H.E.A.R.T.

Healthy parenting and family resilience in early childhood has been shown to be an important factor in building emotional resilience for the children: it illustrates that when parents have higher emotional resilience, their children tend to have higher emotional resilience as well. However, the tools that available in the market right now only teach people what emotional resilience rather than how to practice it in daily life. This report describes our project to create a virtual reality tool that can not only teach the importance of emotional resilience, but also help the parents develop personal resilience. The system is based on the VR Empathy Training Tool created by a former senior design project in which the user can interact with a crying child and learn how to handle stress under certain circumstances. The new system will add new features so that it can inform users about their stress level and allow the users to track their progress

Biological and Mechanical Approaches to Sunscald Management in Bell Pepper Production

Producing red bell peppers in high temperature and light environments can be challenging because many new semi-indeterminate varieties produce small plant canopies that leave fruit exposed to damage (sunscald) caused by solar radiation. Pepper production in Utah coincides with high air temperatures and solar radiation levels during July, August, and September. Increasing plant canopy size is one way to protect fruit from solar radiation. Low tunnels optimize plant growth by increasing air and soil temperatures. Growing plants under low tunnels early in the season could increase fruit shading later in the season. Another way to protect fruit is by using mechanical shade. Hanging shade cloth over a crop has been shown to decrease air temperatures and solar radiation levels reaching fruit. While the common production practice is to horizontally orient shade cloth, vertically orienting shade cloth may also be effective by providing shade to the crop in the morning and evening. These protection methods were evaluated in Layton, Utah for effectiveness of increasing yield by decreasing sunscald occurrence. While plants grown under low tunnels for two weeks after transplanting had larger canopies, they did not increase yield or decrease sunscald compared to plants not grown under low tunnels. Vertical shade increased yield and decreased sunscald most effectively when combined with plants grown under low tunnels. Vertical shade protected exposed fruit when the sun was at lower elevations while increased canopy shade protected fruit when the sun was at high solar elevations. Horizontal shade completely eliminated sunscald and produced the largest yields of high quality fruit. The additional costs associated with using supplemental shade were offset by increased yields and higher value of larger fruit. Separate studies were carried out to determine how sunlight and wind influence the temperature of pepper fruit. Sunlight exceeding 550 W·m-2 increased pepper fruit surface temperature (FST) to damaging levels. Wind decreased pepper FST but moderate wind speeds (3.0 m·s-1) did not decrease it below damaging levels. To insure protection, growers should apply supplemental shade when solar radiation levels exceed 550 W·m-2. These results provide improved guidelines for growers interested in using supplemental shade to provide pepper fruit for local and national consumption. Additionally, pepper growers in high air temperature and light environments can increase productivity and profitability with the use of supplemental shade

Development and Distribution of Thermometry Hardware for the Simons Observatory

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment consisting of four telescopes. SO is being constructed at an elevation of 5,190 meters on Cerro Toco in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and is set to begin observation in 2022. SO will employ 60,000 detectors, yielding a sensitivity greater than all previous CMB experiments. To achieve low noise performance the telescope cryostats will be cooled to ~100 mK using low temperature dilution refrigerators. Measuring cryostat temperatures is essential for pre-deployment testing, telescope installation, and telescope monitoring during observation. The purpose of this project is to design, build, and test the hardware necessary for regular measurements at all temperature stages of the SO telescopes. This paper details my design of housekeeping hardware, contribution to temperature sensor calibration, and characterization of calibration discrepancies attributable to faults within my lab’s dilution refrigerator

Robust social categorization emerges from learning the identities of very few faces

Viewers are highly accurate at recognizing sex and race from faces-though it remains unclear how this is achieved. Recognition of familiar faces is also highly accurate across a very large range of viewing conditions, despite the difficulty of the problem. Here we show that computation of sex and race can emerge incidentally from a system designed to compute identity. We emphasize the role of multiple encounters with a small number of people, which we take to underlie human face learning. We use highly variable everyday 'ambient' images of a few people to train a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model on identity. The resulting model has human-like properties, including a facility to cohere previously unseen ambient images of familiar (trained) people-an ability which breaks down for the faces of unknown (untrained) people. The first dimension created by the identity-trained LDA classifies both familiar and unfamiliar faces by sex, and the second dimension classifies faces by race- even though neither of these categories was explicitly coded at learning. By varying the numbers and types of face identities on which a further series of LDA models were trained, we show that this incidental learning of sex and race reflects covariation between these social categories and face identity, and that a remarkably small number of identities need be learnt before such incidental dimensions emerge. The task of learning to recognize familiar faces is sufficient to create certain salient social categories

Direct and mediated effects of a social-emotional and character development program on adolescent substance use

Mitigating and preventing substance use among adolescents requires approaches that address the multitude of factors that influence this behavior. Such approaches must be tested, not only for evidence of empirical effectiveness, but also to determine the mechanisms by which they are successful. The aims of the present study were twofold: 1) To determine the effectiveness of a school-based social-emotional and character development (SECD) program, Positive Action (PA), in reducing substance use (SU) among a sample of U.S. youth living in a low-income, urban environment, and 2) to test one mechanism by which the program achieves its success. We used longitudinal mediation analysis to test the hypotheses that: 1) students attending PA intervention schools engage in significantly less SU than students attending control schools, 2) students attending PA intervention schools show significantly better change in SECD than students attending control schools, and 3) the effect of the PA intervention on SU is mediated by the change in SECD. Analyses revealed program effects on both SECD and SU, a relationship between SECD and SU, and the effects of PA on SU were completely mediated by changes in SECD. Future research directions and implications for schoolbased social-emotional and character development efforts and substance use prevention are addressed.peer-reviewe

Positive allosteric modulation as a potential therapeutic strategy in anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis

N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) are ionotropic glutamate receptors important for synaptic plasticity, memory, and neuropsychiatric health. NMDAR hypofunction contributes to multiple disorders, including anti-NMDAR encephalitis (NMDARE), an autoimmune disease of the CNS associated with GluN1 antibody-mediated NMDAR internalization. Here we characterize the functional/pharmacological consequences of exposure to CSF from female human NMDARE patients on NMDAR function, and we characterize the effects of intervention with recently described positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) of NMDARs. Incubation (48 h) of rat hippocampal neurons of both sexes in confirmed NMDARE patient CSF, but not control CSF, attenuated NMDA-induced current. Residual NMDAR function was characterized by lack of change in channel open probability, indiscriminate loss of synaptic and extrasynaptic NMDARs, and indiscriminate loss of GluN2B-containing and GluN2B-lacking NMDARs. NMDARs tagged with N-terminal pHluorin fluorescence demonstrated loss of surface receptors. Thus, function of residual NMDARs following CSF exposure was indistinguishable from baseline, and deficits appear wholly accounted for by receptor loss. Coapplication of CSF and PAMs of NMDARs (SGE-301 or SGE-550, oxysterol-mimetic) for 24 h restored NMDAR function following 24 h incubation in patient CSF. Curiously, restoration of NMDAR function was observed despite washout of PAMs before electrophysiological recordings. Subsequent experiments suggested that residual allosteric potentiation of NMDAR function explained the persistent rescue. Further studies of the pathogenesis of NMDARE and intervention with PAMs may inform new treatments for NMDARE and other disorders associated with NMDAR hypofunction.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTAnti-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor encephalitis (NMDARE) is increasingly recognized as an important cause of sudden-onset psychosis and other neuropsychiatric symptoms. Current treatment leaves unmet medical need. Here we demonstrate cellular evidence that newly identified positive allosteric modulators of NMDAR function may be a viable therapeutic strategy.</jats:p