Tracking Simulated Somatosensory Deficiencies that Affect Postural Stability through Detrended Fluctuation Analysis

Falls are a prevalent problem among elderly populations. Falls increase the cost of healthcare, frequently cause severe injuries, and negatively affect quality of life. Lack of postural stability is a major contributing factor to falls, with postural stability defined as the correct biomechanical execution based on sensory feedback. Types of sensory feedback include vision, vestibular, proprioceptive, and somatosensory. This study focuses on the lack of postural stability in quiet standing (standing upright and still) due to somatosensory and vision deficiencies. To track these deficiencies, fifty-one subjects stood for sixty seconds on two force plates, and their center of pressure (COP) time series were extracted. All subjects completed three trials with eyes closed or open while standing on five foam thicknesses that simulated various levels of somatosensory deficiencies at the feet, a common symptom in people with a high risk of falling (e.g., diabetic populations). To quantify these somatosensory deficiencies, Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) was performed on all COP time series. It is hypothesized that DFA on COP time series can track deficiencies in the somatosensory and vision feedbacks. Though this study does not cover actual somatosensory deficiencies, it could offer a validated measure to future studies comprised of participants who suffer from peripheral neuropathy (e.g., diabetic populations)

Critical Introduction to \u3ci\u3eNo Easy Way Out: A Memoir of Interruption\u3c/i\u3e

No Easy Way Out: A Memoir of Interruption is a collection of personal essays examining themes of race, the body, violence and desire as it seeks to examine and interrupt inherited, normative understandings of work, art, beauty, love, and belonging. An illness narrative that follows my experiences as a girl born into a family of white Southern wealth, as a young crime reporter in the Deep South, and as a mother, scholar, and writer in the Midwest, No Easy Way Out raises questions about the entanglement of privilege, illness, and access to care. The book considers the stories I covered as a crime reporter at two daily newspapers—one in small-town Alabama where the homicide rate far outpaced that of much larger cities and another amidst the steel-and-glass-tower skyline of Charlotte, North Carolina—alongside my own history of mental ill health and psychiatric institutionalization. In doing so, it critiques how long-standing institutions—the nuclear family, psychiatric healthcare, and higher education, to name a few—are inextricably intertwined with and productive of our contemporary understandings of seemingly opposed binaries like “body” and “mind,” “crazy” and “sane,” “self” and “other.” The memoir moves between longform and flash essays, the former drawing from my careers as a journalist and academic and the latter from spiritual insights arising from my work as a Tarot reader and astrologer. The flash essays act as lyrical interstices, spaces of dream, myth, and occult imagery that provide new insights, but slant. Together, these essays, based in logic, intuition, and something in-between, offer a reparative way of thinking about difficulty, in the brain, in the body, in the world. Advisor: Joy Castr

The Girl With The Fur Coat

THE GIRL WITH THE FUR COAT thesis is comprised of 40 poems and a five-page introduction that examine – with equal parts intimacy and distance – how interior and exterior violence threatens female subjecthood, as well as how girlhood is always – and will always be – transforming the female self. The thesis produces this intimate-yet-distancing effect through a close attention to the (primarily free-verse) forms of the individual poems and how those forms interact with the poems’ subjects, bodies, Surrealist moments and fabulist imagery. Also, the arrangement of the poems helps to create a sense of close, disturbing conversation between all of these elements in an effort to move the reader past a sense of desensitization on the one hand and shock-value entertainment on the other – what theorist Geoffrey Hartman calls the by-products of narratives that privilege the real, the testimonial, the straightforward confession. The poetry is informed by the nearly four years I spent as investigative reporter in the Deep South as well my own histories with domestic abuse and mental illness. As a result, I have often sought disruption with my poetry; it goes part and parcel with my own lived experiences and quest for critique, urgency and truthfulness in the poems I write. Situated next to an introduction that, quite straightforwardly, tells a short version of the story of my life as a reporter, a survivor of sexual assault, and suicide, the poems provide an intertextual look at trauma, confession, and womanhood. Advisor: Kwame S. Dawe

Electronic origin of spin-phonon coupling effect in transition-metal perovskites

By applying Wannier-based extended Kugel-Khomskii model, we carry out first-principles calculations and electronic structure analysis to understand the spin-phonon coupling effect in transition-metal perovskites. We demonstrate the successful application of our approach to SrMnO$_3$ and BiFeO$_3$. We show that both the electron orbitals under crystal field splitting and the electronic configuration should be taken into account in order to understand the large variances of spin-phonon coupling effects among various phonon modes as well as in different materials.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

PDGFRα signaling drives adipose tissue fibrosis by targeting progenitor cell plasticity

Fibrosis is a common disease process in which profibrotic cells disturb organ function by secreting disorganized extracellular matrix (ECM). Adipose tissue fibrosis occurs during obesity and is associated with metabolic dysfunction, but how profibrotic cells originate is still being elucidated. Here, we use a developmental model to investigate perivascular cells in white adipose tissue (WAT) and their potential to cause organ fibrosis. We show that a Nestin-Cre transgene targets perivascular cells (adventitial cells and pericyte-like cells) in WAT, and Nestin-GFP specifically labels pericyte-like cells. Activation of PDGFRα signaling in perivascular cells causes them to transition into ECM-synthesizing profibrotic cells. Before this transition occurs, PDGFRα signaling up-regulates mTOR signaling and ribosome biogenesis pathways and perturbs the expression of a network of epigenetically imprinted genes that have been implicated in cell growth and tissue homeostasis. Isolated Nestin-GFP+ cells differentiate into adipocytes ex vivo and form WAT when transplanted into recipient mice. However, PDGFRα signaling opposes adipogenesis and generates profibrotic cells instead, which leads to fibrotic WAT in transplant experiments. These results identify perivascular cells as fibro/adipogenic progenitors in WAT and show that PDGFRα targets progenitor cell plasticity as a profibrotic mechanism

Improved age constraints for the AB Dor quadruple system - The binary nature of AB Dor B

We present resolved NACO photometry of the close binary AB Dor B in H- and Ks-band. AB Dor B is itself known to be a wide binary companion to AB Dor A, which in turn has a very low-mass close companion named AB Dor C. These four known components make up the young and dynamically interesting system AB Dor, which will likely become a benchmark system for calibrating theoretical pre-main sequence evolutionary mass tracks for low-mass stars. However, for this purpose the actual age has to be known, and this subject has been a matter of discussion in the recent scientific literature. We compare our resolved photometry of AB Dor Ba and Bb with theoretical and empirical isochrones in order to constrain the age of the system. This leads to an age estimate of about 50 to 100 Myr. We discuss the implications of such an age range for the case of AB Dor C, and compare with other results in the literature.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Discovery and characterization of WASP-6b, an inflated sub-Jupiter mass planet transiting a solar-type star

We report the discovery of WASP-6b, an inflated sub-Jupiter mass planet transiting every 3.3610060^{\rm + 0.0000022 }_ days a mildly metal-poor solar-type star of magnitude V = 11.9. A combined analysis of the WASP photometry, high-precision followup transit photometry and radial velocities yield a planetary mass M_{\rm p} = 0.503^_ $M_{\rm J}$ and radius R_{\rm p} = 1.224^_ $R_{\rm J}$, resulting in a density $\rho_{\rm p} = 0.27 \pm 0.05$ $\rho_{\rm J}$. The mass and radius for the host star are M_\ast = 0.88^_ $M_\odot$ and R_\ast = 0.870^_ $R_\odot$. The non-zero orbital eccentricity e = 0.054^{\rm +0.018}_ that we measure suggests that the planet underwent a massive tidal heating ~1 Gyr ago that could have contributed to its inflated radius. High-precision radial velocities obtained during a transit allow us to measure a sky-projected angle between the stellar spin and orbital axis \beta = 11^_ deg. In addition to similar published measurements, this result favors a dominant migration mechanism based on tidal interactions with a protoplanetary disk