to civil religion creates a false dilemma between the ideals of civil religious soldier and enemy. Daniel’s critique shows a limitation within Rousseau’s and possibly America’s understanding of civil religion. Despite there being evidence supporting his critique, Daniel’s extreme intersectional approach to identity makes his critique impossible to implement within societal, political, or legal realms since it allows people to be both soldier and enemy at the same time

Futuragua: Fostering Cross-Scale Knowledge to Inform Social-Environmental Decision Processes for Building Drought Resilience in Highly Seasonal Environments

Improving resilience to drought in complex social-environmental systems (SES) is extraordinarily important, particularly for rural tropical locations where small changes in climate regimes can have dramatic SES impacts. Efforts to build drought resilience must necessarily be planned and implemented within SES governance systems that involve linkages in water and land use administration from local to national levels. These efforts require knowledge and understanding that links climate and weather forecasts to regional and local hydrology, to social-economic and environmental systems, and to governance processes. In order to provide structure for such complex choices and investments, we argue that a focus on structured decision processes that involve linkages among science, technological perspectives, and public values conducted with agencies and stakeholders will provide a crucial framework for comparing and building insight for pursuing alternative courses of action to build drought resilience. This paper focuses on a regional case study in the seasonally-dry northwest region of Costa Rica, in watersheds rated as most threatened in the country in terms of drought. We present the overall framework guiding the transdisciplinary efforts to link scientific and technical understanding to public values, in order to foster civil society actions that lead to improved drought resilience. Initial efforts to characterize hydrological and climate regimes will be reported along with our approach to linking natural science findings, social inventories in terms of perspectives on SES, and the psychology and patterns of reliance on forecast information that provide the basis for characterizing public understanding. The overall linkage of technical and value information is focused on creating and comparing alternative actions that can potentially build resilience in short and long time frames by building decision making processes involving stakeholders, agencies and interested parties

Estimation of Dog-bite rates and evaluation of Healthcare Seeking Behaviors following dog bite, Haiti

Abstract Background: Haiti has been identified as one of only several countries in the Western Hemisphere in which canine rabies control efforts have succeeded in eliminating dog-mediated human rabies deaths. In 2016, a study was conducted to test several alternative vaccination methods that may compliment the current central point vaccination program. During this study, households within the Croix de Bouquet community completed a questionnaire regarding the dog ownership, roaming status, vaccination coverage of the dog and bite victims and their healthcare seeking behaviors within the household. The aim of this analysis was to determine the incidence of humans being bitten by dogs, and the victims’ healthcare seeking behaviors for medical care and post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) regimen.With the goal of identifying barriers and developing programs to improve timely PEP delivery to persons with likely rabies exposures. Methods: During the door-to-door (DD) vaccination campaign in August 2016, the surveyors completed a household questionnaire by interviewing respondents in the Croix de Bouquet community, West Department of Haiti. The questionnaires highlighted questions regarding bite events within the household. Information recorded on the event was the victim age, month of bite, animal ownership, bite location, case definition of a potential rabid case, whether the victim sought medical care after the bite event, and the choice to receive PEP and complete PEP. We were able to determine the incidence rate of humans bitten by dogs in this community. When applicable, 2-tailed Chi-square test or Fisher’s exact test were calculated to determine the relationship between variables. We also used Multiple Logistic Modeling to analyze the variance through likelihood ratio and Wald tests of fixed effects in generalized linear models to identify associations between dog ownership, dog vaccination, and human healthcare seeking behaviors. Results:Among the total respondent population, there was 111 bite victims within the total household population reported (n = 6993). The annual bite incidence was 3.7% (95% CI 3.2% – 4.2%). A little over half of the victims (52.3%) sought healthcare for the bite wound. However, only 11.7% completed at least three doses of the rabies post-exposure prophylaxis series. Responsible dog owners for poor versus good was: (OR = 3.337) for adequate versus good was: (OR = 1.749) (p= .0032). Households with dogs that died of a rabies-like illness 1 death versus 0 deaths (OR = 2.43), 2 vs 0 deaths (OR = 5.441), and 3 vs 0 (OR = 16.662) (p For healthcare seeking behaviors the following variables were modeled: risk surrounding the event, if the victim sought medical care, the number of people living in the household, rabies-like illness related deaths in the household within the past year, time from the hospital, victim’s age, if the household experienced more than 1 bite, and the economic status of the household. After backwards selection within the multivariate model for healthcare seeking behaviors, risk category was the only risk factor. The risk score comprised of the ownership of the animal that bit, anatomical location of the bite, and the case definition of a rabid dog, was a factor associated with PEP completion of the bite victim. Low risk versus high risk (OR = 8.750) and medium risk versus high risk (OR = 1.923). Conclusions: Responsible dog ownership relates to lower incidence of canine bites within the Haiti community, Croix De Bouquet. A positive association between responsible dog ownership and completion of PEP series was noted, potentially indicating that awareness of dog-health issues improves dog owner’s understanding of the importance of rabies PEP. Respondents demonstrating a relatively high response rate to seeking healthcare, may be attributed the current HARSP program and Ministère de l\u27Agriculture, des Ressources Naturelles et du Développement Rural (MARNDR), in collaboration with the Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP), Christian Veterinary Mission (CVM) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was established in 2011. [2] Time required to reach a hospital was a barrier to seeking healthcare, health officials should consider establishing more community-bite centers to improve bite-victim healthcare seeking. Financial obligations were also implicated as a barrier to not seeking medical care as well as not completing the post-exposure prophylaxis dosage. Healthcare providers should consider providing the vaccination campaign on a routine bases to reach the population that are not able to pay for medical services

Genomes of diverse isolates of the marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus

The marine cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus is the numerically dominant photosynthetic organism in the oligotrophic oceans, and a model system in marine microbial ecology. Here we report 27 new whole genome sequences (2 complete and closed; 25 of draft quality) of cultured isolates, representing five major phylogenetic clades of Prochlorococcus. The sequenced strains were isolated from diverse regions of the oceans, facilitating studies of the drivers of microbial diversity—both in the lab and in the field. To improve the utility of these genomes for comparative genomics, we also define pre-computed clusters of orthologous groups of proteins (COGs), indicating how genes are distributed among these and other publicly available Prochlorococcus genomes. These data represent a significant expansion of Prochlorococcus reference genomes that are useful for numerous applications in microbial ecology, evolution and oceanography.Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (Grant GBMR #495.01)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant OCE-1153588)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant OCE-0425602)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant DBI-0424599)Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Educatio

Polymorphisms in Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter and multidrug resistance 1 genes: parasite risk factors that affect treatment outcomes for P. falciparum malaria after artemether-lumefantrine and artesunate-amodiaquine.

Adequate clinical and parasitologic cure by artemisinin combination therapies relies on the artemisinin component and the partner drug. Polymorphisms in the Plasmodium falciparum chloroquine resistance transporter (pfcrt) and P. falciparum multidrug resistance 1 (pfmdr1) genes are associated with decreased sensitivity to amodiaquine and lumefantrine, but effects of these polymorphisms on therapeutic responses to artesunate-amodiaquine (ASAQ) and artemether-lumefantrine (AL) have not been clearly defined. Individual patient data from 31 clinical trials were harmonized and pooled by using standardized methods from the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network. Data for more than 7,000 patients were analyzed to assess relationships between parasite polymorphisms in pfcrt and pfmdr1 and clinically relevant outcomes after treatment with AL or ASAQ. Presence of the pfmdr1 gene N86 (adjusted hazards ratio = 4.74, 95% confidence interval = 2.29 - 9.78, P < 0.001) and increased pfmdr1 copy number (adjusted hazards ratio = 6.52, 95% confidence interval = 2.36-17.97, P < 0.001 : were significant independent risk factors for recrudescence in patients treated with AL. AL and ASAQ exerted opposing selective effects on single-nucleotide polymorphisms in pfcrt and pfmdr1. Monitoring selection and responding to emerging signs of drug resistance are critical tools for preserving efficacy of artemisinin combination therapies; determination of the prevalence of at least pfcrt K76T and pfmdr1 N86Y should now be routine

The genomes of two key bumblebee species with primitive eusocial organization

Background: The shift from solitary to social behavior is one of the major evolutionary transitions. Primitively eusocial bumblebees are uniquely placed to illuminate the evolution of highly eusocial insect societies. Bumblebees are also invaluable natural and agricultural pollinators, and there is widespread concern over recent population declines in some species. High-quality genomic data will inform key aspects of bumblebee biology, including susceptibility to implicated population viability threats. Results: We report the high quality draft genome sequences of Bombus terrestris and Bombus impatiens, two ecologically dominant bumblebees and widely utilized study species. Comparing these new genomes to those of the highly eusocial honeybee Apis mellifera and other Hymenoptera, we identify deeply conserved similarities, as well as novelties key to the biology of these organisms. Some honeybee genome features thought to underpin advanced eusociality are also present in bumblebees, indicating an earlier evolution in the bee lineage. Xenobiotic detoxification and immune genes are similarly depauperate in bumblebees and honeybees, and multiple categories of genes linked to social organization, including development and behavior, show high conservation. Key differences identified include a bias in bumblebee chemoreception towards gustation from olfaction, and striking differences in microRNAs, potentially responsible for gene regulation underlying social and other traits. Conclusions: These two bumblebee genomes provide a foundation for post-genomic research on these key pollinators and insect societies. Overall, gene repertoires suggest that the route to advanced eusociality in bees was mediated by many small changes in many genes and processes, and not by notable expansion or depauperation

Inter-Rater Reliability of the CASCADE Criteria: Challenges in Classifying Arteriopathies.

Background and purposeThere are limited data about the reliability of subtype classification in childhood arterial ischemic stroke, an issue that prompted the IPSS (International Pediatric Stroke Study) to develop the CASCADE criteria (Childhood AIS Standardized Classification and Diagnostic Evaluation). Our purpose was to determine the CASCADE criteria's reliability in a population of children with stroke.MethodsEight raters from the IPSS reviewed neuroimaging and clinical records of 64 cases (16 cases each) randomly selected from a prospectively collected cohort of 113 children with arterial ischemic stroke and classified them using the CASCADE criteria. Clinical data abstracted included history of present illness, risk factors, and acute imaging. Agreement among raters was measured by unweighted κ statistic.ResultsThe CASCADE criteria demonstrated a moderate inter-rater reliability, with an overall κ statistic of 0.53 (95% confidence interval [CI]=0.39-0.67). Cardioembolic and bilateral cerebral arteriopathy subtypes had much higher agreement (κ=0.84; 95% CI=0.70-0.99; and κ=0.90; 95% CI=0.71-1.00, respectively) than cases of aortic/cervical arteriopathy (κ=0.36; 95% CI=0.01-0.71), unilateral focal cerebral arteriopathy of childhood (FCA; κ=0.49; 95% CI=0.23-0.76), and small vessel arteriopathy of childhood (κ=-0.012; 95% CI=-0.04 to 0.01).ConclusionsThe CASCADE criteria have moderate reliability when used by trained and experienced raters, which suggests that it can be used for classification in multicenter pediatric stroke studies. However, the moderate reliability of the arteriopathic subtypes suggests that further refinement is needed for defining subtypes. Such revisions may reduce the variability in the literature describing risk factors, recurrence, and outcomes associated with childhood arteriopathy