Family Preservation and Fatalities: The Effect of Policy on Child Maltreatment Deaths

National estimates suggest that between 1,600 and 1,800 children are victims of CMFs each year (USDHHS, 2020), though it is believed that this number is an underestimation of the true figure (Douglas and Finkelhor, 2005; Yampolskaya, Greenbaum, and Berson, 2009). Two belief systems in protecting children have arisen over the past decades, influenced both by sensational cases of child abuse and research. One side argues that every effort must be made to keep the family intact: the family preservation approach. Alternatively, some argue that by attempting to preserve the family structure and failing to remove victims expeditiously, we leave children in dangerous and life-threatening situations and increase risk. Family preservation is a common intervention strategy used in cases of child maltreatment. States are tasked with developing their own legislative approach to prevention and intervention of child maltreatment; and the statutes vary between states in terms of prioritization of family preservation. An indicator of family preservation priority was constructed by coding statutes from each U.S. state based on policy language. This value served as the predictor variable in the hierarchical regression analyses of rates of CMF. The sample consisted of all CMFs reported to the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System between the years of 2008 and 2018. A series of multiple hierarchical regressions were run to determine if a relationship existed between family preservation statute score and rate of CMFs by state in an attempt to determine if a relationship existed between family preservation statute score and CMF rate. Analyses revealed no significant correlations, although it was found that the direction of the relationship was that the more states emphasized family preservation in their statutes, the lower the rate of CMFs. In a second hierarchical analysis examining trends of CMFs, no association was found between preservation statute score and increased rates in CMFs

Effects of Previous Hybrid on Corn Yields the Following Year

Approximately 25% of Iowa\u27s annual 12.5 million acres of corn is grown where corn was grown the previous year. With adequate N fertilizer, corn following corn usually yields less than corn following soybeans or some other crop. The magnitude of this yield reduction usually is about 10%, but it varies between fields, locations and years. During 1988 in southeastern Iowa, farmers and researchers reported yield differences as great as 100 bufacre between the yield of corn after soybeans and corn after corn. There are many possible explanations for the rotation effect such as differences in residual soil moisture, soil nitrogen, soil compaction or structure, soil microflora, corn root worm and diseases. Sometimes the yield difference can be related to one or more of these explanations, but not with any consistency. It becomes impossible to characterize the interaction of these various factors with each other in highly variable field environments. Many studies have been conducted attempting to relate substances left by corn which is toxic to the following corn crop or stimulatory substances left by soybeans; this phenomenon of one crop affecting another crop by substances left in the environment is called allelopathy (Anderson et al. 1988)

Living inside the box: environmental effects on mouse models of human disease.

The impact of the laboratory environment on animal models of human disease, particularly the mouse, has recently come under intense scrutiny regarding both the reproducibility of such environments and their ability to accurately recapitulate elements of human environmental conditions. One common objection to the use of mice in highly controlled facilities is that humans live in much more diverse and stressful environments, which affects the expression and characteristics of disease phenotypes. In this Special Article, we review some of the known effects of the laboratory environment on mouse phenotypes and compare them with environmental effects on humans that modify phenotypes or, in some cases, have driven genetic adaptation. We conclude that the \u27boxes\u27 inhabited by mice and humans have much in common, but that, when attempting to tease out the effects of environment on phenotype, a controlled and, importantly, well-characterized environment is essential

The mouse pathology ontology, MPATH; structure and applications

BACKGROUND: The capture and use of disease-related anatomic pathology data for both model organism phenotyping and human clinical practice requires a relatively simple nomenclature and coding system that can be integrated into data collection platforms (such as computerized medical record-keeping systems) to enable the pathologist to rapidly screen and accurately record observations. The MPATH ontology was originally constructed in 2,000 by a committee of pathologists for the annotation of rodent histopathology images, but is now widely used for coding and analysis of disease and phenotype data for rodents, humans and zebrafish. CONSTRUCTION AND CONTENT: MPATH is divided into two main branches describing pathological processes and structures based on traditional histopathological principles. It does not aim to include definitive diagnoses, which would generally be regarded as disease concepts. It contains 888 core pathology terms in an almost exclusively is_a hierarchy nine layers deep. Currently, 86% of the terms have textual definitions and contain relationships as well as logical axioms to other ontologies such the Gene Ontology. APPLICATION AND UTILITY: MPATH was originally devised for the annotation of histopathological images from mice but is now being used much more widely in the recording of diagnostic and phenotypic data from both mice and humans, and in the construction of logical definitions for phenotype and disease ontologies. We discuss the use of MPATH to generate cross-products with qualifiers derived from a subset of the Phenotype and Trait Ontology (PATO) and its application to large-scale high-throughput phenotyping studies. MPATH provides a largely species-agnostic ontology for the descriptions of anatomic pathology, which can be applied to most amniotes and is now finding extensive use in species other than mice. It enables investigators to interrogate large datasets at a variety of depths, use semantic analysis to identify the relations between diseases in different species and integrate pathology data with other data types, such as pharmacogenomics

Quantitative evaluation of ontology design patterns for combining pathology and anatomy ontologies.

Data are increasingly annotated with multiple ontologies to capture rich information about the features of the subject under investigation. Analysis may be performed over each ontology separately, but recently there has been a move to combine multiple ontologies to provide more powerful analytical possibilities. However, it is often not clear how to combine ontologies or how to assess or evaluate the potential design patterns available. Here we use a large and well-characterized dataset of anatomic pathology descriptions from a major study of aging mice. We show how different design patterns based on the MPATH and MA ontologies provide orthogonal axes of analysis, and perform differently in over-representation and semantic similarity applications. We discuss how such a data-driven approach might be used generally to generate and evaluate ontology design patterns.National Institutes of Health (AG038070-05, for the Shock Aging Center) King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award No. URF/1/3454-01-01 and FCC/1/1976-08-01. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Office of Sponsored Research (OSR) under Award No. FCS/1/3657-02-0

Soybean Residual Effects on a Subsequent Maize Crop

Maize (Zea mays 1.) grown after soybean (Glycine max 1. Merr.) consistently performs better than maize that follows itself (second year maize), irrespective of nitrogen fertilization. In previous studies of the soybean-maize rotation, there never has been an evaluation of the potentially different effects of soybean genotypes on following maize. A two-year, soybean maize rotation was initiated in Ames at 1988 with the first year planted to various soybean genotypes, a maize hybrid, and oat (Avena sativa 1.). These were followed in the second year by a single maize hybrid with 0, 80, 160, and 240 kg/ha N fertilization levels. Results are based on three repetitions of this cycle. Averaged over all years and N rates, maize after nodulated soybean and oat yielded 1270 and 1570 kg/ha, 16 and 20% respectively, more than second-year maize. Second-year maize was delayed in silking by 4 days. Though soybean returned 60 to 70 kg/ha of N to the soil in vegetative residue, there seemed to be no net N contribution from soybean to maize because soybean benefited maize less at zero N than did unharvested oat. Soybean evidently returns to the soil less N than is mineralized from soil organic matter during a cropping year. Prior soybean and oat both benefited maize even under the highest nitrogen fertilization rate. BSR 201 soybean benefited maize more than did the other soybean cultivars or oat. Averaged for years and the two highest N rates, BSR 201 benefited maize 680 kg/ha (ca 11 bu/A) more than all the other nodulated soybean genotypes averaged. The BSR 201 effect, however, was not consistent, occurring in two of the three years. Work is continuing using other BSR types

Above- and Below-ground Biomass Production in Corn and Prairie Bioenergy Cropping Systems

The Comparison of Biofuel Systems (COBS) project is a long-term, 20-acre field experiment designed to provide quantitative, side-by-side comparisons of corn- and prairie-based biofuel feedstock production systems with respect to biomass yields, liquid fuel potential, and multiple environmental impacts. Here, we report on above- and below-ground biomass production from selected treatments

Exploring the elephant: histopathology in high-throughput phenotyping of mutant mice

Recent advances in gene knockout techniques and the in vivo analysis of mutant mice, together with the advent of large-scale projects for systematic mouse mutagenesis and genome-wide phenotyping, have allowed the creation of platforms for the most complete and systematic analysis of gene function ever undertaken in a vertebrate. The development of high-throughput phenotyping pipelines for these and other large-scale projects allows investigators to search and integrate large amounts of directly comparable phenotype data from many mutants, on a genomic scale, to help develop and test new hypotheses about the origins of disease and the normal functions of genes in the organism. Histopathology has a venerable history in the understanding of the pathobiology of human and animal disease, and presents complementary advantages and challenges to in vivo phenotyping. In this review, we present evidence for the unique contribution that histopathology can make to a large-scale phenotyping effort, using examples from past and current programmes at Lexicon Pharmaceuticals and The Jackson Laboratory, and critically assess the role of histopathology analysis in high-throughput phenotyping pipelines

Hyaline Arteriolosclerosis in 30 Strains of Aged Inbred Mice.

During a screen for vascular phenotypes in aged laboratory mice, a unique discrete phenotype of hyaline arteriolosclerosis of the intertubular arteries and arterioles of the testes was identified in several inbred strains. Lesions were limited to the testes and did not occur as part of any renal, systemic, or pulmonary arteriopathy or vasculitis phenotype. There was no evidence of systemic or pulmonary hypertension, and lesions did not occur in ovaries of females. Frequency was highest in males of the SM/J (27/30, 90%) and WSB/EiJ (19/26, 73%) strains, aged 383 to 847 days. Lesions were sporadically present in males from several other inbred strains at a much lower (<20%) frequency. The risk of testicular hyaline arteriolosclerosis is at least partially underpinned by a genetic predisposition that is not associated with other vascular lesions (including vasculitis), separating out the etiology of this form and site of arteriolosclerosis from other related conditions that often co-occur in other strains of mice and in humans. Because of their genetic uniformity and controlled dietary and environmental conditions, mice are an excellent model to dissect the pathogenesis of human disease conditions. In this study, a discrete genetically driven phenotype of testicular hyaline arteriolosclerosis in aging mice was identified. These observations open the possibility of identifying the underlying genetic variant(s) associated with the predisposition and therefore allowing future interrogation of the pathogenesis of this condition

Zeeman Anisotropy Fluorescence Spectroscopy, Characteristic Radiative Lifetimes, and Novel Site Symmetries in KCl: Sm 2+

By means of Zeeman anisotropy fluorescence (ZAF) and its field dependence (up to 55.8 kG), the authors have investigated the 4.2 K narrow-line fluorescence of KCl:Sm2+ and identified some hitherto unreported Sm2+ sites. The strong no-field line at 7693.5 Å (5D0→7F3) and a very weak no-field line at 8742.8 Å (5D0→7F5) are shown to be of C3v symmetry origin. The 24.5-kG ZAF pattern observed in the 7696-7700-Å (5D0→7F3) region has been identified to originate from a type-II Cs site. The 26.5-kG ZAF patterns of the C3v no-field line at 7693.5 Å and the type-I Cs no-field line at 7694.5 Å overlap in the 7693-7695.3-Å region, and are elucidated through the field dependence of their Zeeman components. Characteristic radiative lifetimes of the 5D0 level in several Sm2+ symmetry types have been determined from dominant transitions to the 7FJ (J\u3c~4) levels. There are two distinct C4v sites: one with a lifetime of 9.5 msec, and the other 11.2 msec. C2v and type-I Cs sites have lifetimes of 10.5 and 10.8 msec, respectively, which are indistinguishable within the experimental error. The role of O2− compensation of Sm2+ in addition to K+ vacancy compensation in KCl is discussed in terms of these findings