Unwrapping the neolithic package: Wadi Shu\u27eib and Kholetria-Ortos in perspective

Archaeological research of the Neolithic period in Southwest Asia depicts socio-cultural developments and proto-urban villages, resulting from an intensifying agro-economy, emerging simultaneously during the first 5,000 years of the Holocene (11,000 to 6,000 bp). Kholetria-Ortos, Cyprus, and Wadi Shu\u27eib, Jordan, are highlighted in this thesis to illustrate variability found in a proposed Neolithic package. The Neolithic package is a time capsule of items and ideas centered on sedentary villages participating in a domesticated plant/animal driven economy that provided subsistence and surplus to a growing population. Analysis of the recovered artifacts from both sites finds evidence of cultural variability across time and space. Environmental and cultural interactions are speculated upon as possible causation for differences seen between these two sites. A world view for the Neolithic experience is hypothesized by incorporating components of a core/periphery model

What did you do this summer? (Part I)

Brandon Cooper was a Medicinal Chemistry Intern at Ionis Pharmaceuticals in Carlsbad, California. Brandon will be discussing his internship application and interview experiences. He\u27ll give a brief overview of his work pertaining to developing conjugation methods to link antisense oligonucleotides with tissue-specific ligands. He\u27ll also highlight the implementation of different techniques and instruments relevant to his project. Evan Norris was an REU Participant at State University of New York at Geneseo, NY. Evan worked closely with a faculty member to optimize a model for studying optical properties of atmospheric aerosols using the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) programming language, CUDA. He will tell about his experiences and explain some of his work in computational and optical physics. Riley Cooper was a Medicinal Chemistry Intern at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California. Riley will be discussing her internship application and interview experiences. She\u27ll give a brief overview of her work pertaining to the development of a mild C-N coupling platform for electron deficient heteroarenes and biologically relevant quinazolinone architectures. She\u27ll also highlight the implementation of different techniques and instruments relevant to her project

TauFactor: An open-source application for calculating tortuosity factors from tomographic data

TauFactor is a MatLab application for efficiently calculating the tortuosity factor, as well as volume fractions, surface areas and triple phase boundary densities, from image based microstructural data. The tortuosity factor quantifies the apparent decrease in diffusive transport resulting from convolutions of the flow paths through porous media. TauFactor was originally developed to improve the understanding of electrode microstructures for batteries and fuel cells; however, the tortuosity factor has been of interest to a wide range of disciplines for over a century, including geoscience, biology and optics. It is still common practice to use correlations, such as that developed by Bruggeman, to approximate the tortuosity factor, but in recent years the increasing availability of 3D imaging techniques has spurred interest in calculating this quantity more directly. This tool provides a fast and accurate computational platform applicable to the big datasets (>10^8 voxels) typical of modern tomography, without requiring high computational power

Evaluating Outer Segment Length as A Surrogate Measure of Peak Foveal Cone Density

Adaptive optics (AO) imaging tools enable direct visualization of the cone photoreceptor mosaic, which facilitates quantitative measurements such as cone density. However, in many individuals, low image quality or excessive eye movements precludes making such measures. As foveal cone specialization is associated with both increased density and outer segment (OS) elongation, we sought to examine whether OS length could be used as a surrogate measure of foveal cone density. The retinas of 43 subjects (23 normal and 20 albinism; aged 6–67 years) were examined. Peak foveal cone density was measured using confocal adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscopy (AOSLO), and OS length was measured using optical coherence tomography (OCT) and longitudinal reflectivity profile-based approach. Peak cone density ranged from 29,200 to 214,000 cones/mm2(111,700 ± 46,300 cones/mm2); OS length ranged from 26.3 to 54.5 μm (40.5 ± 7.7 μm). Density was significantly correlated with OS length in albinism (p \u3c 0.0001), but not normals (p = 0.99). A cubic model of density as a function of OS length was created based on histology and optimized to fit the albinism data. The model includes triangular cone packing, a cylindrical OS with a fixed volume of 136.6 μm3, and a ratio of OS to inner segment width that increased linearly with increasing OS length (R2 = 0.72). Normal subjects showed no apparent relationship between cone density and OS length. In the absence of adequate AOSLO imagery, OS length may be used to estimate cone density in patients with albinism. Whether this relationship exists in other patient populations with foveal hypoplasia (e.g., premature birth, aniridia, isolated foveal hypoplasia) remains to be seen

Chandra Discovery of 10 New X-Ray Jets Associated With FR II Radio Core-Selected AGNs in the MOJAVE Sample

The Chandra X-ray observatory has proven to be a vital tool for studying high-energy emission processes in jets associated with Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).We have compiled a sample of 27 AGN selected from the radio flux-limited MOJAVE (Monitoring of Jets in AGN with VLBA Experiments) sample of highly relativistically beamed jets to look for correlations between X-ray and radio emission on kiloparsec scales. The sample consists of all MOJAVE quasars which have over 100 mJy of extended radio emission at 1.4 GHz and a radio structure of at least 3" in size. Previous Chandra observations have revealed X-ray jets in 11 of 14 members of the sample, and we have carried out new observations of the remaining 13 sources. Of the latter, 10 have Xray jets, bringing the overall detection rate to ~ 78%. Our selection criteria, which is based on highly compact, relativistically beamed jet emission and large extended radio flux, thus provides an effective method of discovering new X-ray jets associated with AGN. The detected X-ray jet morphologies are generally well correlated with the radio emission, except for those displaying sharp bends in the radio band. The X-ray emission mechanism for these powerful FR II (Fanaroff-Riley type II) jets can be interpreted as inverse Compton scattering off of cosmic microwave background (IC/CMB) photons by the electrons in the relativistic jets. We derive viewing angles for the jets, assuming a non-bending, non-decelerating model, by using superluminal parsec scale speeds along with parameters derived from the inverse Compton X-ray model. We use these angles to calculate best fit Doppler and bulk Lorentz factors for the jets, as well as their possible ranges, which leads to extreme values for the bulk Lorentz factor in some cases. When both the non-bending and non-decelerating assumptions are relaxed [abridged]Comment: 38 Pages, 4 Figures, 5 Tables, accepted for publication in Ap

Forensic Science in Legal Education

In criminal cases, forensic science reports and expert testimony play an increasingly important role in adjudication. More states now follow a federal reliability standard, following Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and Rule 702, which calls upon judges to assess the reliability and validity of such scientific evidence. Little is known about what education law schools provide regarding forensic and scientific evidence or what types of specialized training they receive on scientific methods or evidence. Whether law schools have added forensic science courses to their curricula in recent years was not known. To better understand the answers to those questions, in late 2019 and spring 2020, we conducted searches to identify course offerings in forensic sciences at U.S. law schools and then surveyed their instructors, asking for syllabi and information concerning how the courses are offered, how regularly, and with what coverage. We identified just forty-three courses at law schools and received responses with more detailed information from twenty-two instructors. In this Article, we describe our findings, and situate them in the offerings of law schools regarding evidence, science, and quantitative methods. We suggest that forensic science will necessarily be a specialty subject at law schools that can and should be further taught in continuing education programs, but also that quantitative methods courses in law school may help provide the foundation for such continuing education