Prospectus, September 28, 2006

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2006/1021/thumbnail.jp

Bringing People Back into Public Health Data: Community Feedback on a Set of Visualization Tools - Summary Report

This course-based study is a product of the University of Denver’s Spring 2022 The Social Determination of Health (ANTH 2424) class. The study aimed to understand how well a set of public health visualization tools tells the data stories about people in Colorado, and about important public health problems. For this, a team of almost sixty undergraduate students taking the class, coordinated by three graduate teaching assistants, and directed by the course instructor interviewed a total of fifty-six people from Colorado, qualitatively analyzed those interviews, and wrote reports that draw conclusions and recommendations

Shorter Food Chain Length in Ancient Lakes: Evidence from a Global Synthesis

Food webs may be affected by evolutionary processes, and effective evolutionary time ultimately affects the probability of species evolving to fill the niche space. Thus, ecosystem history may set important evolutionary constraints on community composition and food web structure. Food chain length (FCL) has long been recognized as a fundamental ecosystem attribute. We examined historical effects on FCL in large lakes spanning >6 orders of magnitude in age. We found that food chains in the world’s ancient lakes (n = 8) were significantly shorter than in recently formed lakes (n = 10) and reservoirs (n = 3), despite the fact that ancient lakes harbored much higher species richness, including many endemic species. One potential factor leading to shorter FCL in ancient lakes is an increasing diversity of trophic omnivores and herbivores. Speciation could simply broaden the number of species within a trophic group, particularly at lower trophic levels and could also lead to a greater degree of trophic omnivory. Our results highlight a counter-intuitive and poorly-understood role of evolutionary history in shaping key food web properties such as FCL

Prospectus, October 19, 2006

https://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_2006/1024/thumbnail.jp

The Synthesis of a New Class of Highly Fluorescent Chromones via an Inverse-Demand Hetero-Diels–Alder Reaction

A new class of fluorophores has been developed utilizing an inverse-demand hetero-Diels–Alder reaction with silyl enol ethers and substituted 3-formylchromones. These compounds yield blue to green fluorescence with quantum yields up to 73%. They also exhibit good potential for use as fluorescent probes in biological systems, as they are cell membrane permeable with low cytotoxicity