State of America's Libraries Special Report: Pandemic Year Two

In 2021, libraries of all types stepped up to meet the needs of their communities as they responded to the impacts of a second year of the global pandemic. Library staff in every state faced an unprecedented number of attempts to ban books. ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials and services in 2021, resulting in more than 1,597 individual book challenges or removals. Most targeted books were by or about Black or LGBTQIA+ persons. Read more about the Top Ten Most Challenged Books of 2021 and libraries' response to the pandemic in the State of America's Libraries Special Report: Pandemic Year Two

Holts Summit (Devonian) conodonts from Missouri

The conodonts of a previously unrecognized Upper Devonian formation, the Holts Summit, are unusually abundant and include unique forms which have not been elsewhere reported from strata of North America. An assemblage from Germany as described by Sannemann is closely allied to the fauna of the Holts Summit. The Devonian fauna and the stratigraphic relationships exclude the Holts Summit from the Bushberg and "Basal Mississippian" of previous authors. Lack of recognition in the past of the Holts Summit as a unit has led to the inclusion of its fauna in other faunal lists preventing correlation with these units in this report on the basis of the fauna. The highly plastic state of development of the fauna is discussed and three new genera are recognized. A partial faunal list is submitted which will enable recognition of the Holts Summit fauna and permit correlation with this unit

A Study of Heavy Higgs Properties at a Multi-TeV e+e- Collider

The precise determination of the masses of the neutral and charged heavy Higgs bosons is a crucial input for the study of Supersymmetry and its relation with cosmology through dark matter. This paper presents a study of e+e- -> HA and H+H- production at sqrts=3 TeV. The analysis is performed with full simulation and reconstruction accounting for beamstrahlung effects and the overlay of gamma gamma -> hadrons events. Results are presented in terms of the accuracy on the determination of the masses and widths of the heavy Higgs bosons in two benchmark scenarios.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders LCWS201

Electrical methods of determining soil moisture content

The electrical permittivity of soils is a useful indicator of soil moisture content. Two methods of determining the permittivity profile in soils are examined. A method due to Becher is found to be inapplicable to this situation. A method of Slichter, however, appears to be feasible. The results of Slichter's method are extended to the proposal of an instrument design that could measure available soil moisture profile (percent available soil moisture as a function of depth) from a surface measurement to an expected resolution of 10 to 20 cm

Methylation Operation Wizard (MeOW): Identification of differentially methylated regions in long-read sequencing data

Long-read sequencing (LRS) is able to simultaneously capture information about both DNA sequence and modifications, such as CpG methylation in a single sequencing experiment. Here we present Methylation Operation Wizard (MeOW), a program to identify and prioritize differentially methylated regions (DMRs) genome-wide using LRS data. MeOW can be run using either a file containing counts of per-nucleotide methylated CpG sites or with a bam file containing modified base tags.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur

Starvation in the Depths: How Quagga Mussels Persist in the Most Challenging Habitat of the Laurentian Great Lakes

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. 2021. Major: Integrated Biosciences. Advisor: Ted Ozersky. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 97 pages.The invasive quagga mussel (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis) can significantly alter the biogeochemical cycling of ecologically important nutrients, such as P and N, in lacustrine ecosystems. While D. rostriformis bugensis has invaded large portions of the Great Lakes, its distribution within waterbodies has fluctuated over time. Anticipating the effects of D. rostriformis bugensis on invaded ecosystems requires lake-wide monitoring because the effects of D. rostriformis bugensis are dependent on the size and distribution of mussel populations throughout a waterbody. During the summer of 2018 and 2019, I conducted a benthic survey consisting of ponar grabs and benthic imaging technology (BIS) to assess the distribution, areal density, and areal biomass of D. rostriformis bugensis populations in Lakes Huron and Michigan. I compared the results of my survey to other contemporary surveys of both lakes and found that, recently, D. rostriformis bugensis populations have expanded into deeper regions of Lake Michigan and contracted into more shallow regions of Lake Huron. In addition, ongoing recruitment by juvenile D. rostriformis bugensis has occurred in portions of both lakes that are deeper than other recent reports, which indicates the biomass of these populations will grow in the future. To better understand the ability of quagga mussels to invade profundal habitats and their response to food availability, I investigated the effects of starvation on quagga mussels under laboratory conditions. In an 8-month trial, I compared survival, growth, tissue elemental composition as well as respiration and nutrient transformation rates of starved mussels to mussels fed a high-quality diet. My results indicate that quagga mussels are highly starvation tolerant at temperatures characteristic of the hypolimnia in the Great Lakes, with greater than 95% survival rates after 231 days under starvation conditions. Starved mussels had lower respiration and excretion rates of P and N compared to well-fed mussels. I show that quagga mussels are highly resilient to disruptions in food supply, which helps explain their invasion success in the cold and food-limited profundal zone of the Great Lakes.Zalusky, John. (2021). Starvation in the Depths: How Quagga Mussels Persist in the Most Challenging Habitat of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/224891

Lawrence, Nietzsche, and the will to power

Thesis (B.A.) in Comparative Literature -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988.Bibliography: leaf 61.Microfiche of typescript. [Urbana, Ill.]: Photographic Services, University of Illinois, U of I Library, [1988]. 2 microfiches (76 frames): negative