Lonely nights

PodcastToday on The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast we are excited to bring to you the final installment of our fantastic 2014 Audio Contest winners and runners up. Today's feature is our runner-up in the Audio Documentary Category "Lonely nights" by Diane Hope which explores astronomy and the work-life of the astronomer

Demetrius Johnson and the Weep of the World: A Novel

Demetrius Johnson and the Weep of the World is a middle-grade, dark fantasy novel for readers eight to thirteen years old. The novel uses dark fantasy elements as allegory to render grief’s lived experience. The novel’s protagonist is Demetrius, a ten-year-old who has lost his mother to cancer and is struggling to cope. Demetrius’s grief emerges as the novel’s primary journey, beginning six months after Mama’s death as Demetrius and his father move to rural Virginia to live with family. Upon arrival at his grandmother’s house, Demetrius meets the novel’s antagonist—a promise-peddling inventor named Meraux the Magic Man, who claims that Dee’s mother is not gone but lost and that he has just the gadgets to find her. Using steampunk-horror details, Meraux is grief personified, imagining grief as a force that spontaneously exerts itself upon the bereaved. Demetrius takes Meraux’s bargain and is hurtled into his ashen wasteland, the World In Between, where Dee discovers the lie and magical thinking embedded in Meraux’s promise. Building upon the work of scholar Marta Bladek and writer Joan Didion, I render grief as a fantasy setting on macro and micro levels. First, grief’s spatiality is rendered as the larger invented fantasy world of the novel, the World In Between, a place where bereaved people are stuck in time, space, and grief. Secondly, the novel’s scenes are constructed as individual landscapes representing different emotional affects and atmospheres of grief. In these spaces, Demetrius discovers a multicultural band of trapped bereaved people fighting to survive. The residents of Mourning Star warn Demetrius that Meraux doesn’t just feed off grief, but that Meraux is building the Grief Eater, a machine to weep the waking world, and Demetrius is the perfect fuel. Demetrius must join the bereaved’s ranks to stop Meraux, destroy the machine, and find a way home. Through this journey, the novel develops a kaleidoscope of non-Eurocentric mourning beliefs through the characters of Ellie, Raida, Aharon, and Nii. This exploration develops a theme of grief as a unifying force, wherein the bereaved through shared experience can heal via community

Management Approach for Earth Venture Instrument

The Earth Venture Instrument (EVI) element of the Earth Venture Program calls for developing instruments for participation on a NASA-arranged spaceflight mission of opportunity to conduct innovative, integrated, hypothesis or scientific question-driven approaches to pressing Earth system science issues. This paper discusses the EVI element and the management approach being used to manage both an instrument development activity as well as the host accommodations activity. In particular the focus will be on the approach being used for the first EVI (EVI-1) selected instrument, Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO), which will be hosted on a commercial GEO satellite and some of the challenges encountered to date and corresponding mitigations that are associated with the management structure for the TEMPO Mission and the architecture of EVI

FAB:ulous! Family Literacy Nights: Learning to Listen to Families

This article describes our implementation of a program aimed at supporting families\u27 literacy through books and strategies and through capitalizing on what the families know and care about. We held several Family Literacy Nights in which we planned activities, workshops, and book give-aways around families\u27 interests, discerned during the first event. We struggled with simultaneously accomplishing our goals and those that reflected the families. In this article we share our successes as well as the lessons we learned about how to do this work

Comet Dust: The Diversity of "Primitive" Particles and Implications

Comet dust is primitive and shows significant diversity. Our knowledge of the properties of primitive particles has expanded significantly through microscale investigations of cosmic dust samples ( IDP's(Interplanetary Dust Particles) and AMM's (Antarctic Micrometeorites)) and of comet dust samples (Stardust and Rosetta's COSIMA), as well as through remote sensing (spectroscopy and imaging) via Spitzer and via spacecraft encounters with 103P/Hartley 2 and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Microscale investigations show that comet dust and cosmic dust are particles of unequilibrated materials, including aggregates of materials unequilibrated at submicron scales. We call unequilibrated materials "primitive" and we deduce they were incorporated into ice-rich (H2O-, CO2-, and CO-ice) parent bodies that remained cold, i.e., into comets, because of the lack of aqueous or thermal alteration since particle aggregation; yet some Stardust olivines suggest mild thermal metamorphism. Primitive particles exhibit a diverse range of: structure and typology; size and size distribution of constituents; concentration and form of carbonaceous and organic matter; D-, N-, and O- isotopic enhancements over solar; Mg-, Fe-contents of the silicate minerals; the compositions and concentrations of sulfides, and of less abundant mineral species such as chondrules, CAIs and carbonates. The uniformity within a group of samples points to: aerodynamic sorting of particles and/or particle constituents; the inclusion of a limited range of oxygen fugacities; the inclusion or exclusion of chondrules; a selection of organics. The properties of primitive particles imply there were disk processes that resulted in different comets having particular selections of primitive materials. The diversity of primitive particles has implications for the diversity of materials in the protoplanetary disk present at the time and in the region where the comets formed

Multicompartment Ecosystem Mass Balances as a Tool for Understanding and Managing the Biogeochemical Cycles of Human Ecosystems

Nitrogen remains a ubiquitous pollutant in surface and groundwater throughout the United States, despite 30 years of pollution control efforts. A detailed multicompartment N balance for the Central Arizona-Phoenix ecosystem is used to illustrate how an ecosystem-level approach can be used to develop improved N management strategies. The N balance is used to demonstrate how nitrate in pumped groundwater used for crop irrigation could be used to reduce inputs of commercial fertilizer and decrease N leaching to aquifers. Effectively managing N pollution also will require an understanding of the complex factors that control the N balance, including targeted regulations, individual human behavior, land-use conversion, and other ecosystem management practices that affect the N balance. These sometimes countervailing factors are illustrated with several scenarios of wastewater treatment technology and population growth in the Phoenix area. Management of N eventually must be coupled to management of other elements, notably carbon, phosphorus, and salts. We postulate that an ecosystem framework for pollution management will result in strategies that are more effective, fairer, and less expensive than current approaches

Palbociclib has no clinically relevant effect on the QTc interval in patients with advanced breast cancer.

The aim of this study was to assess the potential effects of palbociclib in combination with letrozole on QTc. PALOMA-2, a phase 3, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, compared palbociclib plus letrozole with placebo plus letrozole in postmenopausal women with estrogen receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative advanced breast cancer. The study included a QTc evaluation substudy carried out as a definitive QT interval prolongation assessment for palbociclib. Time-matched triplicate ECGs were performed at 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 h at baseline (Day 0) and on Cycle 1 Day 14. Additional ECGs were collected from all patients for safety monitoring. The QT interval was corrected for heart rate using Fridericia's correction (QTcF), Bazett's correction (QTcB), and a study-specific correction factor (QTcS). In total, 666 patients were randomized 2 : 1 to palbociclib plus letrozole or placebo plus letrozole. Of these, 125 patients were enrolled in the QTc evaluation substudy. No patients in the palbociclib plus letrozole arm of the substudy (N=77) had a maximum postbaseline QTcS or QTcF value of ≥ 480 ms, or a maximum increase from clock time-matched baseline for QTcS or QTcF values of ≥ 60 ms. The upper bounds of the one-sided 95% confidence interval for the mean change from time-matched baseline for QTcS, QTcF, and QTcB at all time points and at steady-state Cmax following repeated administration of 125 mg palbociclib were less than 10 ms. Palbociclib, when administered with letrozole at the recommended therapeutic dosing regimen, did not prolong the QT interval to a clinically relevant extent

Telephone Surveys Underestimate Cigarette Smoking among African-Americans

Background: This study tested the hypothesis that data from random digit-dial telephone surveys underestimate the prevalence of cigarette smoking among African-American adults. Method: A novel, community-sampling method was used to obtain a statewide, random sample of N = 2118 California (CA) African-American/Black adults, surveyed door-to-door. This Black community sample was compared to the Blacks in the CA Health Interview Survey (N = 2315), a statewide, random digit-dial telephone survey conducted simultaneously. Results: Smoking prevalence was significantly higher among community (33%) than among telephone survey (19%) Blacks, even after controlling for sample differences in demographics. Conclusion: Telephone surveys underestimate smoking among African-Americans and probably underestimate other health risk behaviors as well. Alternative methods are needed to obtain accurate data on African-American health behaviors and on the magnitude of racial disparities in them

The effects of human socioeconomic status and cultural characteristics on urban patterns of biodiversity

ABSTRACT. We present evidence that there can be substantial variation in species richness in residential areas differing in their socioeconomic and cultural characteristics. Many analyses of the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity rely on traditional "urban-to-rural" gradient measures, such as distance from urban center or population density, and thus can fail to account for the ways in which human socioeconomic and cultural characteristics are shaping the human-environment interaction and ecological outcomes. This influence of residential values and economic resources on biodiversity within the urban matrix has implications for human quality of life, for urban conservation strategies, and for urban planning