The Historic Preservation Program in Lincoln, Nebraska and Nomination of the South Bottoms Neighborhood as a Landmark District in Lincoln, Nebraska

Across the nation, thousands of historic properties are preserved, protected, and visited each year. These historic properties and historic preservation programs work to highlight historically significant places, by not only recognizing the past, but also by working to protect the significant sites into the future so they will continue to serve as reminders and examples of the historical events that have made it notable. Currently, the Historic Preservation Program in Lincoln, Nebraska recognizes over 1,400 properties as Local Landmark Sites or Districts within Lancaster County. Through this locally organized program, these properties receive a greater level of protection and financial relief opportunities by being designated within the program. This document focuses on Lincoln’s Historic Preservation Program, with an analysis regarding how the program began, operates, and continues to protect thousands of properties within Lancaster County. Data collection regarding these properties within the program was collected for further analysis and understanding of the program’s impacts and size today. This document details the benefits and enacted guidelines found in the nomination of a property, giving examples of previously nominated local sites and districts, and how the program assisted the continuing use of designated properties. Finally, an application for the proposed nomination of a local neighborhood is completed and can be utilized as an example for how the Historic Preservation Program approves and designates new local landmark sites and districts within the county. This application serves as a visual guide for the required items and research that must be conducted to fulfill a local landmark district application for Lincoln’s Historic Preservation Program. Professional Project Advisory Committee: Professor Gordon Scholz, Chair Professor Rodrigo Cantarero Professor Daniel Piatkowsk

Design Status of the Capillary Brine Residual in Containment Water Recovery System

One of the goals of the AES Life Support System (LSS) Project is to achieve 98% water loop closure for long duration human exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit. To meet this objective, the AES LSS Project is developing technologies to recover water from wastewater brine; highly concentrated waste products generated from a primary water recovery system. The state of the art system used aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has the potential to recover up to 85% water from unine wastewater, leaving a significant amounts of water in the waste brine, the recovery of which is critical technology gap that must be filled in order to enable long duration human exploration. Recovering water from the urine wastewater brine is complicated by the concentration of solids as water is removed from the brine, and the concentration of the corrosive, toxic chemicals used to stabilize the urine which fouls and degrades water processing hardware, and poses a hazard to operators and crew. Brine Residual in Containment (BRIC) is focused on solids management through a process of "in-place" drying - the drying of brines within the container used for final disposal. Application of in-place drying has the potential to improve the safety and reliability of the system by reducing the exposure to curew and hardware to the problematic brine residual. Through a collaboration between the NASA Johnson Space Center and Portland Status University, a novel water recovery system was developed that utilizes containment geometry to support passive capillary flow and static phase separation allowing free surface evaporation to take place in a microgravity environment. A notional design for an ISS demonstration system was developed. This paper describes the testing performed to characterize the performance of the system as well as the status of the system level design

Maximal admissible faces and asymptotic bounds for the normal surface solution space

The enumeration of normal surfaces is a key bottleneck in computational three-dimensional topology. The underlying procedure is the enumeration of admissible vertices of a high-dimensional polytope, where admissibility is a powerful but non-linear and non-convex constraint. The main results of this paper are significant improvements upon the best known asymptotic bounds on the number of admissible vertices, using polytopes in both the standard normal surface coordinate system and the streamlined quadrilateral coordinate system. To achieve these results we examine the layout of admissible points within these polytopes. We show that these points correspond to well-behaved substructures of the face lattice, and we study properties of the corresponding "admissible faces". Key lemmata include upper bounds on the number of maximal admissible faces of each dimension, and a bijection between the maximal admissible faces in the two coordinate systems mentioned above.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; v2: minor revisions (to appear in Journal of Combinatorial Theory A

Beginning of Viniculture in France

Chemical analyses of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics of imported Etruscan amphoras (ca. 500-475 B.C.) and into a limestone pressing platform (ca. 425-400 B.C.) at the ancient coastal port site of Lattara in southern France provide the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from this country, which is crucial to the later history of wine in Europe and the rest of the world. The data support the hypothesis that export of wine by ship from Etruria in central Italy to southern Mediterranean France fueled an ever-growing market and interest in wine there, which, in turn, as evidenced by the winepress, led to transplantation of the Eurasian grapevine and the beginning of a Celtic industry in France. Herbal and pine resin additives to the Etruscan wine point to the medicinal role of wine in antiquity, as well as a means of preserving it during marine transport

Comparison of CT, MRI, and F-18 FDG PET/CT for initial N-staging of oral squamous cell carcinoma: a cost-effectiveness analysis.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Treatment of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is based on clinical exam, biopsy, and a precise imaging-based TNM-evaluation. A high sensitivity and specificity for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and F-18 FDG PET/CT are reported for N-staging. Nevertheless, staging of oral squamous cell carcinoma is most often based on computed tomography (CT) scans. This study aims to evaluate cost-effectiveness of MRI and PET/CT compared to standard of care imaging in initial staging of OSCC within the US Healthcare System. METHODS A decision model was constructed using quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and overall costs of different imaging strategies including a CT of the head, neck, and the thorax, MRI of the neck with CT of the thorax, and whole body F-18 FDG PET/CT using Markov transition simulations for different disease states. Input parameters were derived from literature and willingness to pay (WTP) was set to US $100,000/QALY. Deterministic sensitivity analysis of diagnostic parameters and costs was performed. Monte Carlo modeling was used for probabilistic sensitivity analysis. RESULTS In the base-case scenario, total costs were at US$239,628 for CT, US $240,001 for MRI, and US$239,131 for F-18 FDG PET/CT whereas the model yielded an effectiveness of 5.29 QALYs for CT, 5.30 QALYs for MRI, and 5.32 QALYs for F-18 FDG PET/CT respectively. F-18 FDG PET/CT was the most cost-effective strategy over MRI as well as CT, and MRI was the cost-effective strategy over CT. Deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analysis showed high robustness of the model with incremental cost effectiveness ratio remaining below US $100,000/QALY for a wide range of variability of input parameters. CONCLUSION F-18 FDG PET/CT is the most cost-effective strategy in the initial N-staging of OSCC when compared to MRI and CT. Despite less routine use, both whole body PET/CT and MRI are cost-effective modalities in the N-staging of OSCC. Based on these findings, the implementation of PET/CT for initial staging could be suggested to help reduce costs while increasing effectiveness in OSCC

Multiomics modeling of the immunome, transcriptome, microbiome, proteome and metabolome adaptations during human pregnancy.

MotivationMultiple biological clocks govern a healthy pregnancy. These biological mechanisms produce immunologic, metabolomic, proteomic, genomic and microbiomic adaptations during the course of pregnancy. Modeling the chronology of these adaptations during full-term pregnancy provides the frameworks for future studies examining deviations implicated in pregnancy-related pathologies including preterm birth and preeclampsia.ResultsWe performed a multiomics analysis of 51 samples from 17 pregnant women, delivering at term. The datasets included measurements from the immunome, transcriptome, microbiome, proteome and metabolome of samples obtained simultaneously from the same patients. Multivariate predictive modeling using the Elastic Net (EN) algorithm was used to measure the ability of each dataset to predict gestational age. Using stacked generalization, these datasets were combined into a single model. This model not only significantly increased predictive power by combining all datasets, but also revealed novel interactions between different biological modalities. Future work includes expansion of the cohort to preterm-enriched populations and in vivo analysis of immune-modulating interventions based on the mechanisms identified.Availability and implementationDatasets and scripts for reproduction of results are available through: https://nalab.stanford.edu/multiomics-pregnancy/.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

Dosing Regimen of Enrofloxacin Impacts Intestinal Pharmacokinetics and the Fecal Microbiota in Steers

Objective: The intestinal concentrations of antimicrobial drugs that select for resistance in fecal bacteria of cattle are poorly understood. Our objective was to associate active drug concentrations in the intestine of steers with changes in the resistance profile and composition of the fecal microbiome.Methods: Steers were administered either a single dose (12.5 mg/kg) or 3 multiple doses (5 mg/kg) of enrofloxacin subcutaneously every 24 h. Enrofloxacin and ciprofloxacin concentrations in intestinal fluid were measured over 96 h, and the abundance and MIC of E. coli in culture and the composition of the fecal microbiota by 16S rRNA gene sequencing were assessed over 192 h after initial treatment.Results: Active drug concentrations in the ileum and colon exceeded plasma and interstitial fluid concentrations, but were largely eliminated by 48 h after the last dose. The concentration of E. coli in the feces significantly decreased during peak drug concentrations, but returned to baseline by 96 h in both groups. The median MIC of E. coli isolates increased for 24 h in the single dose group, and for 48 h in the multiple dose group. The median MIC was higher in the multiple dose group when compared to the single dose group starting 12 h after the initial dose. The diversity of the fecal microbiota did not change in either treatment group, and taxa-specific changes were primarily seen in phyla commonly associated with the rumen.Conclusions: Both dosing regimens of enrofloxacin achieve high concentrations in the intestinal lumen, and the rapid elimination mitigates long-term impacts on fecal E. coli resistance and the microbiota