Art Looking within MotherScholarhood: Art Elicitation for Self-Reflections and Sense Making

This study continues the ongoing collaborative autoethnographic, arts-based scholarship of three MotherScholars (Burrow et al.). This study presents both the critical self-reflections resulting from and advocacy for the process of art elicitation (Burrow and Burrow), which is a valid and effective methodology to allow MotherScholars a vital pause for valuable personal self-interrogation and renewed clarity within their scholarship. Like our previous research, this study reaffirms that MotherScholars need space and time to reflect on the fluidity and flexibility of their personal-professional identity as it is affected by natural life changes (e.g., children leaving home for college), unexpected transitions (e.g., divorce), and trauma (e.g., global pandemics). The necessity to find malleability in the MotherScholar identity can help women in academia name what they need and recognize what they are already uniquely suited to handle

A prototype system for observing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation - scientific basis, measurement and risk mitigation strategies, and first results

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) carries up to one quarter of the global northward heat transport in the Subtropical North Atlantic. A system monitoring the strength of the MOC volume transport has been operating since April 2004. The core of this system is an array of moored sensors measuring density, bottom pressure and ocean currents. A strategy to mitigate risks of possible partial failures of the array is presented, relying on backup and complementary measurements. The MOC is decomposed into five components, making use of the continuous moored observations, and of cable measurements across the Straits of Florida, and wind stress data. The components compensate for each other, indicating that the system is working reliably. The year-long average strength of the MOC is 18.7±5.6 Sv, with wind-driven and density-inferred transports contributing equally to the variability. Numerical simulations suggest that the surprisingly fast density changes at the western boundary are partially linked to westward propagating planetary wave

The Skits, Sketches, and Stories of MotherScholars

“MotherScholars” are those who creatively weave their maternal identities into their scholarly spaces. With this article we invite readers along a collaborative friendship study of our own participatory arts-based journey to understand, reclaim, and identify personal and professional benefits only realized once we acknowledged and embraced the blended reality of Mother Scholarhood. Our work is presented as a curation of individual skits, sketches, and short stories that were created during a collective 8-week time span in a shared virtual space. We open our story to interpretation and interaction through the lenses of our readers

Algal food and fuel coproduction can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions while improving land and water-use efficiency

The goals of ensuring energy, water, food, and climate security can often conflict.Microalgae (algae) are being pursued as a feedstockfor both food and fuels—primarily due to algae’s high areal yield and ability to grow on non-arable land, thus avoiding common bioenergy-food tradeoffs. However, algal cultivation requires significant energy inputs that may limit potential emission reductions.We examine the tradeoffs associated with producing fuel andfood from algae at the energy–food–water–climate nexus.We use the GCAM integrated assessment model to demonstrate that algalfood production can promote reductions in land-use change emissions through the offset of conventional agriculture. However,fuel production, either via co-production of algal food and fuel or complete biomass conversion to fuel, is necessary to ensure long-term emission reductions, due to the high energy costs of cultivation. Cultivation of salt– water algae for food products may lead to substantial freshwater savings; but, nutrients for algae cultivation will need to be sourced from waste streams to ensure sustainability. By reducing the land demand of food production, while simultaneously enhancingfood and energy security, algae can further enable the development of terrestrial bioenergy technologies including those utilizing carbon capture and storage. Our results demonstrate that large-scale algae research and commercialization efforts should focus on developing both food and energy products to achieve environmental goals.https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/11/114006/metaPublished versio

Quarantine Mothering and Working at Home: How Institutions of Higher Education Supported (or Failed to Support) Academic Mothers

This mixed methods study explores whether and how explicit policies, implicit practices, and internal communication from university administrators about aca-demic mothers’ work lives and expectations were impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine protocols. As this was a large study focussing on university policies addressing the presence of children on campus and the ways in which their enforcement or nonenforcement affected the personal and professional lives of faculty, we used purposive sampling (Palys) and snowball sampling (Patton) to distribute a survey in academic social media groups and to professional organization listservs (Palys). Among other things, the survey asked participants to report how well they thought their university was handling the COVID-19 pandemic and invited them to participate in an in-depth interview. As a result of the survey responses, we subsequently interviewed nineteen academic mothers from a range of academic disciplines, ages, and types of institutions, until we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin). The semi-structured interview protocol included questions about the impact of COVID-19-related policies, practices, and messaging regarding children on participants’ job satisfaction, mental and physical health, as well as work-life balance. We used open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin) and the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss) to analyze the data. We then triangulated the data by comparing interview and survey findings, engaging multiple researchers in the analysis, and conducting peer debriefings (Denzin and Lincoln; Lincoln and Guba). Findings highlight institutional policies and practices that serve or fail to serve faculty in terms of supporting their professional advancement in teaching, research, and service

Determination of Coenzyme A and Acetyl-Coenzyme A in Biological samples Using HPLC with UV Detection

Coenzyme A (CoA) and acetyl-coenzyme A (acetyl-CoA) play essential roles in cell energy metabolism. Dysregulation of the biosynthesis and functioning of both compounds may contribute to various pathological conditions. We describe here a simple and sensitive HPLC-UV based method for simultaneous determination of CoA and acetyl-CoA in a variety of biological samples, including cells in culture, mouse cortex, and rat plasma, liver, kidney, and brain tissues. The limits of detection for CoA and acetyl-CoA are \u3e10-fold lower than those obtained by previously described HPLC procedures, with coefficients of variatio

Nonanalytic behavior of the spin susceptibility in clean Fermi systems

The wavevector and temperature dependent static spin susceptibility, \chi_s(Q,T), of clean interacting Fermi systems is considered in dimensions 1\leq d \leq 3. We show that at zero temperature \chi_s is a nonanalytic function of |Q|, with the leading nonanalyticity being |Q|^{d-1} for 1<d<3, and Q^2\ln|Q| for d=3. For the homogeneous spin susceptibility we find a nonanalytic temperature dependence T^{d-1} for 1<d<3. We give qualitative mode-mode coupling arguments to that effect, and corroborate these arguments by a perturbative calculation to second order in the electron-electron interaction amplitude. The implications of this, in particular for itinerant ferromagnetism, are discussed. We also point out the relation between our findings and established perturbative results for 1-d systems, as well as for the temperature dependence of \chi_s(Q=0) in d=3.Comment: 12pp., REVTeX, 5 eps figures, final version as publishe

Blowup Criterion for the Compressible Flows with Vacuum States

We prove that the maximum norm of the deformation tensor of velocity gradients controls the possible breakdown of smooth(strong) solutions for the 3-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations, which will happen, for example, if the initial density is compactly supported \cite{X1}. More precisely, if a solution of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations is initially regular and loses its regularity at some later time, then the loss of regularity implies the growth without bound of the deformation tensor as the critical time approaches. Our result is the same as Ponce's criterion for 3-dimensional incompressible Euler equations (\cite{po}). Moreover, our method can be generalized to the full Compressible Navier-Stokes system which improve the previous results. In addition, initial vacuum states are allowed in our cases.Comment: 17 page