ASPECT: A Survey to Assess Student Perspective of Engagement in an Active-Learning Classroom

This paper describes the development and validation of a survey to measure students? self-reported engagement during a wide variety of in-class active-learning exercises. The survey provides researchers and instructors alike with a tool to rapidly evaluate different active-learning strategies from the perspective of the learner

Lateral Membrane Waves Constitute a Universal Dynamic Pattern of Motile Cells

We have monitored active movements of the cell circumference on specifically coated substrates for a variety of cells including mouse embryonic fibroblasts and T cells, as well as wing disk cells from fruit flies. Despite having different functions and being from multiple phyla, these cell types share a common spatiotemporal pattern in their normal membrane velocity; we show that protrusion and retraction events are organized in lateral waves along the cell membrane. These wave patterns indicate both spatial and temporal long-range periodic correlations of the actomyosin gel

Wound-up phase turbulence in the Complex Ginzburg-Landau equation

We consider phase turbulent regimes with nonzero winding number in the one-dimensional Complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. We find that phase turbulent states with winding number larger than a critical one are only transients and decay to states within a range of allowed winding numbers. The analogy with the Eckhaus instability for non-turbulent waves is stressed. The transition from phase to defect turbulence is interpreted as an ergodicity breaking transition which occurs when the range of allowed winding numbers vanishes. We explain the states reached at long times in terms of three basic states, namely quasiperiodic states, frozen turbulence states, and riding turbulence states. Justification and some insight into them is obtained from an analysis of a phase equation for nonzero winding number: rigidly moving solutions of this equation, which correspond to quasiperiodic and frozen turbulence states, are understood in terms of periodic and chaotic solutions of an associated system of ordinary differential equations. A short report of some of our results has been published in [Montagne et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 267 (1996)].Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures included. Uses subfigure.sty (included) and epsf.tex (not included). Related research in http://www.imedea.uib.es/Nonlinea

Measurement report: Emission factors of NH3 and NHx for wildfires and agricultural fires in the United States.

Ammonia (NH3) is an important trace gas in the atmosphere and fires are among the poorly investigated sources. During the FIREX-AQ aircraft campaign in 2019, we measured gaseous ammonia and particulate ammonium (NH4+) in smoke plumes emitted from six wildfires in the Western US and 66 small agricultural fires in the Southeastern US. We herein present a comprehensive set of emission factors of NH3 and NHx, with NHx = NH3 + NH4+

Genetic determinants of telomere length from 109,122 ancestrally diverse whole-genome sequences in TOPMed

Genetic studies on telomere length are important for understanding age-related diseases. Prior GWAS for leukocyte TL have been limited to European and Asian populations. Here, we report the first sequencing-based association study for TL across ancestrally-diverse individuals (European, African, Asian and Hispanic/Latino) from the NHLBI Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) program. We used whole genome sequencing (WGS) of whole blood for variant genotype calling and the bioinformatic estimation of telomere length in n=109,122 individuals. We identified 59 sentinel variants (p-value OBFC1indicated the independent signals colocalized with cell-type specific eQTLs for OBFC1 (STN1). Using a multi-variant gene-based approach, we identified two genes newly implicated in telomere length, DCLRE1B (SNM1B) and PARN. In PheWAS, we demonstrated our TL polygenic trait scores (PTS) were associated with increased risk of cancer-related phenotypes

The genetic determinants of recurrent somatic mutations in 43,693 blood genomes

Nononcogenic somatic mutations are thought to be uncommon and inconsequential. To test this, we analyzed 43,693 National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine blood whole genomes from 37 cohorts and identified 7131 non-missense somatic mutations that are recurrently mutated in at least 50 individuals. These recurrent non-missense somatic mutations (RNMSMs) are not clearly explained by other clonal phenomena such as clonal hematopoiesis. RNMSM prevalence increased with age, with an average 50-year-old having 27 RNMSMs. Inherited germline variation associated with RNMSM acquisition. These variants were found in genes involved in adaptive immune function, proinflammatory cytokine production, and lymphoid lineage commitment. In addition, the presence of eight specific RNMSMs associated with blood cell traits at effect sizes comparable to Mendelian genetic mutations. Overall, we found that somatic mutations in blood are an unexpectedly common phenomenon with ancestry-specific determinants and human health consequences

Multi-ethnic genome-wide association study for atrial fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) affects more than 33 million individuals worldwide and has a complex heritability. We conducted the largest meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for AF to date, consisting of more than half a million individuals, including 65,446 with AF. In total, we identified 97 loci significantly associated with AF, including 67 that were novel in a combined-ancestry analysis, and 3 that were novel in a European-specific analysis. We sought to identify AF-associated genes at the GWAS loci by performing RNA-sequencing and expression quantitative trait locus analyses in 101 left atrial samples, the most relevant tissue for AF. We also performed transcriptome-wide analyses that identified 57 AF-associated genes, 42 of which overlap with GWAS loci. The identified loci implicate genes enriched within cardiac developmental, electrophysiological, contractile and structural pathways. These results extend our understanding of the biological pathways underlying AF and may facilitate the development of therapeutics for AF