Brown Marmorated Stink Bug in the Mid-Atlantic States: Assessing Grower Perceptions, Economic Impact, and Progress

Attendees at mid-Atlantic grower meetings were surveyed in 2012 and 2014 regarding their knowledge of the invasive brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) and its impact. Responses to individual questions were paired and analyzed for independence between survey years. Despite a large-scale effort by Extension to inform growers and others about BMSB, there remains a clear need for more training on the identification of BMSB nymphs. Respondents also want more information on effective chemical options, scouting methods for BMSB, and BMSB biology, and they prefer to receive this information from Cooperative Extension

ARGUING THE INARGUABLE: IDEOLOGY AND ETHOS IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY POLITICAL NOVEL

In “Arguing the Inarguable: Ideology and Ethos in the Twentieth-Century Political Novel,” I examine novels by twentieth-century British and postcolonial writers whose longstanding interest in political ethos was stimulated by Communist and other far-left movements in Britain and the Commonwealth. In both fiction and non-fiction by George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis, and Doris Lessing, the exceptional persona of the left-wing political dissident stimulates these writers’ contemplation of what it means to have political beliefs at all. The Marxist tradition of ideology critique thus proves crucial for them despite their varied attempts at distancing themselves from Marxist politics. Late-twentieth and twenty-first century developments in literary and political theory illuminate these novels’ contemporary relevance to debates about identity and belief. In examining Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, I consider how Orwell’s interest in impersonal modes of political engagement challenges characterizations of his work as anti-intellectual and typological. Rather, I argue, the acquirable powers of ideology critique and abstract analysis are essential for his brand of democratic socialism, because they are separable from personality, taste, and comportment. In The Revenge for Love by Wyndham Lewis, long noted for his anti-Communism, the working-class Communist protagonist enables the novel’s satirical insights rather than serving as the target of them, as I show. By focalizing his criticism of the British bourgeois left through a committed Communist, Lewis is able to advance a political critique that defies most categorizations of Lewis as reactionary. Rather, Lewis is committed to an intellectually rigorous, unflinchingly modern ethos that compels him to deny the feasibility of an apolitical or anti-political posture of personal authenticity. Doris Lessing’s fiction, by contrast, suggests that separation of private life from political engagement is impossible; rather, their inevitable influence on each other in the far-left tends to be corrosive. From The Golden Notebook to “The Temptation of Jack Orkney” to The Good Terrorist (set in the Thatcher era), Lessing shows Marxism’s decline in the British political ethos, from its height during Orwell’s career

"He was distraught, I was distraught.." Parents' experiences of accessing emergency care following an avulsion injury to their child

Objective To explore how parents access emergency care for their children following avulsion of a permanent tooth. Method Semi-structured qualitative interviews were undertaken with parents of children who had suffered a tooth avulsion injury in the previous two years. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Framework analysis was used to analyse the data and interpret the core concepts from the interviews. Results Nine parents participated in the study. None of the children received the appropriate emergency dental care within the timeframe identified by national and international guidelines. The core themes that emerged following the analysis were knowledge, access and emotion. Discussion & Conclusions The parents who were interviewed for this study had poor knowledge of what to do in the event of a tooth avulsion injury. This lack of knowledge directly impaired their ability to navigate emergency dental care for their child. They described their upset and distress following their child's injury, but also feelings of frustration and disappointment in relation to the emergency care their child received. There is a need to develop appropriate support and clinical pathways to enable parents to rapidly access appropriate and timely care for their child following a complex dental trauma

Mechanistic origin of the stereodivergence in decarboxylative allylation

A stereochemical test has been used to probe the mechanism of decarboxylative allylation. This probe suggests that the mechanism of DcA reactions can change based on the substitution pattern at the α-carbon of the nucleophile, however reaction via stabilized malonate nucleophiles is the lower energy pathway. Lastly, this mechanistic proposal has predictive power and can be used to explain chemoselectivities in decarboxylative reactions that were previously confounding

Evaluation of the new capture vapourizer for aerosol mass spectrometers (AMS) through laboratory studies of inorganic species

Aerosol mass spectrometers (AMSs) and Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitors (ACSMs) commercialized by Aerodyne are widely used to measure the non-refractory species in submicron particles. With the standard vapourizer (SV) that is installed in all commercial instruments to date, the quantification of ambient aerosol mass concentration requires the use of the collection efficiency (CE) to correct for the loss of particles due to bounce. A new capture vapourizer (CV) has been designed to reduce the need for a bounce-related CE correction. Two high-resolution AMS instruments, one with a SV and one with a CV, were operated side by side in the laboratory. Four standard species, NH4NO3, NaNO3, (NH4)2SO4 and NH4Cl, which typically constitute the majority of the mass of ambient submicron inorganic species, are studied. The effect of vapourizer temperature (Tv&thinsp;&sim;&thinsp;200&ndash;800 &deg;C) on the detected fragments, CE and size distributions are investigated. A Tv of 500&ndash;550 &deg;C for the CV is recommended. In the CV, CE was identical (around unity) for more volatile species (e.g. NH4NO3) and comparable to or higher than the SV for less-volatile species (e.g. (NH4)2SO4), demonstrating an improvement in CE for laboratory inorganic species in the CV. The detected relative intensities of fragments of NO3&nbsp;and SO4&nbsp;species observed with the CV are different from those observed with the SV, and are consistent with additional thermal decomposition arising from the increased residence time and multiple collisions. Increased residence times with the CV also lead to broader particle size distribution measurements than with the SV. A method for estimating whether pure species will be detected in AMS sizing mode is proposed. Production of CO2(g) from sampled nitrate on the vapourizer surface, which has been reported for the SV, is negligible for the CV for NH4NO3&nbsp;and comparable to the SV for NaNO3.&thinsp;. We observe an extremely consistent fragmentation for ammonium compared to very large changes for the associated anions. Together with other evidence, this indicates that it is unlikely that a major fraction of inorganic species vapourizes as intact salts in the AMS.</p

Treatment algorithm for infants diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy through newborn screening

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is an autosomal recessive disease characterized by the degeneration of alpha motor neurons in the spinal cord, leading to muscular atrophy. SMA is caused by deletions or mutations in the survival motor neuron 1 gene (SMN1). In humans, a nearly identical copy gene, SMN2, is present. Because SMN2 has been shown to decrease disease severity in a dose-dependent manner, SMN2 copy number is predictive of disease severity. To develop a treatment algorithm for SMA-positive infants identified through newborn screening based upon SMN2 copy number. A working group comprised of 15 SMA experts participated in a modified Delphi process, moderated by a neutral third-party expert, to develop treatment guidelines. The overarching recommendation is that all infants with two or three copies of SMN2 should receive immediate treatment (n = 13). For those infants in which immediate treatment is not recommended, guidelines were developed that outline the timing and appropriate screens and tests to be used to determine the timing of treatment initiation. The identification SMA affected infants via newborn screening presents an unprecedented opportunity for achievement of maximal therapeutic benefit through the administration of treatment pre-symptomatically. The recommendations provided here are intended to help formulate treatment guidelines for infants who test positive during the newborn screening process

A feasibility study to explore the governance processes required for linkage between dental epidemiological, and birth cohort, data in the UK

Birth cohort initiatives, such as ‘Born in Bradford’, provide a unique opportunity to study the influence of socio-economic and environmental factors acting in pregnancy, birth and infancy on the development of dental caries in later life. This paper describes a feasibility study which established the processes required, and outcomes of, successful linkage of oral health data collected by the 2013 three-year-old national dental epidemiology survey with the Born in Bradford birth cohort database. The necessary processes included achieving research permissions and ethical approval; creation of a data sharing agreement; ensuring data security and encrypted data transfer. With regard to the outcomes, a robust a priori statistical plan was developed. 152 three-year-old children were examined for the 2013 dental epidemiology survey in Bradford, and of those, 69 parents consented to data linkage believing that their child was part of the Born in Bradford cohort. However, only 36 of these 69 children were participating in the cohort. Of these, six children had obvious dentinal caries experience (dmft >0). There was insufficient power with such small numbers, to examine the association between birthweight and dental caries at the age of three-years-old. Key learning points from this feasibility study have informed the design of a larger study to link the 2014/5 five-year-old dental epidemiology surveys with the Born in Bradford cohort. This paper reveals the important methodological considerations for future data linkages between routine health data and research data

Computing exponentially faster: Implementing a nondeterministic universal Turing machine using DNA

The theory of computer science is based around Universal Turing Machines (UTMs): abstract machines able to execute all possible algorithms. Modern digital computers are physical embodiments of UTMs. The nondeterministic polynomial (NP) time complexity class of problems is the most significant in computer science, and an efficient (i.e. polynomial P) way to solve such problems would be of profound economic and social importance. By definition nondeterministic UTMs (NUTMs) solve NP complete problems in P time. However, NUTMs have previously been believed to be physically impossible to construct. Thue string rewriting systems are computationally equivalent to UTMs, and are naturally nondeterministic. Here we describe the physical design for a NUTM that implements a universal Thue system. The design exploits the ability of DNA to replicate to execute an exponential number of computational paths in P time. Each Thue rewriting step is embodied in a DNA edit implemented using a novel combination of polymerase chain reactions and site-directed mutagenesis. We demonstrate that this design works using both computational modelling and in vitro molecular biology experimentation. The current design has limitations, such as restricted error-correction. However, it opens up the prospect of engineering NUTM based computers able to outperform all standard computers on important practical problems