A ticket to the middle class: working off college debt

A proposed program—in which each year of paid public service would cancel one year of college expense—could lift the burden of debt from graduates while supplying capable workers to municipalities and nonprofits.Student loans ; College costs

The Social and Cultural Context of Coping with Sickle Cell Disease: II. The Role of Financial Hardship in Adjustment to Sickle Cell Disease

Recent evidence on the negative psychological effects of poverty suggests that economic status alone might account for the adjustment problems attributed to sickle cell disease (SCD). The relationship of SCD and financial hardship to adjustment was examined in 327 ill children and their parents. SCD and hardship contributed independently to impaired child and parental functioning. For parents, illness severity had more negative effects than did financial hardship, but forPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66919/2/10.1177_0095798499025003003.pd

Efficacy of personalized cognitive counseling in men of color who have sex with men: secondary data analysis from a controlled intervention trial.

In a previous report, we demonstrated the efficacy of a cognitively based counseling intervention compared to standard counseling at reducing episodes of unprotected anal intercourse (UAI) among men who have sex with men (MSM) seeking HIV testing. Given the limited number of efficacious prevention interventions for MSM of color (MOC) available, we analyzed the data stratified into MOC and whites. The sample included 196 white MSM and 109 MOC (23 African Americans, 36 Latinos, 22 Asians, eight Alaskan Natives/Native Americans/Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 20 of mixed or other unspecified race). Among MOC in the intervention group, the mean number of episodes of UAI declined from 5.1 to 1.6 at six months and was stable at 12 months (1.8). Among the MOC receiving standard counseling, the mean number of UAI episodes was 4.2 at baseline, 3.9 at six months and 2.1 at 12 months. There was a significant treatment effect overall (relative risk 0.59, 95% confidence interval 0.35-0.998). These results suggest that the intervention is effective in MOC

The Social and Cultural Context of Coping with Sickle Cell Disease: III. Stress, Coping Tasks, Family Functioning, and Children’s Adjustment

Conceptions of individual and family coping with sickle cell disease (SCD) must incorporate several disease and sociocultural factors. This article proposes an integrative model and tests the relative contribution of model parameters to the prediction of social, academic, and psychological adjustment of children with SCD. The individual coping and family functioning variables most highly predictive of the child’s psychological outcomes (anxiety, depression, and positive mood) include parental psychological functioning, maturity demands made of the ill child, and the quality of relations with parents and siblings. Academic adjustment was significantly predicted by parental academic expectations and by the child’s rejection of a restrictive sick role. Competent social functioning also was predicted by the extent to which the ill child rejected the role of being sick.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67288/2/10.1177_0095798499025003006.pd

Mammalian Y chromosomes retain widely expressed dosage-sensitive regulators

The human X and Y chromosomes evolved from an ordinary pair of autosomes, but millions of years ago genetic decay ravaged the Y chromosome, and only three per cent of its ancestral genes survived. We reconstructed the evolution of the Y chromosome across eight mammals to identify biases in gene content and the selective pressures that preserved the surviving ancestral genes. Our findings indicate that survival was nonrandom, and in two cases, convergent across placental and marsupial mammals. We conclude that the gene content of the Y chromosome became specialized through selection to maintain the ancestral dosage of homologous X-Y gene pairs that function as broadly expressed regulators of transcription, translation and protein stability. We propose that beyond its roles in testis determination and spermatogenesis, the Y chromosome is essential for male viability, and has unappreciated roles in Turner (tm) s syndrome and in phenotypic differences between the sexes in health and disease

Southern Ocean phytoplankton dynamics and carbon export: insights from a seasonal cycle approach

Quantifying the strength and efficiency of the Southern Ocean biological carbon pump (BCP) and its response to predicted changes in the Earth's climate is fundamental to our ability to predict long-term changes in the global carbon cycle and, by extension, the impact of continued anthropogenic perturbation of atmospheric CO2. There is little agreement, however, in climate model projections of the sensitivity of the Southern Ocean BCP to climate change, with a lack of consensus in even the direction of predicted change, highlighting a gap in our understanding of a major planetary carbon flux. In this review, we summarize relevant research that highlights the important role of fine-scale dynamics (both temporal and spatial) that link physical forcing mechanisms to biogeochemical responses that impact the characteristics of the seasonal cycle of phytoplankton and by extension the BCP. This approach highlights the potential for integrating autonomous and remote sensing observations of fine scale dynamics to derive regionally optimized biogeochemical parameterizations for Southern Ocean models. Ongoing development in both the observational and modelling fields will generate new insights into Southern Ocean ecosystem function for improved predictions of the sensitivity of the Southern Ocean BCP to climate change. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Heat and carbon uptake in the Southern Ocean: the state of the art and future priorities'

A Polychaete’s Powerful Punch: Venom Gland Transcriptomics of Glycera Reveals a Complex Cocktail of Toxin Homologs

© The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The article attached is the publisher's pdf

The Ariel payload design post-PDR

The Ariel space mission will characterize spectroscopically the atmospheres of a large and diverse sample of hundreds of exoplanets. Through the study of targets with a wide range of planetary parameters (mass, density, equilibrium temperature) and host star types the origin for the diversity observed in known exoplanets will be better understood. Ariel is an ESA Medium class science mission (M4) with a spacecraft bus developed by industry under contract to ESA, and a Payload provided by a consortium of national funding agencies in ESA member states, plus contributions from NASA, the CSA and JAXA. The payload is based on a 1-meter class telescope operated at below 60K, built all in Aluminium, which feeds two science instruments. A multi-channel photometer and low-resolution spectrometer instrument (the FGS, Fine Guidance System instrument) operating from 0.5 – 1.95 microns in wavelength provides both guidance information for stabilizing the spacecraft pointing as well as vital scientific information from spectroscopy in the near-infrared and photometry in the visible channels. The Ariel InfraRed Spectrometer (AIRS) instrument provides medium resolution spectroscopy from 1.95 – 7.8 microns wavelength coverage over two instrument channels. Supporting subsystems provide the necessary mechanical, thermal and electronics support to the cryogenic payload. This paper presents the overall picture of the payload for the Ariel mission. The payload tightly integrates the design and analysis of the various payload elements (including for example the integrated STOP analysis of the Telescope and Common Optics) in order to allow the exacting photometric stability requirements for the mission to be met. The Ariel payload has passed through the Preliminary Design Review (completed in Q2 2023) and is now developing and building prototype models of the Telescope, Instruments and Subsystems (details of which will be provided in other contributions to this conference). This paper will present the current status of the development work and outline the future plans to complete the build and verification of the integrated payload