Being a Freshman, Being an Author: An Interview With Teen Author Zoe Trope

While most fourteen year old girls are hanging out at the mall spending their hard-earned allowance on new clothes and quarters for an all-day marathon of Dance Dance Revolution at the video arcade, Portland-based author Zoe Trope was muddling through her freshman year of high school and composing a diary, which would later be turned into a much praised work of young adult literature, Please Don’t Kill the Freshman: A Memoir. In the opening pages of the book, Trope displays her rare and witty teenage insight into the world of librarianship, insisting of the school media specialist, “You’re the one got stuck working in a high school library. No one chooses that profession, I’m sure.

Identification and characterization of proteins binding to regulatory elements of the Hoxa-5 spatial-specific enhancer

The Hox homeobox genes cooperate in providing positional information needed for spatial and temporal patterning of the vertebrate body axis. However, the biological mechanisms behind spatial Hox expression are largely unknown. In transgenic mice, gene fusions between Hoxa-5 (previously called Hox-1.3) 5\u27 flanking regions and lacZ show tissue- and time-specific expression in the brachial spinal cord in day 11-13 embryos. This spatially-specific expression is directed by a 604 bp regulatory region with enhancer properties. Fine-detail mapping of this enhancer has identified several elements involved in region-specific expression. A brachial spinal cord (BSC) element, is required for expression in the brachial spinal cord and the upper cervical repressor (UCR) element is required to repress expression in the upper cervical region of the spinal cord. Factors in embryonic day 12.5 nuclear extracts bind these elements in electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA). Factors binding the BSC element protect three regions from DNase digestion. All three sites contain an AAATAA sequence and mutations at these sites reduce or abolish binding. Furthermore, this element binds specific individual embryonic proteins on a protein blot. The binding appears as a gradient along the A-P axis with two- to three-fold higher levels observed in extracts from anterior regions than from posterior regions. In parallel with the EMSA, the proteins on the protein blot also show reduced binding to probes with mutations at the AAATAA sites. Binding activity to both of these elements is temporally-specific. Strong binding is present from early to midgestation but absent prior to birth. We also show binding activity to the BSC element in the same tissues in which Hoxa-5 is specifically expressed and that this binding activity is not inducible by nerve growth factor. These elements and the factors specifically-binding them are, therefore, likely to be involved in regulating the spatial-specific expression of Hoxa-5. This brachial spinal cord element and its binding proteins are likely to be involved in spatial expression of Hoxa-5 during development

Platform recruited reef fish, Phase I: do platforms provide habitat that increase the survival of juvenile reef fishes?

There are currently over 4000 functioning oil and gas platforms in the northern Gulf of Mexico (Gulf). Platform operations, and their prior drilling operations, produce trace amounts of lead, barium, vanadium, and lanthanum residues that are leached into the surrounding waters and are deposited on the sea floor. These residues have isotopic ratios different from those typical of the Gulf seafloor and can be used as harmless ‘fingerprints’ if they become incorporated into hard-parts or tissues in fishes associated with oil and gas platforms. From 2002 to 2004, 115 red snapper were collected from oil and gas platforms and artificial reefs off Louisiana and Alabama. Otoliths were removed and analyzed using Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). The objective of this study was to determine if a trace element isotope ratio fingerprint could be detected and described as unique to red snapper inhabiting the platforms. Stepwise and canonical discriminant function analyses were used to compare red snapper otolith fingerprints from on and off platforms, and from east and west of the Mississippi River. Classification accuracies based on the probability of an individual fish being correctly classified into the habitat from which it was sampled were over 90% for each of the two main comparisons. When comparing the elemental composition of red snapper otoliths from Louisiana oil and gas platforms and Louisiana artificial reefs, the classification accuracy was 93.75%. When comparing the elemental composition of red snapper otoliths from Louisiana artificial reefs and Alabama artificial reefs, the classification accuracy was 91.06%. Vanadium 51, Lead 206, Lead 207, and Lead 208 all appear to be linked with oil and gas platforms or their prior drilling operations, as the concentrations of these four elements or isotopes were significantly higher in otoliths sampled on platforms in Louisiana than in otoliths sampled from artificial reefs in either Louisiana or Alabama. Results from this study indicate that it may be possible in future studies to determine if oil and gas platforms contribute disproportionately to the survival of juvenile and adult red snapper, and as such can be considered viable management tools for stock rebuilding

The Uniform Soybean Tests: Northern Region 2019

United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, West Lafayette, Indiana, Cooperating with State Agricultural Experiment Stations, Northern States

Brane Decay from the Origin of Time

We present a novel scenario where matter in a spacetime originates from a decaying brane at the origin of time. The decay could be considered as a ``Big Bang''-like event at X^0=0. The closed string interpretation is a time-dependent spacetime with a semi-infinite time direction, with the initial energy of the brane converted into energy flux from the origin. The open string interpretation can be viewed as a string theoretic non-singular initial condition.Comment: 5 pages, 2 eps figure

Inhomogeneous Structures in Holographic Superfluids: II. Vortices

We study vortex solutions in a holographic model of Herzog, Hartnoll, and Horowitz, with a vanishing external magnetic field on the boundary, as is appropriate for vortices in a superfluid. We study relevant length scales related to the vortices and how the charge density inside the core of the vortex behaves as a function of temperature or chemical potential. We extract the critical superfluid velocity from the vortex solutions, study how it behaves as a function of the temperature, and compare it to earlier studies and to the Landau criterion. We also comment on the possibility of a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless vortex confinement-deconfinement transition.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures, typos corrected, references adde

The Uniform Soybean Tests: Northern Region 2018

United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service, West Lafayette, Indiana, Cooperating with State Agricultural Experiment Stations, Northern States