Use of Interactive Simulations in Fundamentals of Biochemistry, a LibreText Online Educational Resource, to Promote Understanding of Dynamic Reactions

Biology is perhaps the most complex of the sciences, given the incredible variety of chemical species that are interconnected in spatial and temporal pathways that are daunting to understand. Their interconnections lead to emergent properties such as memory, consciousness, and recognition of self and non-self. To understand how these interconnected reactions lead to cellular life characterized by activation, inhibition, regulation, homeostasis, and adaptation, computational analyses and simulations are essential, a fact recognized by the biological communities. At the same time, students struggle to understand and apply binding and kinetic analyses for the simplest reactions such as the irreversible first-order conversion of a single reactant to a product. This likely results from cognitive difficulties in combining structural, chemical, mathematical, and textual descriptions of binding and catalytic reactions. To help students better understand dynamic reactions and their analyses, we have introduced two kinds of interactive graphs and simulations into the online educational resource, Fundamentals of Biochemistry, a multivolume biochemistry textbook that is part of the LibreText collection. One type is available for simple binding and kinetic reactions. The other displays progress curves (concentrations vs time) for both simple reactions and more complex metabolic and signal transduction pathways, including those available through databases using systems biology markup language (SBML) files. Users can move sliders to change dissociation and kinetic constants as well as initial concentrations and see instantaneous changes in the graphs. They can also export data into a spreadsheet for further processing, such as producing derivative Lineweaver-Burk and traditional Michaelis-Menten graphs of initial velocity (v0) vs substrate concentration.Comment: 17 pages, 2 tables, 8 figures. Submitted to Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education. Funding: MiniSidewinder: NIH/NIGMS (Grant R01-GM123032-04) LibreText: Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlo

Eyewitness recall and suggestibility in individuals with Down syndrome

Background: Many criminal justice professionals perceive the eyewitness skills of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) to be weaker than those of typically developing (TD) individuals. Down syndrome (DS) is one of the most common genetic causes of ID, yet there is no research addressing eyewitness skills in this population. This study examinedthe eyewitness recall and suggestibility of young peoplewith DS. Method: Young people with DS and mental age-matched TD children viewed a video of a non-violent petty crime and were subsequently asked to freely recall the event before being asked general and specific questions incorporating both misleading and non-leading prompts. Results: Compared to mental age-matched TDindividuals, young people with DS:produced as much information; were just as accurate;and were no moresuggestible. Conclusions: The eyewitness memory skills of young people with DS are comparable to those of mental age-matched TDchildren. The implications of these findings for the forensic context and eyewitness memory are discussed

MBX: A many-body energy and force calculator for data-driven many-body simulations.

Many-Body eXpansion (MBX) is a C++ library that implements many-body potential energy functions (PEFs) within the many-body energy (MB-nrg) formalism. MB-nrg PEFs integrate an underlying polarizable model with explicit machine-learned representations of many-body interactions to achieve chemical accuracy from the gas to the condensed phases. MBX can be employed either as a stand-alone package or as an energy/force engine that can be integrated with generic software for molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations. MBX is parallelized internally using Open Multi-Processing and can utilize Message Passing Interface when available in interfaced molecular simulation software. MBX enables classical and quantum molecular simulations with MB-nrg PEFs, as well as hybrid simulations that combine conventional force fields and MB-nrg PEFs, for diverse systems ranging from small gas-phase clusters to aqueous solutions and molecular fluids to biomolecular systems and metal-organic frameworks

Perceived credibility and eyewitness testimony of children with intellectual disabilities

Background: Although children with intellectual disabilities (ID) often provide accurate witness testimony, jurors tend to perceive their witness statements to be inherently unreliable. Method: The current study explored the free recall transcripts of child witnesses with ID who had watched a video clip, relative to those of typically developing (TD) age-matched children, and assessed how mock jurors perceived these transcripts in the absence of knowledge of group (ID or TD) membership. A further aim of this research was to determine whether perceptions of credibility were associated with levels of free recall and witness characteristics (anxiety and mental age). Results: Mock jurors rated the testimony of children with ID as less credible than that of a TD age-matched comparison group. This was largely because of the transcripts of the children with ID containing fewer details than those of the TD children. Anxiety and mental age were found to have no effect on perceived levels of credibility. Conclusions: It appears that even in the absence of knowledge of whether a child does or does not have ID, this factor still affects perceptions of credibility among mock jurors. Our findings suggest that fundamental differences in the quality of the witness transcripts lead to lower perceptions of credibility for children with ID

Cross-examination: The Testimony of Children With and Without Intellectual Disabilities

The present study assessed how children with a range of cognitive abilities fared during a mock cross-examination. Ninety children (aged 4 to 11 years; 18 with intellectual disabilities [ID], 13 with borderline intellectual disabilities [BID], and 59 who were typically developing [TD]) witnessed a staged event, participated in an initial forensic interview (a few days later), and were cross-examined by a barrister-in-training (ten months later). During cross-examination, 98% of all children changed at least one response from their initial interview when challenged. However, group differences in performance (total number of changed responses, ‘resistance’ to challenges), controlling for age and memory for event details, were not significant or did not prove reliable at the level of individual group contrasts. Overall, little robust evidence for group differences in performance on crossexamination could be identified, and memory for event details was the most reliable predictor of performance

Multi-spectral terahertz sensing: proposal for a coupled-cavity quantum cascade laser based optical feedback interferometer

We propose a laser feedback interferometer operating at multiple terahertz (THz) frequency bands by using a pulsed coupled-cavity THz quantum cascade laser (QCL) under optical feedback. A theoretical model that contains multi-mode reduced rate equations and thermal equations is presented, which captures the interplay between electro-optical, thermal, and feedback effects. By using the self-heating effect in both active and passive cavities, self-mixing signal responses at three different THz frequency bands are predicted. A multi-spectral laser feedback interferometry system based on such a coupled-cavity THz QCL will permit ultra-high-speed sensing and spectroscopic applications including material identification

Nutrient composition of selected traditional United States Northern Plains Native American plant foods

Ten wild plants (cattail broad leaf shoots, chokecherries, beaked hazelnuts, lambsquarters, plains prickly pear, prairie turnips, stinging nettles, wild plums, raspberries, and rose hips) from three Native American reservations in North Dakota were analyzed to expand composition information of traditional foraged plants. Proximates, dietary fiber (DF), vitamins, minerals, carotenoids, and folate vitamers were assayed using standard methods and reference materials. Per serving, all were rich in Mn (100–2808 mg). Several provided \u3e10% DRI of Fe (cattail shoots, steamed lambsquarters, and prairie turnips), Ca (steamed lambsquarters, prickly pear, and prairie turnips), Mg (cattail shoots, lambsquarters, prickly pear, and prairie turnips), vitamins B6 (chokecherries, steamed lambsquarters, broiled prickly pear, and prairie turnips), C (raw prickly pear, plums, raspberries, rose hips (426 mg/100 g), and K (cattail shoots, chokecherries, lambsquarters, plums, rose hips, and stinging nettles). DF was \u3e10 g/serving in chokecherries, prairie turnips, plums and raspberries. Rose hips, plums, lambsquarters, and stinging nettles were carotenoid-rich (total, 3.2–11.7 mg/100 g; b-carotene, 1.2–2.4 mg/100 g; lutein/zeaxan- thin, 0.9–6.2 mg/100 g) and lycopene (rose hips only, 6.8 mg/100 g). Folate (primarily 5-methylte- trahydrofolate) was highest in raw lambsquarters (97.5 mg/100 g) and notable in cattail shoots, raw prairie turnips, and blanched stinging nettles (10.8, 11.5, and 24.0 mg/100 g, respectively). Results, provided to collaborating tribes and available in the National Nutrient Database of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) (www.ars.usda.gov/nutrientdata), support reintroduction or increased consumption of foraged plants

Restoring Degraded Landscapes through An Integrated Approach Using Geospatial Technologies in the Context of the Humanitarian Crisis in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

The influx of nearly a million refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine state to Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, in August 2017 put significant pressure on the regional landscape leading to land degradation due to biomass removal to provide shelter and fuel energy and posed critical challenges for both host and displaced population. This article emphasizes geospatial applications at different stages of addressing land degradation in Cox’s Bazar. A wide range of data and methods were used to delineate land tenure, estimate wood fuel demand and supply, assess land degradation, evaluate land restoration suitability, and monitor restoration activities. The quantitative and spatially explicit information from these geospatial assessments integrated with the technical guidelines for sustainable land management and an adaptive management strategy was critical in enabling a collaborative, multi-disciplinary and evidence-based approach to successfully restoring degraded landscapes in a displacement setting

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

The introductory essay outlines the way in which Change and Exchange places literature, and, in a wider sense, imaginative practice, at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. Probing the affinity between economic and metaphorical experience in terms of the transactional processes of change and exchange, it sets up the parameters within which the essays in the volume collectively forge a language to grasp early modern economic phenomena and their epistemic dimensions. It prepares the reader for the stimulating combination of materials that the book presents: the range of generic contexts engendered by emergent economic practices, structures of feeling and modes of knowing made available by new economic relations, and economies of transformation in discursive domains that are distinct from ‘economics’ as we understand it but cognate in their intuition of change and exchange as shaping agents