Analyzing Fatal Bird-Window Collisions Occurring on USU\u27s C&SS Building, Brigham City, Utah

Fatal bird window collisions are often overlooked as minimally damaging to bird populations or viewed as inevitable collateral damage of human habitat expansion. In reality, these unnecessary collisions are truly monumental in number, and prove to be a serious threat to bird populations, especially endangered bird species. In the United States alone it is estimated that between 365 - 988 million birds fatally collide with man-made windows annually. We are focusing our study on fatal bird-window collisions occurring on the Classroom and Student Services Building (C&SS building) at the USU campus in Brigham City, UT 84302. We have selected this building as a potential location for a high frequency of bird-window collision for its inclusion of multiple large windows. Several studies have indicated that window area was positively correlated with the amount of window strikes. The objective of the study is to: Investigate the number of fatal bird window collisions that occur on the C&SS building, then determine if it is larger than the expected number of fatal window collisions per month for a low-rise non-residential building. The expected number is between 0 – 6 collisions per month. The objective will be accomplished through a two-step method. First, we will be analyzing data obtained through the conduction of daily surveys of the C&SS building during the months of August through November of 2020. The surveys will be conducted by ourselves and USU faculty. We will be looking for bird-window collision evidence. Finally, we will be collating our survey data with survey data obtained in the in the years 2017-2019.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fsrs2020/1039/thumbnail.jp

Building a Custom 4-Row Planter

This brief essay describes the processes taken to build a custom 4-row planter with the precision Agriculture Department and their company partner, Helena Chemical

Carl Bosch and the Haber-Bosch Process

This poster for the Natural Sciences Poster Session at Parkland College features organic chemist Carl Bosch, winner of the Nobel Prize of Chemistry in 1931 for his contribution to the development of chemical high pressure methods, Bosch built on Fritz Haber\u27s process of fixing nitrogen using high pressure chemistry to industrialize the process on a large scale to mass produce fertilizer, now known as the Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from the air, bonds it with hydrogen from natural gases and converts it to ammonia

Dewatering Optimization Strategies in Support of Closure by Removal (CBR) to accelerate Groundwater Cleanup at Coal Combustion Residual Sites (CCR) with Case Study

Dewatering Optimization Strategies in Support of Closure by Removal (CBR) to Accelerate Groundwater Cleanup at CCR Sites with Case Study Authors Mr. Sean Larkin - United States - Haley & Aldrich Inc. Dr. Jacob Chu - United States - Haley & Aldrich Inc. Abstract This presentation is focused on coal combustion residual (CCR) sites in corrective action that are performing closure-by-removal (CBR) in support of an overall groundwater remedy. CBR is often coupled with a variety of groundwater treatment options, including (but not limited to), monitored natural attenuation and/or contingent active or passive treatment of areas within the plume where a CCR constituent persists in groundwater at levels above a groundwater protection standard (GWPS). Based on site conditions, dewatering is often required to access and remove CCRs as part of the CBR process. In those situations, the site dewatering system can also be optimized to remove CCR constituents from impacted groundwater and shorten the timeframe to achieve GWPS, thereby streamlining contingent groundwater treatment programs. The concepts of porewater flushing and dynamic pumping in conjunction with site dewatering will be reviewed in this presentation and include foundational groundwater management principles that can be used to enhance CCR constituent removal from impacted groundwater during the closure implementation period. To further illustrate these techniques, an example case study will be presented which includes site settings and numerical groundwater modeling. To compare the performance of CCR constituent removal from impacted groundwater, this case study will consider various configurations of dewatering well networks operated during the CBR process and their effectiveness and contribution to achieving GWPSs. The modeling outcomes will be used to further codify engineering principles to be applied for optimization of dewatering systems and the secondary beneficial effects on groundwater remediation

The InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) for TMT: Reflective ruled diffraction grating performance testing and discussion

We present the efficiency of near-infrared reflective ruled diffraction gratings designed for the InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). IRIS is a first light, integral field spectrograph and imager for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and narrow field infrared adaptive optics system (NFIRAOS). We present our experimental setup and analysis of the efficiency of selected reflective diffraction gratings. These measurements are used as a comparison sample against selected candidate Volume Phase Holographic (VPH) gratings (see Chen et al., this conference). We investigate the efficiencies of five ruled gratings designed for IRIS from two separate vendors. Three of the gratings accept a bandpass of 1.19-1.37 {\mu}m (J band) with ideal spectral resolutions of R=4000 and R=8000, groove densities of 249 and 516 lines/mm, and blaze angles of 9.86 and 20.54 degrees, respectively. The other two gratings accept a bandpass of 1.51-1.82 {\mu}m (H Band) with an ideal spectral resolution of R=4000, groove density of 141 lines/mm, and blaze angle of 9.86{\deg}. We measure the efficiencies off blaze angle for all gratings and the efficiencies between the polarization transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) states. The peak reflective efficiencies are 98.90 +/- 3.36% (TM) and 84.99 +/- 2.74% (TM) for the H-band R=4000 and J-band R=4000 respectively. The peak reflective efficiency for the J-band R=8000 grating is 78.78 +/- 2.54% (TE). We find that these ruled gratings do not exhibit a wide dependency on incident angle within +/-3{\deg}. Our best-manufactured gratings were found to exhibit a dependency on the polarization state of the incident beam with a ~10-20% deviation, consistent with the theoretical efficiency predictions.Comment: Proceedings of the SPIE, 9147-34

Efficiency Measurements and Installation of a New Grating for the OSIRIS Spectrograph at Keck Observatory

OSIRIS is a near-infrared integral field spectrograph operating behind the adaptive optics system at W. M. Keck Observatory. While OSIRIS has been a scientifically productive instrument to date, its sensitivity has been limited by a grating efficiency that is less than half of what was expected. The spatially averaged efficiency of the old grating, weighted by error, is measured to be 39.5 +/- 0.8 % at {\lambda} = 1.310 {\mu}m, with large field dependent variation of 11.7 % due to efficiency variation across the grating surface. Working with a new vendor, we developed a more efficient and uniform grating with a weighted average efficiency at {\lambda} = 1.310 {\mu}m of 78.0 +/- 1.6 %, with field variation of only 2.2 %. This is close to double the average efficiency and five times less variation across the field. The new grating was installed in December 2012, and on- sky OSIRIS throughput shows an average factor of 1.83 improvement in sensitivity between 1 and 2.4 microns. We present the development history, testing, and implementation of this new near-infrared grating for OSIRIS and report the comparison with the predecessors. The higher sensitivities are already having a large impact on scientific studies with OSIRIS

Individual Differences in Dopamine Are Associated with Reward Discounting in Clinical Groups But Not in Healthy Adults.

Some people are more willing to make immediate, risky, or costly reward-focused choices than others, which has been hypothesized to be associated with individual differences in dopamine (DA) function. In two studies using PET imaging, one empirical (Study 1: N = 144 males and females across 3 samples) and one meta-analytic (Study 2: N = 307 across 12 samples), we sought to characterize associations between individual differences in DA and time, probability, and physical effort discounting in human adults. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in DA D2-like receptors were not associated with time or probability discounting of monetary rewards in healthy humans, and associations with physical effort discounting were inconsistent across adults of different ages. Meta-analytic results for temporal discounting corroborated our empirical finding for minimal effect of DA measures on discounting in healthy individuals but suggested that associations between individual differences in DA and reward discounting depend on clinical features. Addictions were characterized by negative correlations between DA and discounting, but other clinical conditions, such as Parkinson's disease, obesity, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, were characterized by positive correlations between DA and discounting. Together, the results suggest that trait differences in discounting in healthy adults do not appear to be strongly associated with individual differences in D2-like receptors. The difference in meta-analytic correlation effects between healthy controls and individuals with psychopathology suggests that individual difference findings related to DA and reward discounting in clinical samples may not be reliably generalized to healthy controls, and vice versa.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Decisions to forgo large rewards for smaller ones due to increasing time delays, uncertainty, or physical effort have been linked to differences in dopamine (DA) function, which is disrupted in some forms of psychopathology. It remains unclear whether alterations in DA function associated with psychopathology also extend to explaining associations between DA function and decision making in healthy individuals. We show that individual differences in DA D2 receptor availability are not consistently related to monetary discounting of time, probability, or physical effort in healthy individuals across a broad age range. By contrast, we suggest that psychopathology accounts for observed inconsistencies in the relationship between measures of DA function and reward discounting behavior

Charge relaxation resistance in the Coulomb blockade problem

We study the dissipation in a system consisting of a small metallic island coupled to a gate electrode and to a massive reservoir via single tunneling junction. The dissipation of energy is caused by a slowly oscillating gate voltage. We compute it in the regimes of weak and strong Coulomb blockade. We focus on the regime of not very low temperatures when electron coherence can be neglected but quantum fluctuations of charge are strong due to Coulomb interaction. The answers assume a particularly transparent form while expressed in terms of specially chosen physical observables. We discovered that the dissipation rate is given by a universal expression in both limiting cases.Comment: 21 pages, 12 figure

Microscale 3-D capacitance tomography with a CMOS sensor array

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a non-optical imaging technique in which a map of the interior permittivity of a volume is estimated by making capacitance measurements at its boundary and solving an inverse problem. While previous ECT demonstrations have often been at centimeter scales, ECT is not limited to macroscopic systems. In this paper, we demonstrate ECT imaging of polymer microspheres and bacterial biofilms using a CMOS microelectrode array, achieving spatial resolution of 10 microns. Additionally, we propose a deep learning architecture and an improved multi-objective training scheme for reconstructing out-of-plane permittivity maps from the sensor measurements. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to resolve microscopic 3-D structures, achieving 91.5% prediction accuracy on the microsphere dataset and 82.7% on the biofilm dataset, including an average of 4.6% improvement over baseline computational methods.1019304.01 - Burroughs Wellcome Fund; 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001612 - Brown UniversityFirst author draf

Microscale 3-D Capacitance Tomography with a CMOS Sensor Array

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a nonoptical imaging technique in which a map of the interior permittivity of a volume is estimated by making capacitance measurements at its boundary and solving an inverse problem. While previous ECT demonstrations have often been at centimeter scales, ECT is not limited to macroscopic systems. In this paper, we demonstrate ECT imaging of polymer microspheres and bacterial biofilms using a CMOS microelectrode array, achieving spatial resolution of 10 microns. Additionally, we propose a deep learning architecture and an improved multi-objective training scheme for reconstructing out-of-plane permittivity maps from the sensor measurements. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to resolve microscopic 3-D structures, achieving 91.5% prediction accuracy on the microsphere dataset and 82.7% on the biofilm dataset, including an average of 4.6% improvement over baseline computational methods