Developing Hybrid Aspen as a Complementary Energy Crop

Our objective is to develop hybrid aspens as an energy crop that would fit as one part of systems for biomass energy production in the Corn Belt. Most liquid fuels are derived from biomass from cornstarch and cellulose. An additional perennial energy crop coming from in-field buffer strips and windbreaks could contribute to soil conservation, improvement in water quality, year-round harvesting with reduced need for storage of feedstock, and reduced energy and financial inputs. Wood biomass has about twice the energy density and therefore can be economically transported further to a conversion site. Woody biomass is the preferred feedstock for pyrolysis production of liquid fuels and can be a major component of combustion fuel for power plants

Of Cracks and Crackdowns: Five Translations of Recent Internet Postings

Page range: 37-5

Assessing the Need for a Riparian Management System (RiMS)

Riparian management systems (RiMS) often appear complex, and assessing your stream riparian area to design one can seem a daunting task. There are many design options for RiMS that can provide multiple benefits. The best option is the design that accomplishes the most for you, for the land, and for the community. This publication provides a list of tools and considerations to help you determine what kind of RiMS is best for you and your land.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/extension_ag_pubs/1219/thumbnail.jp

Building social networks to capture synergies in wood-based energy production and invasive pest mitigation

This project makes a variety of policy recommendations for cities and the private sector to help deal with the consequences of emerald ash borer infestations

VEB-econ: An Outreach Tool for Designing Vegetative Environmental Buffers

Vegetative environmental buffers, or VEBs, are rows of trees and shrubs purposefully planted to mitigate livestock odor. In this article, we present VEB-econ, a free-to-use geographic information system–based decision support tool Extension professionals can implement when working with livestock producers in designing site-specific VEBs. A soil database links tree and shrub species recommendations to soil-based suitability guidelines. VEB-econ estimates annualized cost for tree establishment and management and opportunity costs and factors in potential Natural Resources Conservation Service cost-share payments. Additionally, VEB-econ can be used to design field windbreaks. VEB-econ is designed specifically to be useful to Extension professionals and other air quality stakeholders

Master Sergeant, Pusher, Midwife, or the Department Chair

Six decades of literature were examined to get a sense of the role of the academic chair. Three things emerge. Roles: (a) vary widely; (b) change drastically; (c) are culturally influenced. This session discusses the role’s development from the influence of societal changes more than duties assigned by administrators

Exploring the functional dynamics between PIEZO1 and cell-generated forces

The conversion of mechanical stimuli into biochemical signals plays an integral role in regulating physiology and homeostasis. Cells utilize several specialized proteins to translate these mechanical forces into intracellular signaling. Of these, the mechanically-activated ion channel PIEZO1 has emerged as a key mechanosensor regulating a range of biological processes occurring in a variety of cell types. Despite the observed importance of PIEZO1, the mechanisms by which PIEZO1 is activated under native cellular contexts and scales to control physiologically important phenomena are largely unknown. Within this dissertation, I describe my efforts to fill this gap within the scientific literature by contributing towards the development of novel microscopy-based techniques and accompanying bioimage analyses which can be implemented to study PIEZO1 activity under endogenous cellular conditions. In Chapter 2, we find that mechanical forces initiated by cell generated, or Myosin II-based, traction forces are able to activate nearby PIEZO1 channels. Given that cell generated forces play a central role during cell migration we then asked whether PIEZO1 may regulate the migration of keratinocytes, the predominant cell type of the epidermis, during wound healing. Within Chapter 3, we show through molecular, cellular and organismal studies that PIEZO1 plays a regulatory role during keratinocyte migration and wound healing. Epidermal-specific Piezo1 knockout mice exhibited faster wound closure while gain-of-function mice displayed slower wound closure compared to littermate controls. By imaging the spatiotemporal localization dynamics of endogenous PIEZO1 channels we find that channel enrichment at regions along the wound edge induces a localized cellular retraction that slows the wound closure process. Efficient wound closure is driven by the formation of specialized cells called leader cells which transmit mechanical and biochemical cues to ensuing follower cells, ensuring their uniform polarization and coordinated direction of migration, or directionality. Despite the observed importance mechanical cues play in regulating both leader cell formation and directionality, the underlying biophysical mechanisms remain elusive. Given that PIEZO1 plays a regulatory role during wound healing, within Chapter 4 we set to elucidate PIEZO1's contributions to collective migration by taking an integrative experimental and mathematical modeling approach. Through numerical simulations and subsequent experimental validation, we found that directionality plays a key role in regulating epithelial sheet migration and is inhibited by PIEZO1 activity. We propose that PIEZO1-mediated retraction suppresses leader cell formation which inhibits the coordination of directionality between cells during collective migration

An Attributional Analysis of Resistance to Group Pressure Regarding Illicit Drug and Alcohol Consumption

This article investigates the role of attributional thinking in generating resistance to pressures toward conformity in the illicit consumption of drugs and alcohol. The results of four studies regarding how conformity influences illicit drug and alcohol consumption among high school and college students are reported. In study 1 more than two-thirds of the respondents reported concern for the implications of their own dissent or compliance regarding the reactions of their peers. Study 2 demonstrated a significant relationship between high school students\u27 attributional thinking concerning a peer group\u27s illicit beer consumption and conformity, expressed as intentions to drink the beer. In study 3, in-depth interviews with high school students provided insight into the realism of the conformity scenarios used in the research and the types of conformity pressures experienced by young people. In study 4, locus of causality, an abstract attributional dimension, and several specific attributions were shown to be significantly associated with conformity in the consumption of marijuana

The University of Iowa Biomass Partnership Project

Biomass may be obtained from existing sources, such as industrial co-products (e.g., oat hulls and paper sludge), from the forest using managed timber stand improvement, and from growing perennial dedicated energy crops on marginal lands. Each of these sources may be developed in a manner that improves the sustainability of the University of Iowa energy supplies

Locality in Theory Space

Locality is a guiding principle for constructing realistic quantum field theories. Compactified theories offer an interesting context in which to think about locality, since interactions can be nonlocal in the compact directions while still being local in the extended ones. In this paper, we study locality in "theory space", four-dimensional Lagrangians which are dimensional deconstructions of five-dimensional Yang-Mills. In explicit ultraviolet (UV) completions, one can understand the origin of theory space locality by the irrelevance of nonlocal operators. From an infrared (IR) point of view, though, theory space locality does not appear to be a special property, since the lowest-lying Kaluza-Klein (KK) modes are simply described by a gauged nonlinear sigma model, and locality imposes seemingly arbitrary constraints on the KK spectrum and interactions. We argue that these constraints are nevertheless important from an IR perspective, since they affect the four-dimensional cutoff of the theory where high energy scattering hits strong coupling. Intriguingly, we find that maximizing this cutoff scale implies five-dimensional locality. In this way, theory space locality is correlated with weak coupling in the IR, independent of UV considerations. We briefly comment on other scenarios where maximizing the cutoff scale yields interesting physics, including theory space descriptions of QCD and deconstructions of anti-de Sitter space.Comment: 40 pages, 11 figures; v2: references and clarifications added; v3: version accepted by JHE