Health in Mind: Improving Education Through Wellness

Educators know that healthy students are better prepared to learn and succeed in school. It's also known that people who are better educated and obtain a college education have lower rates of health conditions and longer life expectancy. Yet current health and education policy misses several simple but vital opportunities to boost academic success through health promotion and school wellness. The nation's current generation of students could become the first to live shorter and less healthy lives than their parents. At the same time, our nation faces a growing achievement gap: Students who attend school in communities with lower socioeconomic status have lower academic outcomes than students in higher socioeconomic status communities. Overwhelmingly, the underserved communities predominantly comprise ethnic minority residents, which propagates a racial chasm. Research is increasingly confirming a link between the achievement gap and health disparities. For this reason, Healthy Schools Campaign and Trust for America's Health developed "Health in Mind: Improving Education Through Wellness". This effort focuses on policy recommendations for immediate, practical changes at the federal level to help close the achievement gap and create a healthy future for all children

Interviewers’ Ratings of Respondents’ Health: Predictors and Association With Mortality

Objectives Recent research indicates that survey interviewers’ ratings of respondents’ health (IRH) may provide supplementary health information about respondents in surveys of older adults. Although IRH is a potentially promising measure of health to include in surveys, our understanding of the factors contributing to IRH remains incomplete. Methods We use data from the 2011 face-to-face wave of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a longitudinal study of older adults from the Wisconsin high school class of 1957 and their selected siblings. We first examine whether a range of factors predict IRH: respondents’ characteristics that interviewers learn about and observe as respondents answer survey questions, interviewers’ evaluations of some of what they observe, and interviewers’ characteristics. We then examine the role of IRH, respondents’ self-rated health (SRH), and associated factors in predicting mortality over a 3-year follow-up. Results As in prior studies, we find that IRH is associated with respondents’ characteristics. In addition, this study is the first to document how IRH is associated with both interviewers’ evaluations of respondents and interviewers’ characteristics. Furthermore, we find that the association between IRH and the strong criterion of mortality remains after controlling for respondents’ characteristics and interviewers’ evaluations of respondents. Discussion We propose that researchers incorporate IRH in surveys of older adults as a cost-effective, easily implemented, and supplementary measure of health

Metallurgical and Corrosion Assessment of Submerged Tanker S.S. \u3ci\u3eMontebello\u3c/i\u3e

The Union Oil Tanker S.S. Montebello was torpedoed and sunk six miles (9.7 km) off the coast of Cambria, California by a Japanese submarine on December 23, 1941, two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With close proximity to the National Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, concern about possible crude oil contamination led to the most recent expedition to the site in October 2011. Assessment of the shell plate found that the average corrosion rate was very low and the structure will remain stable for many decades

Broadening horizons: holistic viewpoints from the Biology of Genomes

A report on the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory 27th annual meeting on the Biology of Genomes, held in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, USA, 6-10 May 2014

Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of an Evolutionary Social-Learning Game

An important way to learn new actions and behaviors is by observing others, and several evolutionary games have been developed to investigate what learning strategies work best and how they might have evolved. In this paper we present an extensive set of mathematical and simulation results for Cultaptation, which is one of the best-known such games. We derive a formula for measuring a strategy's expected reproductive success, provide algorithms to compute near-best-response strategies and near-Nash equilibria, and provide techniques for efficient implementation of those algorithms. Our experimental studies provide strong evidence for the following hypotheses: 1. The best strategies for Cultaptation and similar games are likely to be conditional ones in which the choice of action at each round is conditioned on the agent's accumulated experience. Such strategies (or close approximations of them) can be computed by doing a lookahead search that predicts how each possible choice of action at the current round is likely to affect future performance. 2. Such strategies are likely to exploit most of the time, but will have ways of quickly detecting structural shocks, so that they can switch quickly to innovation in order to learn how to respond to such shocks. This conflicts with the conventional wisdom that successful social-learning strategies are characterized by a high frequency of innovation; and agrees with recent experiments by others on human subjects that also challenge the conventional wisdom

Improving Functional Communication Outcomes in Post-Stroke Aphasia via Telepractice: An Alternative Service Delivery Model for Underserved Populations

Many persons with aphasia (PWA) have limited access to speech-language treatment (SLT) due to limited funding, speech-language pathologist shortages, geographical barriers, physical disabilities, transportation barriers, and COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study was to determine if telepractice is an effective and feasible service delivery model for PWA. Ten PWA completed 8 hours of remote treatment over 4 weeks. Synchronous telepractice sessions employed Oral Reading for Language in Aphasia (ORLA) and Conversational Script Training (CST). Pre- and post-assessment outcome measures included the Communication Activities of Daily Living-3 (CADL-3) and the Communication Confidence Rating Scale for Aphasia (CCRSA). Participants completed a telepractice satisfaction survey following post-assessment. All participants demonstrated improvements in CCRSA scores, total words produced correctly on trained CST stimuli, and total words produced correctly on trained ORLA stimuli. No differences were noted in CADL-3 scores. All participants were highly satisfied with telepractice as a service delivery model.

New Moon Explorer Mission Concept

New Moon Explorer (NME) is a smallsat reconnaissance mission concept to explore Earths New Moon, the recently discovered Earth orbital companion asteroid 469219 Kamooalewa (formerly 2016HO3), using solar sail propulsion. NME would determine Kamooalewas spin rate, pole position, shape, structure, mass, density, chemical composition, temperature, thermal inertia, regolith characteristics, and spectral type using onboard instrumentation. If flown, NME would demonstrate multiple enabling technologies, including solar sail propulsion, large-area thin film power generation, and small spacecraft technology tailored for interplanetary space missions. Leveraging the solar sail technology and mission expertise developed by NASA for the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) Scout mission, affordably learning more about our newest near neighbor is now a possibility. The mission is not yet planned for flight

A burden of proof study on alcohol consumption and ischemic heart disease

Cohort and case-control data have suggested an association between low to moderate alcohol consumption and decreased risk of ischemic heart disease (IHD), yet results from Mendelian randomization (MR) studies designed to reduce bias have shown either no or a harmful association. Here we conducted an updated systematic review and re-evaluated existing cohort, case-control, and MR data using the burden of proof meta-analytical framework. Cohort and case-control data show low to moderate alcohol consumption is associated with decreased IHD risk – specifically, intake is inversely related to IHD and myocardial infarction morbidity in both sexes and IHD mortality in males – while pooled MR data show no association, confirming that self-reported versus genetically predicted alcohol use data yield conflicting findings about the alcohol-IHD relationship. Our results highlight the need to advance MR methodologies and emulate randomized trials using large observational databases to obtain more definitive answers to this critical public health question

Measuring Signaling and RNA-Seq in the Same Cell Links Gene Expression to Dynamic Patterns of NF-κB Activation

Signaling proteins display remarkable cell-to-cell heterogeneity in their dynamic responses to stimuli, but the consequences of this heterogeneity remain largely unknown. For instance, the contribution of the dynamics of the innate immune transcription factor nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) to gene expression output is disputed. Here we explore these questions by integrating live-cell imaging approaches with single-cell sequencing technologies. We used this approach to measure both the dynamics of lipopolysaccharide-induced NF-κB activation and the global transcriptional response in the same individual cell. Our results identify multiple, distinct cytokine expression patterns that are correlated with NF-κB activation dynamics, establishing a functional role for NF-κB dynamics in determining cellular phenotypes. Applications of this approach to other model systems and single-cell sequencing technologies have significant potential for discovery, as it is now possible to trace cellular behavior from the initial stimulus, through the signaling pathways, down to genome-wide changes in gene expression, all inside of a single cell