Thinking and acting both globally and locally : The Field School in intercultural education as a model for action-research training and civic learning.

We present the Field School model of intercultural civic education, service-learning, action research training, and collaboration (with local academic and community partners) based on field work in applied anthropology. Theoretical and methodological foundations of the Field School also include experiential learning and immersive pedagogy, multiculturalism and cross-cultural communication, international education and study abroad programs, collaborative international development, participatory research, and in-depth knowledge in one’s own specific discipline. The primary goals of these intensive, short-term action research projects in other, less-developed countries or regions are benefits for community partners that are as sustainable as possible and to foster and assess learning experiences of students. The Peabody-Vanderbilt Field School in Intercultural Education began in Ecuador and Argentina, but we focus on Field Schools in China, rural New Mexico, and South Africa. In Guangxi, P.R.C., U.S. and Chinese students learned to navigate political and cultural complexities to study migration, community needs and assets assessment, and health effects of changing diet on children, and assisted English language learning in schools, a university and a factory. Native American students from Gallup, NM, and students from Nashville, TN, travelled to each other’s locale to study the impact of diabetes in each culture and develop health education and other prevention strategies. In Cape Town, SA, students worked on health and education projects in three townships; we focus here on a collaboration with high school staff to study and reduce the high dropout rate. We analyze Field School impacts on local community partners and student-researchers

Adenosine-to-inosine RNA editing by ADAR1 is essential for normal murine erythropoiesis

Adenosine deaminases that act on RNA (ADARs) convert adenosine residues to inosine in doublestranded RNA. In vivo, ADAR1 is essential for the maintenance of hematopoietic stem/progenitors. Whether other hematopoietic cell types also require ADAR1 has not been assessed. Using erythroid- and myeloid-restricted deletion of Adar1, we demonstrate that ADAR1 is dispensable for myelopoiesis but is essential for normal erythropoiesis. Adar1-deficient erythroid cells display a profound activation of innate immune signaling and high levels of cell death. No changes in microRNAlevels were found inADAR1-deficient erythroid cells. Using an editing-deficient allele, we demonstrate thatRNA editing is the essential function ofADAR1 during erythropoiesis.Mapping of adenosine-to-inosine editing in purified erythroid cells identified clusters of hyperedited adenosines located in long 3’-untranslated regions of erythroid-specific transcripts and these are ADAR1-specific editing events. ADAR1-mediated RNA editing is essential for normal erythropoiesis

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7