Designing Sugaropolis:digital games as a medium for conveying transnational narratives

In this paper, the authors present a case study of ‘Sugaropolis’: a two-year practice-based project that involved interdisciplinary co-design and stakeholder evaluation of two digital game prototypes. Drawing on the diverse expertise of the research team (game design and development, human geography, and transnational narratives), the paper aims to contribute to debates about the use of digital games as a medium for representing the past. With an emphasis on design-as-research, we consider how digital games can be (co-)designed to communicate complex histories and geographies in which people, objects, and resources are connected through space and time

Grid cells on steeply sloping terrain: evidence for planar rather than volumetric encoding

Neural encoding of navigable space involves a network of structures centred on the hippocampus, whose neurons –place cells – encode current location. Input to the place cells includes afferents from the entorhinal cortex, which contains grid cells. These are neurons expressing spatially localised activity patches, or firing fields, that are evenly spaced across the floor in a hexagonal close-packed array called a grid. It is thought that grid cell grids function to enable the calculation of distances. The question arises as to whether this odometry process operates in three dimensions, and so we queried whether grids permeate three-dimensional space – that is, form a lattice – or whether they simply follow the environment surface. If grids form a three-dimensional lattice then a tilted floor should transect several layers of this lattice, resulting in interruption of the hexagonal pattern. We model this prediction with simulated grid lattices and show that on a 40-degree slope the firing of a grid cell should cover proportionally less of the surface, with smaller field size and fewer fields and reduced hexagonal symmetry. However, recording of grid cells as animals foraged on a 40-degree-tilted surface found that firing of grid cells was almost indistinguishable, in pattern or rate, from that on the horizontal surface, with if anything increased coverage and field number, and preserved field size. It thus appears unlikely that the sloping surface transected a lattice. However, grid cells on the slope displayed slightly degraded firing patterns, with reduced coherence and slightly reduced symmetry. These findings collectively suggest that the grid cell component of the metric representation of space is not fixed in absolute three-dimensional space but is influenced both by the surface the animal is on and by the relationship of this surface to the horizontal, supporting the hypothesis that the neural map of space is multi-planar rather than fully volumetric

The Healthy Flea Market

Learn how rural students in Kentucky shared their classroom knowledge by presenting on health topics and new technologies at flea markets, swap meets, and specialty events such as car shows

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on State Court Proceedings: Five Key Findings

The University of Illinois System’s Institute for Government and Public Affairs and the National Center for State Courts jointly conducted the COVID-19 and the State Courts Study between August 2020 and July 2021. The first stage of the study involved focus groups of attorneys, judges, court administrators, court staff, jurors, and litigants in four states. This report describes some results of the second stage of the study, which involved nationwide surveys of judges, court personnel, and attorneys. The surveys asked participants questions about access to courts during the pandemic and their experiences with the new strategies courts adopted to continue hearing and processing cases. This report summarizes five key findings from the surveys concerning access to the courts. • • First, early in the pandemic, most attorneys thought that litigants’ access to judicial proceedings was worse than usual. • Second, attorneys reported that litigants’ experiences in courts improved after September 2020. Over time, participants believed that some early access difficulties abated. • Third, court personnel had a more positive view than did attorneys about the ability of individuals to participate in the judicial system during the pandemic. • Fourth, attorneys with practices concentrated in landlord-tenant law and criminal law perceived somewhat greater problems than did attorneys who practice in other areas of the law. • Fifth, while participants identified many benefits to online court proceedings, they also saw drawbacks. Assessing whether and under what circumstances to conduct court proceedings online after the pandemic is over will require careful consideration of benefits and downsides and balancing some competing factors.Ope

Placental chemokine compartmentalisation: a novel mammalian molecular control mechanism

Atypical chemokine receptor 2 (ACKR2) is a chemokine-scavenging receptor. ACKR2–/–embryos display a reduction in size of a novel, to our knowledge, embryonic skin macrophage population referred to as ‘intermediate’ cells. CC chemokine receptor 2 (CCR2)–/–embryos display an identical phenotype, indicating that these cells require CCR2 to enable them to populate embryonic skin. Further analysis revealed that ACKR2–/–embryos have higher circulating concentrations of the CCR2 ligand, CC ligand 2 (CCL2); thus, ACKR2 regulates intraembryonic CCL2 levels. We show that ACKR2 is strongly expressed by trophoblasts and that it blocks movement of inflammatory chemokines, such as CCL2, from the maternal decidua into the embryonic circulation. We propose that trophoblastic ACKR2 is responsible for ensuring chemokine compartmentalisation on the maternal decidua, without which chemokines enter the embryonic circulation, disrupting gradients essential for directed intraembryonic cell migration. Overall, therefore, we describe a novel, to our knowledge, molecular mechanism whereby maternal decidual chemokines can function in a compartmentalised fashion without interfering with intraembryonic leukocyte migration. These data suggest similar functions for other atypical chemokine receptors in the placenta and indicate that defects in such receptors may have unanticipated developmental consequences

Accelerometer and GPS Data to Analyze Built Environments and Physical Activity

Purpose: Most built environment studies have quantified characteristics of the areas around participants' homes. However, the environmental exposures for physical activity (PA) are spatially dynamic rather than static. Thus, merged accelerometer and global positioning system (GPS) data were utilized to estimate associations between the built environment and PA among adults. Methods: Participants (N = 142) were recruited on trails in Massachusetts and wore an accelerometer and GPS unit for 1-4 days. Two binary outcomes were created: moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA vs. light PA-to-sedentary); and light-to-vigorous PA (LVPA vs. sedentary). Five built environment variables were created within 50-meter buffers around GPS points: population density, street density, land use mix (LUM), greenness, and walkability index. Generalized linear mixed models were fit to examine associations between environmental variables and both outcomes, adjusting for demographic covariates. Results: Overall, in the fully adjusted models, greenness was positively associated with MVPA and LVPA (odds ratios [ORs] = 1.15, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.03, 1.30 and 1.25, 95% CI = 1.12, 1.41, respectively). In contrast, street density and LUM were negatively associated with MVPA (ORs = 0.69, 95% CI = 0.67, 0.71 and 0.87, 95% CI = 0.78, 0.97, respectively) and LVPA (ORs = 0.79, 95% CI = 0.77, 0.81 and 0.81, 95% CI = 0.74, 0.90, respectively). Negative associations of population density and walkability with both outcomes reached statistical significance, yet the effect sizes were small. Conclusions: Concurrent monitoring of activity with accelerometers and GPS units allowed us to investigate relationships between objectively measured built environment around GPS points and minute-by-minute PA. Negative relationships between street density and LUM and PA contrast evidence from most built environment studies in adults. However, direct comparisons should be made with caution since most previous studies have focused on spatially fixed buffers around home locations, rather than the precise locations where PA occurs

Antarctica: A Keystone in a Changing World

The 10th International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences was convened at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where 350 researchers presented talks and posters on topics including climate change, biotic evolution, magmatic processes, surface processes, tectonics, geodynamics, and the cryosphere. The symposium resulted in 335 peer-reviewed papers, 225 of which are published online). A proceedings book will also be published by the National Academies Press. Advances in our understanding of Antarctic tectonics were many, often involving techniques that provide information under ice sheets or from proxies such as glacial till to provide clues on provenance. John Goodge (University of Minnesota-Duluth) and coworkers reported a 1440-million-year-old granite boulder from glacial till from the Nimrod Glacier that can be matched to North American Laurentian province granites, supporting the postulated (Southwest U.S.—East Antarctica (SWEAT) hypothesis) fit of East Antarctica and North America more than 1 billion years ago. Considerable debate concerned the formation of the Transantarctic Mountains and the role of plateau collapse