Performance and Recovery of Turfgrasses Subjected to Drought and Traffic Stresses

This study is an effort to determine effects of drought and traffic in turfgrasses. During a 41-day summer drought in 2015 and 2016, warm-season (C4) grasses were more affected by traffic than cool-season (C3) grasses when percent green cover and turf quality were measured. This was because the non-trafficked plots in C4 grasses maintained higher percent green cover and turf quality throughout the drought due to better drought-stress tolerance than the C3 grasses. Regardless of traffic treatment or mowing height, C4 grasses maintained higher percent green cover and visual turf quality than C3 grasses during drought and recovery periods. There was a larger separation between traffic treatments within the higher (rough) height compared to the lower (fairway) height. Overall, traffic application during a drought will have a negative and accelerated impact on the above-ground portion of turfgrass, which will vary due to turf species and mowing height

Freezing Strip Loin and Top Round Steaks Improves Warner-Bratzler Shear Force

Postmortem aging of steaks is a common practice used to improve tenderness of beef steaks. The impact of proteolysis and improvement in tenderness due to aging varies among muscles. When designing research protocols, samples for Warner-Bratzler shear force (WBSF) are often frozen for later analysis because of convenience and time limitations. Freezing stops postmortem aging and allows for storage until meat can be cooked for WBSF and/or sensory analysis. However freezing meat may cause damage to cell membranes resulting in lower Warner-Bratzler shear force (improved mechanical tenderness), lower water holding capacity, and greater moisture loss during cooking. Several researchers have indicated that freezing strip loin (Longissimus muscle) steaks may lower Warner-Bratzler shear force (improve tenderness) compared with those not previously frozen and sheared fresh. However, these results have been inconclusive for steaks from other muscles. Therefore, the objective of this study was to determine the effects of postmortem aging time and freezing on Warner-Bratzler shear force of six muscles from the beef hindquarter

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes

Implementation and applications of EMOD, an individual-based multi-disease modeling platform

Individual-based models provide modularity and structural flexibility necessary for modeling of infectious diseases at the within-host and population levels, but are challenging to implement. Levels of complexity can exceed the capacity and timescales for students and trainees in most academic institutions. Here we describe the process and advantages of a multi-disease framework approach developed with formal software support. The epidemiological modeling software, EMOD, has undergone a decade of software development. It is structured so that a majority of code is shared across disease modeling including malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, dengue, polio and typhoid. In additional to implementation efficiency, the sharing increases code usage and testing. The freely available codebase also includes hundreds of regression tests, scientific feature tests and component tests to help verify functionality and avoid inadvertent changes to functionality during future development. Here we describe the levels of detail, flexible configurability and modularity enabled by EMOD and the role of software development principles and processes in its development