The Potential Impact of Federal Laws On State Water Supplies

States have long held the exclusive right to allocate their surface and groundwater supplies absent some express federal authority, usually via a contract with a federal agency for stored water in a federally sponsored and funded project. Over time, however, an emphasis on federal involvement has led to scrutiny of projects where there are no federal dollars being expended—only federal permits needed to implement projects by the states. This federal involvement can sometimes have extremely costly impacts to states, effectively creating an invisible dam of laws and regulations under the guise of protecting the environment. This paper will explore a few of those actions that are currently being experienced in the arid southwest where new reservoirs are needed to support a growing population and a thirst for water that cannot be quenched by conservation alone

Taking Back Control: Human Rights and Human Trafficking in the United Kingdom

Modern slavery and human trafficking are well recognized as significant problems in need of legislation, policies, and actions from a wide range of stakeholders in the United Kingdom. The passage of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 is a hallmark of these concerns and has made the UK a world leader in the fight against modern slavery and human trafficking, a legislative development that is in line with the country’s broader formal commitment to the international and European human rights regime. In the post-Brexit period, however, there has been an increasing de jure conflation of modern slavery and human trafficking with efforts to curb immigration, leading to a significant questioning of the UK’s commitment to human rights. This article locates the consideration of human rights and human trafficking within these broader political trends in order to understand the prospects for meaningful measures to combat modern slavery and human trafficking in the future

RETRATO SIN IDENTIFICAR [Material gráfico]

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, 201

School-based intervention study examining approaches for well-being and mental health literacy of pupils in Year 9 in England: study protocol for a multischool, parallel group cluster randomised controlled trial (AWARE) (vol 12, artne029044corr1, 20022)

The authors would like to notify that the co-authors Sara Evans-Lacko, Bettina Moltrecht, Kirsty Nisbet, Emma Thornton, Aurelie Lange, Paul Stallard, Abigail Thompson were missed including in the authorship list of the paper. The supplementary file has been also updated

Population-based rare variant detection via pooled exome or custom hybridization capture with or without individual indexing

BACKGROUND: Rare genetic variation in the human population is a major source of pathophysiological variability and has been implicated in a host of complex phenotypes and diseases. Finding disease-related genes harboring disparate functional rare variants requires sequencing of many individuals across many genomic regions and comparing against unaffected cohorts. However, despite persistent declines in sequencing costs, population-based rare variant detection across large genomic target regions remains cost prohibitive for most investigators. In addition, DNA samples are often precious and hybridization methods typically require large amounts of input DNA. Pooled sample DNA sequencing is a cost and time-efficient strategy for surveying populations of individuals for rare variants. We set out to 1) create a scalable, multiplexing method for custom capture with or without individual DNA indexing that was amenable to low amounts of input DNA and 2) expand the functionality of the SPLINTER algorithm for calling substitutions, insertions and deletions across either candidate genes or the entire exome by integrating the variant calling algorithm with the dynamic programming aligner, Novoalign. RESULTS: We report methodology for pooled hybridization capture with pre-enrichment, indexed multiplexing of up to 48 individuals or non-indexed pooled sequencing of up to 92 individuals with as little as 70 ng of DNA per person. Modified solid phase reversible immobilization bead purification strategies enable no sample transfers from sonication in 96-well plates through adapter ligation, resulting in 50% less library preparation reagent consumption. Custom Y-shaped adapters containing novel 7 base pair index sequences with a Hamming distance of ≥2 were directly ligated onto fragmented source DNA eliminating the need for PCR to incorporate indexes, and was followed by a custom blocking strategy using a single oligonucleotide regardless of index sequence. These results were obtained aligning raw reads against the entire genome using Novoalign followed by variant calling of non-indexed pools using SPLINTER or SAMtools for indexed samples. With these pipelines, we find sensitivity and specificity of 99.4% and 99.7% for pooled exome sequencing. Sensitivity, and to a lesser degree specificity, proved to be a function of coverage. For rare variants (≤2% minor allele frequency), we achieved sensitivity and specificity of ≥94.9% and ≥99.99% for custom capture of 2.5 Mb in multiplexed libraries of 22–48 individuals with only ≥5-fold coverage/chromosome, but these parameters improved to ≥98.7 and 100% with 20-fold coverage/chromosome. CONCLUSIONS: This highly scalable methodology enables accurate rare variant detection, with or without individual DNA sample indexing, while reducing the amount of required source DNA and total costs through less hybridization reagent consumption, multi-sample sonication in a standard PCR plate, multiplexed pre-enrichment pooling with a single hybridization and lesser sequencing coverage required to obtain high sensitivity

Mechanical design and development of TES bolometer detector arrays for the Advanced ACTPol experiment

The next generation Advanced ACTPol (AdvACT) experiment is currently underway and will consist of four Transition Edge Sensor (TES) bolometer arrays, with three operating together, totaling ~5800 detectors on the sky. Building on experience gained with the ACTPol detector arrays, AdvACT will utilize various new technologies, including 150mm detector wafers equipped with multichroic pixels, allowing for a more densely packed focal plane. Each set of detectors includes a feedhorn array of stacked silicon wafers which form a spline profile leading to each pixel. This is then followed by a waveguide interface plate, detector wafer, back short cavity plate, and backshort cap. Each array is housed in a custom designed structure manufactured from high purity copper and then gold plated. In addition to the detector array assembly, the array package also encloses cryogenic readout electronics. We present the full mechanical design of the AdvACT high frequency (HF) detector array package along with a detailed look at the detector array stack assemblies. This experiment will also make use of extensive hardware and software previously developed for ACT, which will be modified to incorporate the new AdvACT instruments. Therefore, we discuss the integration of all AdvACT arrays with pre-existing ACTPol infrastructure.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference proceeding

The Talking Texts: What Pop Culture Really Has to Say

This newsletter is built upon work done in a Fall 2017 honors writing course based around the rhetorical analysis of pop culture. Students wrote several initial analyses before choosing one to research and write about further. They then chose a short excerpt from their researched projects to include in the newsletter

Sleep problems are associated with binge eating in women

We examined the association among current self-reported sleep problems, lifetime binge eating, and current obesity in women from the Swedish Twin study of Adults: Genes and Environment stud