Immunological Sex Differences in Socially Promiscuous African Ground Squirrels

Differences in how males and females respond to foreign antigens are common across taxa. Such sexual differences in the immune system are predicted to be greater in species with high promiscuity and sociality as these factors increase the likelihood of disease transmission. Intense sperm competition is thought to further this sexual dichotomy as increased investment in spermatogenesis likely incurs additional immunological costs. Xerus inauris, a ground squirrel found throughout southern Africa, is extremely social and promiscuous with one of the highest male reproductive investments among rodents. These life-history attributes suggest males and females should demonstrate a large dichotomy in immunity. Contrary to our prediction, we found no difference in spleen mass between the sexes. However, we did find significant biases in leukocyte types and red blood cell counts, possibly reflecting responses to parasite types. Among males, we predicted greater investments in spermatogenesis would result in reduced immunological investments. We found a negative association between testes and spleen size and a positive relationship between testes and number of lice suggesting trade-offs in reproductive investment possibly due to the costs associated with spermatogenesis and immunity. We suggest when measuring sexual differences in immunity it is important to consider the effects of reproductive pressures, parasite types, and life history costs

Arctic Energy Technology Development Laboratory

The Arctic Energy Technology Development Laboratory was created by the University of Alaska Fairbanks in response to a congressionally mandated funding opportunity through the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), specifically to encourage research partnerships between the university, the Alaskan energy industry, and the DOE. The enabling legislation permitted research in a broad variety of topics particularly of interest to Alaska, including providing more efficient and economical electrical power generation in rural villages, as well as research in coal, oil, and gas. The contract was managed as a cooperative research agreement, with active project monitoring and management from the DOE. In the eight years of this partnership, approximately 30 projects were funded and completed. These projects, which were selected using an industry panel of Alaskan energy industry engineers and managers, cover a wide range of topics, such as diesel engine efficiency, fuel cells, coal combustion, methane gas hydrates, heavy oil recovery, and water issues associated with ice road construction in the oil fields of the North Slope. Each project was managed as a separate DOE contract, and the final technical report for each completed project is included with this final report. The intent of this process was to address the energy research needs of Alaska and to develop research capability at the university. As such, the intent from the beginning of this process was to encourage development of partnerships and skills that would permit a transition to direct competitive funding opportunities managed from funding sources. This project has succeeded at both the individual project level and at the institutional development level, as many of the researchers at the university are currently submitting proposals to funding agencies, with some success

Los Otros Lados: Transnational Agrarian Livelihoods and Kinship in West-Central Mexico and Southern Appalachia

“Tiene que irse para sembrar” “You have to leave [home] in order to farm [at home].” This is a saying often heard in a rural village in the agricultural region, el Bajio, of west-central Mexico. While the idea that a farming family has to leave their home to farm sounds like a contradiction, it is a collective understanding in the rural village which characterizes a basic social problem—that is people have to migrate to make a living. In this paper, I tell stories of one extended transnational family who straddles agricultural lives in foothills communities in the Bajio and Southern Appalachia. The bi-national families discussed in this paper are raising families, producing food, shaping agricultural labor, even acquiring land and capital—all simultaneously in two rural places, in interwoven neighboring nation-states in North America. Their stories illustrate how family members, as campesinos in Mexico and Latino Appalachians in the U.S. South, use their family’s agricultural history and practical knowledge to contribute to agricultural industries and rural communities. In Southern Appalachia, these agriculturalists are building up the tomato industry in an area in western North Carolina and upstate South Carolina. These families are picking tomatoes, packing tomatoes, renting and buying land to grow tomatoes, transporting and shipping tomatoes all from Southern Appalachia in addition to teaming-up with tomato growers in the region through various land-labor arrangements. Through collective practices, these farming families are building cultural identity, mitigating social costs of disenfranchisement and laying the foundations for an alternative farming future

Equitable Food Assistance: Designing Community Food Security Strategies to Overcome Racialized Obstacles

This project contributes to the study of the nexus of health equity, racism, program design, policy, and food security in diverse rural places in the contemporary U.S. The study focuses on food assistance agencies’ challenges and strategies for equitably assisting economically marginalized populations in a cluster of ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) counties in North Carolina. The study pays particular attention to the ways in which these agencies understand, strategize with, and attempt to serve the Latinx population during the current U.S. historic moment of anti-immigration policy. The work was funded by the Wilma Dykeman “Faces of Appalachia” Post-doctoral Research Fellowship and the Public Policy Institute of Western Carolina University. Part of the Panel: Cultural Traces in Appalachian Food. In program titled: Food or Security? Policy, Equity and Food Assistance in Southern Appalachia

Festival of Dionysus in the Mountain South: Melding Local and Ancient Foodways

In Winter 2017, an interdisciplinary faculty team hosted the 4th Festival of Dionysus in the Mountain South at UNC Asheville featuring a feast for the commons prepared by students from a course on Ancient Foodways. Festival feasts in ancient Greece would have used nearly all local or regional ingredients - fresh foods available seasonally and those that could be stored. (Beer, 2010) In designing the menu, students had to navigate using a list of ingredients available locally in December, ancient (or traditional) Greek dishes, cost, modern palates and individual food preferences, while keeping true to an ancient, simple but celebratory, menu that could be made for, and enjoyed by, the masses. The resultant menu included traditional Kalitsounia - Cretan Spinach Pies and adapted Kalitsounia – Southern Sweet Potato Pies, as well as ancient Homeric olive relish. (Dalby & Grainger, 1996) In an effort to assess the festival’s impact on participants’ interest and knowledge of ancient Greek food and culture, student researchers collected participant emails (n = 136) and emailed them a survey addressing their interest in local food, food preparation, and ancient Greek culture and cuisine. Survey respondents (n = 41) indicated that as a result of their participation, they would be very likely to want to learn about the history of food cultures (41%), and nearly all respondents (98%) indicated that they would be somewhat or very likely to attend similar events in the future. The impact of experiential learning through planning and cooking was explored using reflection papers

The economic integration of Germany - an update

SIGLEIAB-90-0DE0-101100 AT 265 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

The Detailed Science Case for the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer: the Composition and Dynamics of the Faint Universe

210 pages, 91 figures. Exposure draft. Appendices to the Detailed Science Case can be found at http://mse.cfht.hawaii.edu/docs/MSE is an 11.25m aperture observatory with a 1.5 square degree field of view that will be fully dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy. More than 3200 fibres will feed spectrographs operating at low (R ~ 2000 - 3500) and moderate (R ~ 6000) spectral resolution, and approximately 1000 fibers will feed spectrographs operating at high (R ~ 40000) resolution. MSE is designed to enable transformational science in areas as diverse as tomographic mapping of the interstellar and intergalactic media; the in-situ chemical tagging of thick disk and halo stars; connecting galaxies to their large scale structure; measuring the mass functions of cold dark matter sub-halos in galaxy and cluster-scale hosts; reverberation mapping of supermassive black holes in quasars; next generation cosmological surveys using redshift space distortions and peculiar velocities. MSE is an essential follow-up facility to current and next generations of multi-wavelength imaging surveys, including LSST, Gaia, Euclid, WFIRST, PLATO, and the SKA, and is designed to complement and go beyond the science goals of other planned and current spectroscopic capabilities like VISTA/4MOST, WHT/WEAVE, AAT/HERMES and Subaru/PFS. It is an ideal feeder facility for E-ELT, TMT and GMT, and provides the missing link between wide field imaging and small field precision astronomy. MSE is optimized for high throughput, high signal-to-noise observations of the faintest sources in the Universe with high quality calibration and stability being ensured through the dedicated operational mode of the observatory. (abridged

The Detailed Science Case for the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer: the Composition and Dynamics of the Faint Universe

210 pages, 91 figures. Exposure draft. Appendices to the Detailed Science Case can be found at http://mse.cfht.hawaii.edu/docs/MSE is an 11.25m aperture observatory with a 1.5 square degree field of view that will be fully dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy. More than 3200 fibres will feed spectrographs operating at low (R ~ 2000 - 3500) and moderate (R ~ 6000) spectral resolution, and approximately 1000 fibers will feed spectrographs operating at high (R ~ 40000) resolution. MSE is designed to enable transformational science in areas as diverse as tomographic mapping of the interstellar and intergalactic media; the in-situ chemical tagging of thick disk and halo stars; connecting galaxies to their large scale structure; measuring the mass functions of cold dark matter sub-halos in galaxy and cluster-scale hosts; reverberation mapping of supermassive black holes in quasars; next generation cosmological surveys using redshift space distortions and peculiar velocities. MSE is an essential follow-up facility to current and next generations of multi-wavelength imaging surveys, including LSST, Gaia, Euclid, WFIRST, PLATO, and the SKA, and is designed to complement and go beyond the science goals of other planned and current spectroscopic capabilities like VISTA/4MOST, WHT/WEAVE, AAT/HERMES and Subaru/PFS. It is an ideal feeder facility for E-ELT, TMT and GMT, and provides the missing link between wide field imaging and small field precision astronomy. MSE is optimized for high throughput, high signal-to-noise observations of the faintest sources in the Universe with high quality calibration and stability being ensured through the dedicated operational mode of the observatory. (abridged

The Detailed Science Case for the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer: the Composition and Dynamics of the Faint Universe

210 pages, 91 figures. Exposure draft. Appendices to the Detailed Science Case can be found at http://mse.cfht.hawaii.edu/docs/MSE is an 11.25m aperture observatory with a 1.5 square degree field of view that will be fully dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy. More than 3200 fibres will feed spectrographs operating at low (R ~ 2000 - 3500) and moderate (R ~ 6000) spectral resolution, and approximately 1000 fibers will feed spectrographs operating at high (R ~ 40000) resolution. MSE is designed to enable transformational science in areas as diverse as tomographic mapping of the interstellar and intergalactic media; the in-situ chemical tagging of thick disk and halo stars; connecting galaxies to their large scale structure; measuring the mass functions of cold dark matter sub-halos in galaxy and cluster-scale hosts; reverberation mapping of supermassive black holes in quasars; next generation cosmological surveys using redshift space distortions and peculiar velocities. MSE is an essential follow-up facility to current and next generations of multi-wavelength imaging surveys, including LSST, Gaia, Euclid, WFIRST, PLATO, and the SKA, and is designed to complement and go beyond the science goals of other planned and current spectroscopic capabilities like VISTA/4MOST, WHT/WEAVE, AAT/HERMES and Subaru/PFS. It is an ideal feeder facility for E-ELT, TMT and GMT, and provides the missing link between wide field imaging and small field precision astronomy. MSE is optimized for high throughput, high signal-to-noise observations of the faintest sources in the Universe with high quality calibration and stability being ensured through the dedicated operational mode of the observatory. (abridged