Using the CERES-Maize Model to Create a Geographically Explicit Grid Based Estimate of Corn Yield Under Climate Change Scenarios

The CERES-Maize model was evaluated in its capacity to predict both regional maize yield and water use within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) Region 1 between the years 1997-2007. A grid based, geospatially explicit method was developed to express the various rainfed and irrigated maize cultivars grown across the region. Overall, the calibrated model compared well for both physiological and yield parameters, producing significant linear relationships (p The calibrated and validated CERES-Maize model was used to predict potential evapotranspiration and yield under three IPCC weather scenarios for the year 2050 to evaluate crop production under climate change. Regional evapotranspiration was predicted to increase for both rainfed and irrigated maize; however, declines were predicted in rainfed evapotranspiration for the states of Indiana and Ohio. Regional maize yields were predicted to increase under both rainfed and irrigation conditions compared to the baseline (1997-2007) conditions. Despite the increases in overall maize yield projected across the region as a whole, large declines were observed in certain areas such as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio under rainfed conditions and South Dakota under irrigated conditions. Overall irrigation demands declined in Nebraska and South Dakota. The results suggest that maize production could improve under climate change scenarios, and shifts in production to western locations could maximize production in 2050

Kenya-Malawi Biomass Energy Project Summary Report

This project is intended to carry out an engineering, social and economic evaluation of food processing in the rural areas of Malawi and Kenya. The aim is to collect the information necessary for designing a clean and low-cost energy system for co-generation of heat and electricity from agricultural waste to support food processing. the objective of this research is to survey the following aspects: Technical: The existing energy-intensive food processing industries in the partner countries. Social: Current and historic social resources: e.g. the designers, operators and beneficiaries of the existing processes; Locally available skills for designing and operating alternative energy solutions. End-user: Current and historical regional usages of the agricultural products; Local views on existing problems and their desired goals

Active Manifold-Geodesics: A Riemannian View On Active Subspaces With Shape Sensitivity Applications

Aerospace designers routinely manipulate shapes in engineering systems toward design goals and study changes in the modeled system to facilitate new intuitions about the physical processes---e.g., shape optimization and parameter sensitivity analysis of an airfoil. The computational tools for such manipulation can include parameterized geometries, where the parameters provide a set of independent variables that control the geometry. Active subspaces provide an intuitive change of basis for studying differentiable functions with Euclidean domain of dimension greater than or equal to two. Recent work has developed and exploited active subspaces in the composition from geometry parameters to design quantities of interest (e.g., lift or drag of an airfoil); the active subspace is spanned by a set of directions in a parameter space which change the associated quantity of interest more, on average over the parameter design space, than orthogonal directions. Consequently, the active directions produce insight-rich geometry perturbations for a specific quantity of interest; however, these perturbations also depend on the chosen geometry parameterization. Several engineering applications explore this shape-parameterization dependency for optimization and sensitivity analysis. However, selection of a parameterization restricts any subsequent analysis to the class of chosen parameterization; including the approximation of an active subspace. Defining a precise calculus of shapes independent of engineering parameterizations requires a new interpretation of the domain of scalar-valued functions dependent on these shapes. The space of shapes admits a topological structure of a smooth manifold, a more general non-Euclidean domain for quantities of interest. This work extends the computation of active subspaces to differentiable functions defined on smooth manifolds M. We seek ordered geodesics defining submanifolds of a Riemannian manifold (M, g), endowed with a metric g, which change the differentiable function iv more, by an analogous globalizing notion of the average. These submanifolds representing analogous subspaces on a more general non-Euclidean domain are referred to as active manifold-geodesics. However, there are competing intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives regarding computations and approximations on Riemannian manifolds. Extrinsic perspectives rely on the existence of isometric embeddings of the manifold into an ambient Euclidean space while intrinsic perspectives work entirely with objects defined only on the manifold, i.e., not requiring an isometric embedding. The continuous form of an analogous average outer product of the gradient is presented from an intrinsic perspective. A discretization and approximation of the eigenspaces of the proposed intrinsic extension is applied to the sphere S2 &sub; R3 as an example which can be visualizedThese routines are then generalized to a matrix manifold of landmark-affine shapes to inform a global shape sensitivity analysis of transonic airfoils---independent of a shape-parameterization.</p

The pre- and post-pitch-entry physical and technical responses of rugby league interchange players according to starting status

This study quantified the activities of interchange players during the 15 min before and 20 min after initial pitch-entry (INTentry) or re-entry (INTre−entry) for substitutes and starters, respectively, and identified relationships between pre- and post-pitch-entry responses. Fourteen semi-professional rugby league players wore Microelectromechanical Systems and were filmed throughout 10 matches in which they were interchanged (68 observations). Twelve physical and technical variables were analyzed for the pre-match warm-up, five, 10, and 15 min before INTentry or INTre−entry (physical variables only), and five min epochs following match-introduction. Linear mixed models indicated that during the 0–5 min following INTentry, physical and technical responses were typically greater (∼7.1% to 66.3%) than subsequent epochs while total (∼6.2%) and high-speed (37.1%) distance also exceeded the 0–5 min after INTre−entry (p < 0.05). Edge forwards reached higher peak speeds (11.4% to 11.7%) than hookers and middle forwards, but hookers completed more passes (87.4% to 90.5%). Pre-pitch-entry movements were positively associated with post-pitch-entry tackles (r = 0.43 to 0.49) and high-speed distance (r = 0.46), but negatively associated with total distance (r = −0.32 to −0.68). Within tolerable limits, increasing the activity performed during the ∼15 min before pitch-entry could benefit high-speed match-play performance indicators. Transient changes in post-pitch-entry physical and technical responses could reflect self-pacing strategies, contextual factors, or perceived preparedness. The apparent absence of progressive performance-limiting fatigue, characterized by a plateau in responses after the initial five min following INTentry or INTre−entry, may suggest a role for interchange players to provide a more sustained impact and thus achieve interchange objectives

Satori 2017

The Satori is a student literary publication that expresses the artistic spirit of the students of Winona State University. Student poetry, prose, and graphic art are published in the Satori every spring since 1970. The Satori 2017 editors are: Editor-in-Chief: Sajda Omar Poetry Editor: Karl Hanson Art/Design Editor: Danielle Eberhard Prose Editor: Cassie Douglas Poetry Committee: Kelly Johnson and Lydia Papenfuss Art/Design Committee: Aurie Brighton and Xinyue Wang Prose Committee: Katie McCoy, Madison Wilke, Megan Back, Alayna Godfrey, Madelyn Hall, and Sam Stormoen Faculty Advisor: Dr. Gary Eddy, Professor of Englishhttps://openriver.winona.edu/satori/1013/thumbnail.jp

Afterimage

https://via.library.depaul.edu/museum-publications/1007/thumbnail.jp

The contribution of geogenic particulate matter to lung disease in indigenous children

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Indigenous children have much higher rates of ear and lung disease than non-Indigenous children, which may be related to exposure to high levels of geogenic (earth-derived) particulate matter (PM). The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between dust levels and health in Indigenous children in Western Australia (W.A.). Data were from a population-based sample of 1077 Indigenous children living in 66 remote communities of W.A. (>2,000,000 km2), with information on health outcomes derived from carer reports and hospitalisation records. Associations between dust levels and health outcomes were assessed by multivariate logistic regression in a multi-level framework. We assessed the effect of exposure to community sampled PM on epithelial cell (NuLi-1) responses to non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) in vitro. High dust levels were associated with increased odds of hospitalisation for upper (OR 1.77 95% CI [1.02–3.06]) and lower (OR 1.99 95% CI [1.08–3.68]) respiratory tract infections and ear disease (OR 3.06 95% CI [1.20–7.80]). Exposure to PM enhanced NTHi adhesion and invasion of epithelial cells and impaired IL-8 production. Exposure to geogenic PM may be contributing to the poor respiratory health of disadvantaged communities in arid environments where geogenic PM levels are high

MicroRNA Predictors of Longevity in Caenorhabditis elegans

Neither genetic nor environmental factors fully account for variability in individual longevity: genetically identical invertebrates in homogenous environments often experience no less variability in lifespan than outbred human populations. Such variability is often assumed to result from stochasticity in damage accumulation over time; however, the identification of early-life gene expression states that predict future longevity would suggest that lifespan is least in part epigenetically determined. Such “biomarkers of aging,” genetic or otherwise, nevertheless remain rare. In this work, we sought early-life differences in organismal robustness in unperturbed individuals and examined the utility of microRNAs, known regulators of lifespan, development, and robustness, as aging biomarkers. We quantitatively examined Caenorhabditis elegans reared individually in a novel apparatus and observed throughout their lives. Early-to-mid–adulthood measures of homeostatic ability jointly predict 62% of longevity variability. Though correlated, markers of growth/muscle maintenance and of metabolic by-products (“age pigments”) report independently on lifespan, suggesting that graceful aging is not a single process. We further identified three microRNAs in which early-adulthood expression patterns individually predict up to 47% of lifespan differences. Though expression of each increases throughout this time, mir-71 and mir-246 correlate with lifespan, while mir-239 anti-correlates. Two of these three microRNA “biomarkers of aging” act upstream in insulin/IGF-1–like signaling (IIS) and other known longevity pathways, thus we infer that these microRNAs not only report on but also likely determine longevity. Thus, fluctuations in early-life IIS, due to variation in these microRNAs and from other causes, may determine individual lifespan

Climate drives the geography of marine consumption by changing predator communities

Este artículo contiene 7 páginas, 3 figuras, 1 tabla.The global distribution of primary production and consumption by humans (fisheries) is well-documented, but we have no map linking the central ecological process of consumption within food webs to temperature and other ecological drivers. Using standardized assays that span 105° of latitude on four continents, we show that rates of bait consumption by generalist predators in shallow marine ecosystems are tightly linked to both temperature and the composition of consumer assemblages. Unexpectedly, rates of consumption peaked at midlatitudes (25 to 35°) in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres across both seagrass and unvegetated sediment habitats. This pattern contrasts with terrestrial systems, where biotic interactions reportedly weaken away from the equator, but it parallels an emerging pattern of a subtropical peak in marine biodiversity. The higher consumption at midlatitudes was closely related to the type of consumers present, which explained rates of consumption better than consumer density, biomass, species diversity, or habitat. Indeed, the apparent effect of temperature on consumption was mostly driven by temperature-associated turnover in consumer community composition. Our findings reinforce the key influence of climate warming on altered species composition and highlight its implications for the functioning of Earth’s ecosystems.We acknowledge funding from the Smithsonian Institution and the Tula Foundation.Peer reviewe