The Beetle Chronicler

Longtime UNL entomologist names beetles for dragons Gymnetis rhaegali, Gymnetis drogoni, Gymnetis viserioni, Ambyoproctus boondocksius, Cyclocephala nadanotherwon, Strategus longichomperus University of Nebraska entomology professor Brett Ratcliffe, who also curates the Nebraska State Museum\u27s beetle collection, shows elephant beetles, a member of the scarab beetle family, in his office in Nebraska Hall. Unlike their namesakes, three species of scarab beetles newly described by University of Nebraska-Lincoln entomologist Brett Ratcliffe do not breathe fire. Or, at least, entomologists and field researchers haven\u27t observed them doing so. Nor do the scarabs have the thick, reptilian scales and leathery wings like the trio of dragons hatched by Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, etc., in the HBO series Game of Thrones. But in a world where millions of variations of beetles exist — roughly one-quarter of all insects on the planet is a beetle — new names are sometimes hard to come by. Typically people name things after some charactertistic of the animal, Ratcliffe said in the fifth-floor lab of Nebraska Hall, lined with volumes of reference material related to the world\u27s insects. Other times they\u27ll name them after people who have been important to the discipline, or who helped find the species in nature, or an important colleague you want to give credit to for their life\u27s work

Can Education Reduce Political Polarization?: Fostering Open-Minded Political Engagement during the Legislative Semester

Background: In the United States, elected leaders and the general public have become more politically polarized during the past several decades, making bipartisan compromise difficult. Political scientists and educational scholars have argued that generating productive political cooperation requires preparing members of democratic societies to productively negotiate their political disagreements. Numerous prior studies on civic learning have focused on fostering youth political engagement, but little research has examined how educators can support both political engagement and political open-mindedness. Purpose: The study described in this paper explores how students’ experiences in a unique high school government course may help to foster their open-minded political engagement (OMPE) which we define as an individual’s propensity to explore and participate in political affairs while maintaining a willingness to adjust one’s political views. Research Design: Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we examined the development of adolescents’ OMPE during their participation in high school government courses at three schools. Whereas participants at Standard High (N=87) completed a traditional government course, students at Green High (N=224) and Gomez High (N=94) were enrolled in the Legislative Semester course, an extended political simulation that required students to research, discuss, debate, and mock-vote on controversial public issues. At each research site, we gathered data through student surveys, teacher and student interviews, and classroom observations during the fall 2014-15 semester. We analyzed survey data using principal component analysis, t-tests, and OLS regression, and we conducted constant comparative analysis with our qualitative data. Findings: Students in the LS program became more politically engaged and open-minded than students in the traditional government course. Whereas studying and exploring various political issues was especially helpful for the development of political engagement, considering diverse political perspectives in an open classroom environment was helpful for the development of political open-mindedness. However, if students in the LS were encouraged to be partisan, they were less likely to develop greater political open-mindedness. Conclusions: Repeated opportunities to examine diverse political ideas with peers can foster the development of open-minded political engagement. Educators can support such exchanges not only through structuring substantive sharing of diverse political perspectives but also through creating emotionally “safe” classroom environments, encouraging the expression of minority viewpoints, and de-emphasizing partisan uniformity. Encouraging careful listening – rather than polite hearing – may be central for the development of political open-mindedness

Certificates of Confidentiality: Protecting Human Subject Research Data in Law and Practice

The federal Certificate of Confidentiality plays an important role in research on sensitive topics by authorizing researchers to refuse to disclose identifiable research data in response to subpoenas in any legal setting. However, there is little known about how effective Certificates are in practice. This article draws on our legal and empirical research on this topic to fill this information gap. It includes a description of the purpose of Certificates, their legislative and regulatory history, and a summary of the few reported and unreported cases that have dealt with Certificates. In addition, we outline other statutory confidentiality protections, compare them to the Certificate\u27s protections, and analyze some of the vulnerabilities of a Certificate\u27s protections. This analysis allows us to make specific recommendations for strengthening the protections afforded to research data

The Web of Legal Protections for Participants in Genomic Research

The identification and arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA uploaded to an ancestry database occurred shortly before recruitment for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us Study commenced, with a goal of enrolling and collecting DNA, health, and lifestyle information from one million Americans. It also highlighted the need to ensure prospective research participants that their confidentiality will be protected and their materials used appropriately. But there are questions about how well current law protects against these privacy risks. This article is the first to consider comprehensively and simultaneously all the federal and state laws offering protections to participants in genomic research. The literature typically focuses on the federal laws in isolation, questioning the strengths of federal legal protections for genomic research participants provided in the Common Rule, the HIPAA Privacy Rule, or the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Nevertheless, we found significant numbers and surprising variety among state laws that provide greater protections than federal laws, often filling in federal gaps by broadening the applicability of privacy or nondiscrimination standards or by providing important remedies for individuals harmed by breaches. Identifying and explaining the protections these laws provide is significant both to allow prospective participants to accurately weigh the risks of enrolling in these studies and as models for how federal legal protections could be expanded to fill known gaps

Lorentz Violation and the Yukawa Potential

We analyze Lorentz violations in the bosonic sector of a Yukawa-type quantum field theory. The nonrelativistic potential may be determined to all orders in the Lorentz violation, and we find that only specific types of modifications to the normal Yukawa potential can be generated. The influence of this modified potential on scattering and bounds states is calculated. These results could be relevant to the search for new macroscopic forces, which may not necessarily be Lorentz invariant.Comment: 10 page

An Examination of the Changes in Science Teaching Orientations and Technology-Enhanced Tools for Student Learning in the Context of Professional Development

This research examines how science teaching orientations and beliefs about technology-enhanced tools change over time in professional development (PD). The primary data sources for this study came from learning journals of 8 eighth grade science teachers at the beginning and conclusion of a year of PD. Based on the analysis completed, Information Transmission (IT) and Struggling with Standards-Based Reform (SSBR) profiles were found at the beginning of the PD, while SSBR and Standards-Based Reform (SBR) profiles were identified at the conclusion of PD. All profiles exhibited Vision I beliefs about the goals and purposes for science education, while only the SBR profile exhibited Vision II goals and purposes for science teaching. The IT profile demonstrated naïve or unrevealed beliefs about the nature of science, while the SSBR and SBR profiles had more sophisticated beliefs in this area. The IT profile was grounded in more teacher-centered beliefs about science teaching and learning as the other two profiles revealed more student-centered beliefs. While no beliefs about technology-enhanced tools were found for the IT profile, these were found for the other two profiles. Our findings suggest promising implications for (a) Roberts\u27 Vision II as a central support for reform efforts, (b) situating technology-enhanced tools within the beliefs about science teaching and learning dimension of science teaching orientations, and (c) revealing how teacher orientations develop as a result of PD

Black Hole Final State Conspiracies

The principle that unitarity must be preserved in all processes, no matter how exotic, has led to deep insights into boundary conditions in cosmology and black hole theory. In the case of black hole evaporation, Horowitz and Maldacena were led to propose that unitarity preservation can be understood in terms of a restriction imposed on the wave function at the singularity. Gottesman and Preskill showed that this natural idea only works if one postulates the presence of "conspiracies" between systems just inside the event horizon and states at much later times, near the singularity. We argue that some AdS black holes have unusual internal thermodynamics, and that this may permit the required "conspiracies" if real black holes are described by some kind of sum over all AdS black holes having the same entropy.Comment: Various minor improvements, references added, 25 page

The origin of aubrites: Evidence from lithophile trace element abundances and oxygen isotope compositions

We report the abundances of a selected set of “lithophile” trace elements (including lanthanides, actinides and high field strength elements) and high-precision oxygen isotope analyses of a comprehensive suite of aubrites. Two distinct groups of aubrites can be distinguished: (a) the main-group aubrites display flat or light-REE depleted REE patterns with variable Eu and Y anomalies; their pyroxenes are light-REE depleted and show marked negative Eu anomalies; (b) the Mount Egerton enstatites and the silicate fraction from Larned display distinctive light-REE enrichments, and high Th/Sm ratios; Mount Egerton pyroxenes have much less pronounced negative Eu anomalies than pyroxenes from the main-group aubrites. Leaching experiments were undertaken to investigate the contribution of sulfides to the whole rock budget of the main-group aubrites. Sulfides contain in most cases at least 50% of the REEs and of the actinides. Among the elements we have analyzed, those displaying the strongest lithophile behaviors are Rb, Ba, Sr and Sc. The homogeneity of the Δ17O values obtained for main-group aubrite falls [Δ17O = +0.009 ± 0.010‰ (2σ)] suggests that they originated from a single parent body whose differentiation involved an early phase of large-scale melting that may have led to the development of a magma ocean. This interpretation is at first glance in agreement with the limited variability of the shapes of the REE patterns of these aubrites. However, the trace element concentrations of their phases cannot be used to discuss this hypothesis, because their igneous trace-element signatures have been modified by subsolidus exchange. Finally, despite similar O isotopic compositions, the marked light-REE enrichments displayed by Mount Egerton and Larned suggest that they are unrelated to the main-group aubrites and probably originated from a distinct parent body

Inflation, Large Branes, and the Shape of Space

Linde has recently argued that compact flat or negatively curved spatial sections should, in many circumstances, be considered typical in Inflationary cosmologies. We suggest that the "large brane instability" of Seiberg and Witten eliminates the negative candidates in the context of string theory. That leaves the flat, compact, three-dimensional manifolds -- Conway's *platycosms*. We show that deep theorems of Schoen, Yau, Gromov and Lawson imply that, even in this case, Seiberg-Witten instability can be avoided only with difficulty. Using a specific cosmological model of the Maldacena-Maoz type, we explain how to do this, and we also show how the list of platycosmic candidates can be reduced to three. This leads to an extension of the basic idea: the conformal compactification of the entire Euclidean spacetime also has the topology of a flat, compact, four-dimensional space.Comment: 29 pages, clarifications, typos fixed, references adde

Perspectives on Astrophysics Based on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Techniques

About two generations ago, a large part of AMO science was dominated by experimental high energy collision studies and perturbative theoretical methods. Since then, AMO science has undergone a transition and is now dominated by quantum, ultracold, and ultrafast studies. But in the process, the field has passed over the complexity that lies between these two extremes. Most of the Universe resides in this intermediate region. We put forward that the next frontier for AMO science is to explore the AMO complexity that describes most of the Cosmos.Comment: White paper submission to the Decadal Assessment and Outlook Report on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Science (AMO 2020