The Relation between Self-Reported Alcohol and Cannabis Use and Prospective Memory in College Students

Emily Koberstein, Stephanie Clancy Dollinger, Ph.d, & Sherrie Parks, M.A. Department of Psychology The Relation between Self-Reported Alcohol and Cannabis Use and Prospective Memory in College Students The aim of this study is to see if there is a relation between drug use and prospective memory performance. Prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future and is a vital aspect of everyday living. Prospective memory can be broken down into short-term, long-term and event-based or time-based components. Most research on prospective memory has primarily examined differences between young and old adults (e.g., Einstein & McDaniel, 2005; Rendell & Craik, 2000; Schnitzpahn et al., 2014). The current study examined possible effects of self-reported alcohol and cannabis use on prospective memory performance. A computer based Virtual Week task was used to assess prospective memory; and a questionnaire was used to assess substance use in college students at a large Midwestern university. Prospective memory performance was examined in five groups; non-drug users, alcohol-only user, cannabis-only users, alcohol and cannabis users, poly-drug users. It was hypothesized that prospective memory scores would be lowest in college students who reported poly-drug use followed by students who reported combined alcohol and cannabis use. Alcohol-only and cannabis-only users were expected to have similar results, while non-drug users were expected to perform the best on the prospective memory task. Findings and implications of drug use on prospective memory in college students is discussed

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Associations Across Multiple Saltmarsh Plant Species Mitigating the Impacts of Sea-Level Rise

Sea level rise caused by climate change will detrimentally impact saltmarsh habitats by increasing the elevation and rate of terrestrial salt water inundation, thereby reducing effective functionality of ecosystem services provided by saltmarshes. Facilitation is key to community structuring and function in habitats characterized by abiotic stress, such as salt marshes. Halophytic plants within salt marshes can benefit from symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) facilitations through increased inundation tolerance, greater nutrient availability and uptake, alleviation from drought stress and relief from saline stress. Through this research, land managers developing sea-level rise mitigation plans will have data supporting which plants will be most resilient to future increases in inundation and limits to nutrient availability due to AMF association. Potential inoculation of host plants could protect estuaries from sea level rise and increased frequency and intensity of storm events in coastal regions. In identifying plants which host beneficial fungi, and thereby have greater inundation resilience and nutrient availability, fungal inoculation of plants in marshes could help plants grow further into lower marsh elevations, increasing sediment accretion and decreasing erosion and soil degradation

Unleashing Optics and Optoacoustics for Developmental Biology

The past decade marked an optical revolution in biology: an unprecedented number of optical techniques were developed and adopted for biological exploration, demonstrating increasing interest in optical imaging and in vivo interrogations. Optical methods have become faster and have reached nanoscale resolution, and are now complemented by optoacoustic (photoacoustic) methods capable of imaging whole specimens in vivo. Never before were so many optical imaging barriers broken in such a short time-frame: with new approaches to optical microscopy and mesoscopy came an increased ability to image biology at unprecedented speed, resolution, and depth. This review covers the most relevant techniques for imaging in developmental biology, and offers an outlook on the next steps for these technologies and their applications.The work on this review article has received funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Germany (Leibniz Prize 2013; NT 3/10 1) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Photonic Science Germany, Tech2See 13N12623/ 4. J.R. acknowledges support from the European Commission FP7 CIG grant HIGH THROUGH PUT TOMO, and Spanish MINECO grant MESO IMAGING FIS2013 41802 R

SATCOM simulator speeds MSS deployment and lowers costs

Mobile satellite systems (MSS) are being proposed and licensed at an accelerating rate. How can the design, manufacture, and performance of these systems be optimized at costs that allow a reasonable return on investment? The answer is the use of system simulation techniques beginning early in the system design and continuing through integration, pre- and post-launch monitoring, and in-orbit monitoring. This paper focuses on using commercially available, validated simulation instruments to deliver accurate, repeatable, and cost effective measurements throughout the life of a typical mobile satellite system. A satellite communications test set is discussed that provides complete parametric test capability with a significant improvement in measurement speed for manufacturing, integration, and pre-launch and in-orbit testing. The test set can simulate actual up and down link traffic conditions to evaluate the effects of system impairments, propagation and multipath on bit error rate (BER), channel capacity and transponder and system load balancing. Using a standard set of commercial instruments to deliver accurate, verifiable measurements anywhere in the world speeds deployment, generates measurement confidence, and lowers total system cost

Shedding light on surfaces: using photons to transform and pattern material surfaces

The ultimate goal of surface modification is to quantitatively control surface properties by precise manipulation of surface chemical structure at the molecular level. Advances in the understanding of molecular design principles for soft matter surfaces can be combined with the available arsenal of interesting photochemical reactions to create an exciting paradigm for surface modification: the use of photons to both transform and pattern chemical functionality at soft matter surfaces. The success of the paradigm is predicated on the ability to design and synthesize "photochemical surface delivery vehicles," complex photoactive molecules that form stable surface monolayers and subsequently deliver photoactive moieties to the surface. Shedding light onto these smart, modified surfaces brings about a wide variety of precise photochemical reactions that are preprogrammed within the surface delivery vehicle. Surface chemical patterns are formed by exposure through a mask. Some photochemical surface transformation can be considered as "green" chemistry since only photons are required as reagents. In this review, we provide a brief tutorial on photochemistry fundamentals to illustrate the nature of possible photochemical surface reactions and discuss the principles of design for photochemical surface delivery vehicles. Applications of the paradigm drawn from a variety of fields emphasize the tremendous potential for photochemical surface transformation and patterning on both hard and soft substrates

Core-Clickable PEG-Branch-Azide Bivalent-Bottle-Brush Polymers by ROMP: Grafting-Through and Clicking-To

The combination of highly efficient polymerizations with modular "click" coupling reactions has enabled the synthesis of a wide variety of novel nanoscopic tructures. Here we demonstrate the facile synthesis of a new class of clickable, branched nanostructures, polyethylene glycol (PEG)-branch-azide bivalent-brush polymers, facilitated by "graft-through" ring-opening metathesis polymerization of a branched norbornene-PEG-chloride macromonomer followed by halide-azide exchange. The resulting bivalent-brush polymers possess azide groups at the core near a polynorbornene backbone with PEG chains extended into solution; the structure resembles a unimolecular micelle. We demonstrate copper-catalyzed azide-alkre cycloaddition (CuAAC) "click-to" coupling of a photocleavable doxorubicin (DOX)-alkyne derivative to the azide core. The CuAAC coupling was quantitative across a wide range of nanoscopic sizes (similar to 6-similar to 50 nrn); UV photolysis of the resulting DOX-loaded materials yielded free DOX that was therapeutically effective against human cancer cells

Dynamic sequencing and cut consolidation for the parallel hybrid-cut nested L-shaped method

Abstract The Nested L-shaped method is used to solve two-and multi-stage linear stochastic programs with recourse, which can have integer variables on the first stage. In this paper we present and evaluate a cut consolidation technique and a dynamic sequencing protocol to accelerate the solution process. Furthermore, we present a parallelized implementation of the algorithm, which is developed within the COIN-OR framework. We show on a test set of 48 two-stage and 42 multi-stage problems, that both of the developed techniques lead to significant speed ups in computation time

Copper-free click chemistry for the in situ crosslinking of photodegradable star polymers

Bifunctional, fluorinated cyclooctynes were used for the in situ click crosslinking of azide-terminated photodegradable star polymers, yielding photodegradable polymeric model networks with well-defined structures and tunable gelation times