Assessing the Intention, Attitudes, and Social Influences on COVID-19 Preventive Behaviors Among Non-rural Black and Rural Appalachian White Populations: A Faith-Based Community Study

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has had detrimental impacts in non-rural Black and rural Appalachian populations. Yet despite the pandemic’s magnitude, there is a scarcity of research exploring potential influences of attitudes and social influences within these populations on their adherence to COVID-19 public health preventive behaviors. Purpose: This study examines the intention, attitudes, and social influences to adhere to COVID-19 preventive behaviors among non-rural Black and rural Appalachian congregants in Kentucky by integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Methods: Secondary analysis of cross-sectional data was used to assess the association between the TPB constructs and four key public health behaviors: obeying a stay-at-home order, social distancing, good hygiene practices, and wearing a mask in public. Generalized estimating equation-type logistic regression models were fit for all binary outcomes. Results: A total of 942 respondents completed the survey. Eighty-nine per cent were older than 36 years, and 73% were female. Of the respondents who were White, 97.7% lived in rural Appalachia Kentucky, and of those who were Black, 93.5% lived in non-rural Kentucky. Attitude towards the behavior was negatively associated with the stay-at-home order (p=0.003). Both attitude toward the behavior (p\u3c0.001) and the subjective norm (p=0.025) were negatively associated with mask wearing. Perceived behavioral control was positively associated with mask wearing (p=0.023) with non-rural respondents more likely to wear a mask than rural ones (p\u3c0.001). None of the TPB constructs showed significant association with hygiene practices or with social distancing. Implications: This study provides further insight into the cultural and societal influences that intersect during a global pandemic. The intention to comply with public health recommendations may vary at favorable and unfavorable levels. The results lend support to the importance of designing effective, culturally tailored communication for future public health preparedness

Hematopoietic Stem Cells Are Uniquely Selective in Their Migratory Response to Chemokines

Although hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) migration into and out of sites of active hematopoiesis is poorly understood, it is a critical process that underlies modern clinical stem cell transplantation and may be important for normal hematopoietic homeostasis. Given the established roles of chemotactic cytokine (chemokine)-directed migration of other leukocyte subsets, the migration of murine HSC to a large panel of CC and CXC chemokines was investigated. HSC migrated only in response to stromal derived factor-1α, the ligand for the CXC chemokine receptor 4 (CXCR4). CXCR4 expression by HSC was confirmed by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction analysis. Surprisingly, HSC also expressed mRNA for CCR3 and CCR9, although they failed to migrate to the ligands for these receptors. The sharply restricted chemotactic responsiveness of HSC is unique among leukocytes and may be necessary for the specific homing of circulating HSC to bone marrow, as well as for the maintenance of HSC in hematopoietic microenvironments

\u3cem\u3eBorrelia burgdorferi\u3c/em\u3e EbfC Defines a Newly-Identified, Widespread Family of Bacterial DNA-Binding Proteins

The Lyme disease spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, encodes a novel type of DNA-binding protein named EbfC. Orthologs of EbfC are encoded by a wide range of bacterial species, so characterization of the borrelial protein has implications that span the eubacterial kingdom. The present work defines the DNA sequence required for high-affinity binding by EbfC to be the 4 bp broken palindrome GTnAC, where ‘n’ can be any nucleotide. Two high-affinity EbfC-binding sites are located immediately 5′ of B. burgdorferi erp transcriptional promoters, and binding of EbfC was found to alter the conformation of erp promoter DNA. Consensus EbfC-binding sites are abundantly distributed throughout the B. burgdorferi genome, occurring approximately once every 1 kb. These and other features of EbfC suggest that this small protein and its orthologs may represent a distinctive type of bacterial nucleoid-associated protein. EbfC was shown to bind DNA as a homodimer, and site-directed mutagenesis studies indicated that EbfC and its orthologs appear to bind DNA via a novel α-helical ‘tweezer’-like structure

The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a dipole-based aperture array synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz frequency range. It is capable of a wide range of science investigations, but is initially focused on three key science projects. These are detection and characterization of 3-dimensional brightness temperature fluctuations in the 21cm line of neutral hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) at redshifts from 6 to 10, solar imaging and remote sensing of the inner heliosphere via propagation effects on signals from distant background sources,and high-sensitivity exploration of the variable radio sky. The array design features 8192 dual-polarization broad-band active dipoles, arranged into 512 tiles comprising 16 dipoles each. The tiles are quasi-randomly distributed over an aperture 1.5km in diameter, with a small number of outliers extending to 3km. All tile-tile baselines are correlated in custom FPGA-based hardware, yielding a Nyquist-sampled instantaneous monochromatic uv coverage and unprecedented point spread function (PSF) quality. The correlated data are calibrated in real time using novel position-dependent self-calibration algorithms. The array is located in the Murchison region of outback Western Australia. This region is characterized by extremely low population density and a superbly radio-quiet environment,allowing full exploitation of the instrumental capabilities.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the IEE

Overcoming real-world obstacles in 21 cm power spectrum estimation: A method demonstration and results from early Murchison Widefield Array data

We present techniques for bridging the gap between idealized inverse covariance weighted quadratic estimation of 21 cm power spectra and the real-world challenges presented universally by interferometric observation. By carefully evaluating various estimators and adapting our techniques for large but incomplete data sets, we develop a robust power spectrum estimation framework that preserves the so-called "Epoch of Reionization (EoR) window" and keeps track of estimator errors and covariances. We apply our method to observations from the 32-tile prototype of the Murchinson Widefield Array to demonstrate the importance of a judicious analysis technique. Lastly, we apply our method to investigate the dependence of the clean EoR window on frequency—especially the frequency dependence of the so-called “wedge" feature—and establish upper limits on the power spectrum from z ¼ 6.2 to z ¼ 11:7. Our lowest limit is ?ðkÞ < 0.3 Kelvin at 95% confidence at a comoving scale k ¼ 0.046 Mpc-1 and z ¼ 9.5

Serendipitous discovery of a dying Giant Radio Galaxy associated with NGC 1534, using the murchison widefield array

Recent observations with the Murchison Widefield Array at 185 MHz have serendipitously unveiled a heretofore unknown giant and relatively nearby (z=0.0178) radio galaxy associated with NGC 1534. The diffuse emission presented here is the first indication that NGC 1534 is one of a rare class of objects (along with NGC 5128 and NGC 612) in which a galaxy with a prominent dust lane hosts radio emission on scales of ~700 kpc. We present details of the radio emission along with a detailed comparison with other radio galaxies with discs. NGC 1534 is the lowest surface brightness radio galaxy known with an estimated scaled 1.4-GHz surface brightness of just 0.2 mJy arcmin-2. The radio lobes have one of the steepest spectral indices yet observed: α = -2.1 ± 0.1, and the core to lobe luminosity ratio is <0.1 per cent. We estimate the space density of this low brightness (dying) phase of radio galaxy evolution as 7 × 10-7 Mpc-3 and argue that normal AGN cannot spend more than 6 per cent of their lifetime in this phase if they all go through the same cycle

Quantifying ionospheric effects on time-domain astrophysics with the Murchison Widefield Array

© 2015 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Refraction and diffraction of incoming radio waves by the ionosphere induce time variability in the angular positions, peak amplitudes and shapes of radio sources, potentially complicating the automated cross-matching and identification of transient and variable radio sources. In this work, we empirically assess the effects of the ionosphere on data taken by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope. We directly examine 51 h of data observed over 10 nights under quiet geomagnetic conditions (global storm index Kp &lt; 2), analysing the behaviour of short-time-scale angular position and peak flux density variations of around ten thousand unresolved sources. We find that while much of the variation in angular position can be attributed to ionospheric refraction, the characteristic displacements (10-20 arcsec) at 154 MHz are small enough that search radii of 1-2 arcmin should be sufficient for crossmatching under typical conditions. By examining bulk trends in amplitude variability, we place upper limits on the modulation index associated with ionospheric scintillation of 1-3 per cent for the various nights. For sources fainter than ~1 Jy, this variation is below the image noise at typical MWA sensitivities. Our results demonstrate that the ionosphere is not a significant impediment to the goals of time-domain science with the MWA at 154 MHz