A Spanish Language Milker\u27s School for Idaho Dairy Employees

Educational opportunities for Hispanic employees are consistently one of the top Idaho dairy industry-identified needs. Consequently, University of Idaho Extension Faculty developed a Spanish language Milker\u27s School. The Milker\u27s School provides Spanish-speaking dairy employees with an opportunity to improve their knowledge and understanding of the entire milking process, including the importance of their role in the process. The Milker\u27s School provides an educational opportunity for a traditionally underserved group, and narrows the language and culture gap that exists between English speaking dairy owners and Spanish speaking employees

Building and Sustaining Small Acreage Programs

Living on the Land (LOL), a Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education curriculum for small acreage landowners, has been successfully used in Southwest Idaho for 8 years. During that time, Extension organizers have built and sustained a small acreage learning community using systems thinking, team teaching, alumni participation, and community partners. These concepts could be applied to other small acreage and natural resource Extension programs to keep the programs relevant, useful, and functioning for an extended period of time

Building and Sustaining Small Acreage Programs

Living on the Land (LOL), a Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education curriculum for small acreage landowners, has been successfully used in Southwest Idaho for 8 years. During that time, Extension organizers have built and sustained a small acreage learning community using systems thinking, team teaching, alumni participation, and community partners. These concepts could be applied to other small acreage and natural resource Extension programs to keep the programs relevant, useful, and functioning for an extended period of time

Spiky oscillations in NF-kB signalling

The NF-kB signalling system is involved in a variety of cellular processes including immune response, inflammation, and apoptosis. Recent experiments have found oscillations in the nuclear-cytoplasmic translocation of the NF-kB transcription factor. How the cell uses the oscillations to differentiate input conditions and send specific signals to downstream genes is an open problem. We shed light on this issue by examining the small core network driving the oscillations, which, we show, is designed to produce periodic spikes in nuclear NF-kB concentration. The oscillations can be used to regulate downstream genes in a variety of ways. In particular, we show that genes to whose operator sites NF-kB binds and dissociates fast can respond very sensitively to changes in the input signal, with effective Hill coefficients in excess of 20.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure

High Q Cavity Induced Fluxon Bunching in Inductively Coupled Josephson Junctions

We consider fluxon dynamics in a stack of inductively coupled long Josephson junctions connected capacitively to a common resonant cavity at one of the boundaries. We study, through theoretical and numerical analysis, the possibility for the cavity to induce a transition from the energetically favored state of spatially separated shuttling fluxons in the different junctions to a high velocity, high energy state of identical fluxon modes.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

An easy proof of Jensen's theorem on the uniqueness of infinity harmonic functions

We present a new, easy, and elementary proof of Jensen's Theorem on the uniqueness of infinity harmonic functions. The idea is to pass to a finite difference equation by taking maximums and minimums over small balls.Comment: 4 pages; comments added, proof simplifie

Antibody-Mediated Immobilization of Virions in Mucus

Antibodies have been shown to hinder the movement of herpes simplex virus virions in cervicovaginal mucus, as well as other viruses in other mucus secretions. However, it has not been possible to directly observe the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, so the nature of virion-antibody-mucin interactions remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyzed thousands of virion traces from single particle tracking experiments to explicate how antibodies must cooperate to immobilize virions for relatively long time periods. First, using a clustering analysis, we observed a clear separation between two classes of virion behavior: freely diffusing and immobilized. While the proportion of freely diffusing virions decreased with antibody concentration, the magnitude of their diffusivity did not, implying an all-or-nothing dichotomy in the pathwise effect of the antibodies. Proceeding under the assumption that all binding events are reversible, we used a novel switch-point detection method to conclude that there are very few, if any, state switches on the experimental timescale of 20Â s. To understand this slow state switching, we analyzed a recently proposed continuous-time Markov chain model for binding kinetics and virion movement. Model analysis implied that virion immobilization requires cooperation by multiple antibodies that are simultaneously bound to the virion and mucin matrix and that there is an entanglement phenomenon that accelerates antibody-mucin binding when a virion is immobilized. In addition to developing a widely applicable framework for analyzing multistate particle behavior, this work substantially enhances our mechanistic understanding of how antibodies can reinforce a mucus barrier against passive invasive species

Convexity criteria and uniqueness of absolutely minimizing functions

We show that absolutely minimizing functions relative to a convex Hamiltonian $H:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ are uniquely determined by their boundary values under minimal assumptions on $H.$ Along the way, we extend the known equivalences between comparison with cones, convexity criteria, and absolutely minimizing properties, to this generality. These results perfect a long development in the uniqueness/existence theory of the archetypal problem of the calculus of variations in $L^\infty.$Comment: 34 page

Singular solutions of fully nonlinear elliptic equations and applications

We study the properties of solutions of fully nonlinear, positively homogeneous elliptic equations near boundary points of Lipschitz domains at which the solution may be singular. We show that these equations have two positive solutions in each cone of $\mathbb{R}^n$, and the solutions are unique in an appropriate sense. We introduce a new method for analyzing the behavior of solutions near certain Lipschitz boundary points, which permits us to classify isolated boundary singularities of solutions which are bounded from either above or below. We also obtain a sharp Phragm\'en-Lindel\"of result as well as a principle of positive singularities in certain Lipschitz domains.Comment: 41 pages, 2 figure

Estimating vegetation and litter biomass fractions in rangelands using structure-from-motion and LiDAR datasets from unmanned aerial vehicles

Collection: Advances and Applications of Unoccupied Aerial Systems (UAS) Research in Landscape Ecology[EN] Context The invasion of annual grasses in western U.S. rangelands promotes high litter accumulation throughout the landscape that perpetuates a grass-fire cycle threatening biodiversity. Objectives To provide novel evidence on the potential of fine spatial and structural resolution remote sensing data derived from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to separately estimate the biomass of vegetation and litter fractions in sagebrush ecosystems. Methods We calculated several plot-level metrics with ecological relevance and representative of the biomass fraction distribution by strata from UAV Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) datasets and regressed those predictors against vegetation, litter, and total biomass fractions harvested in the field. We also tested a hybrid approach in which we used digital terrain models (DTMs) computed from UAV LiDAR data to height-normalize SfM-derived point clouds (UAV SfM-LiDAR). Results The metrics derived from UAV LiDAR data had the highest predictive ability in terms of total (R2 = 0.74) and litter (R2 = 0.59) biomass, while those from the UAV SfM-LiDAR provided the highest predictive performance for vegetation biomass (R2 = 0.77 versus R2 = 0.72 for UAV LiDAR). In turn, SfM and SfM-LiDAR point clouds indicated a pronounced decrease in the estimation performance of litter and total biomass. Conclusions Our results demonstrate that high-density UAV LiDAR datasets are essential for consistently estimating all biomass fractions through more accurate characterization of (i) the vertical structure of the plant community beneath top-of-canopy surface and (ii) the terrain microtopography through thick and dense litter layers than achieved with SfM-derived productsSIThis study was financially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation in the framework of LANDSUSFIRE project (PID2022-139156OB-C21) within the National Program for the Promotion of Scientific-Technical Research (2021–2023), and with Next-Generation Funds of the European Union (EU) in the framework of the FIREMAP project (TED2021-130925B-I00); and by the Regional Government of Castile and León in the framework of the IA-FIREXTCyL project (LE081P23). Additional financial support was provided by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture (award 2019-68008-29914) and the US Department of Interior Grant No. L21AC10378-0