Vaccine hesitancy and the willingness to recommend the COVID-19 vaccine to children in a rural country on the United States-Mexico border

IntroductionAs of October 26, 2022, only 9% of children in the United States aged 6 months to 4 years have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine despite FDA approval since June 17, 2022. Rates are better yet still low for children aged 5 to 11 years as nearly 30% were fully vaccinated as of August 23, 2022. Vaccine hesitancy among adults is one of the major factors affecting low vaccine uptake rates in children against COVID-19, yet most studies examining vaccine hesitancy have targeted school-age and adolescent children.MethodsWith the aim of assessing the willingness to recommend the COVID-19 vaccination to children under 5 years compared to children 5 to 12 years of age, a county-wide survey was conducted between January 11 and March 7, 2022, among adults on the United States-Mexico border.ResultsAmong the 765 responses, 72.5% were female and 42.3% were Latinx. The most significant factor associated with likelihood to recommend the COVID-19 vaccine to children less than 5 years and 5–12 years of age was adult vaccination status. Ordinal logistic regression also indicated that ethnicity, primary language, being a parent, previous COVID-19 infection, and concern about getting COVID-19 in the future were significantly associated with likelihood of COVID-19 vaccine recommendation to children < 5 years and 5–12 years old.DiscussionThis study found high consistency among respondents in their willingness to vaccinate children aged < 5 years compared with children aged 5–12 years. Our findings support public health strategies that target adult vaccinations as an avenue to improve childhood vaccinations for young childre

Julio C. TREBOLLÉ-BARRERA, Jehú y Joás. Texto y composición literaria de 2 Reyes 9-11, Edilva («Institución San Jerónimo», 17), Valencia 1984, 254 pp., 16 x 24. [RECENSIÓN]

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147202/1/jgc40689.pd

A Framework for Prioritizing the TESS Planetary Candidates Most Amenable to Atmospheric Characterization

A key legacy of the recently launched TESS mission will be to provide the astronomical community with many of the best transiting exoplanet targets for atmospheric characterization. However, time is of the essence to take full advantage of this opportunity. JWST, although delayed, will still complete its nominal five year mission on a timeline that motivates rapid identification, confirmation, and mass measurement of the top atmospheric characterization targets from TESS. Beyond JWST, future dedicated missions for atmospheric studies such as ARIEL require the discovery and confirmation of several hundred additional sub-Jovian size planets (R_p < 10 R_Earth) orbiting bright stars, beyond those known today, to ensure a successful statistical census of exoplanet atmospheres. Ground-based ELTs will also contribute to surveying the atmospheres of the transiting planets discovered by TESS. Here we present a set of two straightforward analytic metrics, quantifying the expected signal-to-noise in transmission and thermal emission spectroscopy for a given planet, that will allow the top atmospheric characterization targets to be readily identified among the TESS planet candidates. Targets that meet our proposed threshold values for these metrics would be encouraged for rapid follow-up and confirmation via radial velocity mass measurements. Based on the catalog of simulated TESS detections by Sullivan et al. (2015), we determine appropriate cutoff values of the metrics, such that the TESS mission will ultimately yield a sample of $\sim300$ high-quality atmospheric characterization targets across a range of planet size bins, extending down to Earth-size, potentially habitable worlds.Comment: accepted to PAS

A broadband thermal emission spectrum of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-18b

Close-in giant exoplanets with temperatures greater than 2,000 K (''ultra-hot Jupiters'') have been the subject of extensive efforts to determine their atmospheric properties using thermal emission measurements from the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. However, previous studies have yielded inconsistent results because the small sizes of the spectral features and the limited information content of the data resulted in high sensitivity to the varying assumptions made in the treatment of instrument systematics and the atmospheric retrieval analysis. Here we present a dayside thermal emission spectrum of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-18b obtained with the NIRISS instrument on JWST. The data span 0.85 to 2.85 $\mu$m in wavelength at an average resolving power of 400 and exhibit minimal systematics. The spectrum shows three water emission features (at $>$6$\sigma$ confidence) and evidence for optical opacity, possibly due to H$^-$, TiO, and VO (combined significance of 3.8$\sigma$). Models that fit the data require a thermal inversion, molecular dissociation as predicted by chemical equilibrium, a solar heavy element abundance (''metallicity'', M/H = 1.03$_{-0.51}^{+1.11}$ $\times$ solar), and a carbon-to-oxygen (C/O) ratio less than unity. The data also yield a dayside brightness temperature map, which shows a peak in temperature near the sub-stellar point that decreases steeply and symmetrically with longitude toward the terminators.Comment: JWST ERS bright star observations. Uploaded to inform JWST Cycle 2 proposals. Manuscript under review. 50 pages, 14 figures, 2 table

‘Fourth places’: the Contemporary Public Settings for Informal Social Interaction among Strangers.

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’ (Oldenburg 1989). Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity, and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces. Keywords: ‘Fourth places’, Informal Public Social Settings, Social Interaction, Strangers, Public Space Design

Dietary cadmium and risk of invasive postmenopausal breast cancer in the VITAL cohort.

This study does not support the hypothesis that dietary cadmium intake is a risk factor for breast cancer. However, non-differential measurement error in the estimate of cadmium intake is likely the most important factor that could have obscured an association

Nightside clouds and disequilibrium chemistry on the hot Jupiter WASP-43b

Hot Jupiters are among the best-studied exoplanets, but it is still poorly understood how their chemical composition and cloud properties vary with longitude. Theoretical models predict that clouds may condense on the nightside and that molecular abundances can be driven out of equilibrium by zonal winds. Here we report a phase-resolved emission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-43b measured from 5 μm to 12 μm with the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument. The spectra reveal a large day–night temperature contrast (with average brightness temperatures of 1,524 ± 35 K and 863 ± 23 K, respectively) and evidence for water absorption at all orbital phases. Comparisons with three-dimensional atmospheric models show that both the phase-curve shape and emission spectra strongly suggest the presence of nightside clouds that become optically thick to thermal emission at pressures greater than ~100 mbar. The dayside is consistent with a cloudless atmosphere above the mid-infrared photosphere. Contrary to expectations from equilibrium chemistry but consistent with disequilibrium kinetics models, methane is not detected on the nightside (2σ upper limit of 1–6 ppm, depending on model assumptions). Our results provide strong evidence that the atmosphere of WASP-43b is shaped by disequilibrium processes and provide new insights into the properties of the planet’s nightside clouds. However, the remaining discrepancies between our observations and our predictive atmospheric models emphasize the importance of further exploring the effects of clouds and disequilibrium chemistry in numerical models.Peer reviewe

Nightside clouds and disequilibrium chemistry on the hot Jupiter WASP-43b

Hot Jupiters are among the best-studied exoplanets, but it is still poorly understood how their chemical composition and cloud properties vary with longitude. Theoretical models predict that clouds may condense on the nightside and that molecular abundances can be driven out of equilibrium by zonal winds. Here we report a phase-resolved emission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-43b measured from 5-12 μm with JWST's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). The spectra reveal a large day-night temperature contrast (with average brightness temperatures of 1524±35 and 863±23 Kelvin, respectively) and evidence for water absorption at all orbital phases. Comparisons with three-dimensional atmospheric models show that both the phase curve shape and emission spectra strongly suggest the presence of nightside clouds which become optically thick to thermal emission at pressures greater than ~100 mbar. The dayside is consistent with a cloudless atmosphere above the mid-infrared photosphere. Contrary to expectations from equilibrium chemistry but consistent with disequilibrium kinetics models, methane is not detected on the nightside (2σ upper limit of 1-6 parts per million, depending on model assumptions)

The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC 8462852

We present a photometric detection of the first brightness dips of the unique variable star KIC 8462852 since the end of the Kepler space mission in 2013 May. Our regular photometric surveillance started in October 2015, and a sequence of dipping began in 2017 May continuing on through the end of 2017, when the star was no longer visible from Earth. We distinguish four main 1-2.5% dips, named "Elsie," "Celeste," "Skara Brae," and "Angkor", which persist on timescales from several days to weeks. Our main results so far are: (i) there are no apparent changes of the stellar spectrum or polarization during the dips; (ii) the multiband photometry of the dips shows differential reddening favoring non-grey extinction. Therefore, our data are inconsistent with dip models that invoke optically thick material, but rather they are in-line with predictions for an occulter consisting primarily of ordinary dust, where much of the material must be optically thin with a size scale <<1um, and may also be consistent with models invoking variations intrinsic to the stellar photosphere. Notably, our data do not place constraints on the color of the longer-term "secular" dimming, which may be caused by independent processes, or probe different regimes of a single process