Crossing Selma\u27s Bridge: Integrating Visual Discovery Strategy and Young Adult Literature to Promote Dialogue and Understanding

Urban communities, separated by race and class, experience a disproportionate number of gun deaths, police shootings, crime, violent and nonviolent protests, as well as disparities in housing, education, and employment. These discussions are visual and textual, appearing in both traditional and social media outlets. How do adolescents read and make sense of these images? We discuss integrating a Social Studies practice, Visual Discovery Strategy, with Young Adult Literature to provide students with the skills to both critique images from the events in their lives and produce responses through both traditional and digital methods

SO ORDERED: A Textual Analysis of United States’ Governors’ Press Release Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique environment from which each individual state, in the United States, has been forced to address their publics. In order to understand how each state has engaged with this pandemic, a textual analysis of each state’s governor’s first press release was conducted; five thematic trends were identified. Through use of the social trust approach to risk communication and the contingency theory of strategic conflict management (using external threat variables), the implications of these press releases are discussed

Solar PV - Equipping the Future

The Solar PV team has installed several solar power systems for various partners in the developing world. Most recently, the team installed a solar-powered well pump at the Living Love Ministries Children’s Home in Ol Kalou, Kenya. As is true for all the previous installations, the team gained a wealth of valuable knowledge and experience on the trip to Kenya. A problem the team faces is that a lot of that experience gained leaves when seniors graduate. With the goal of passing on our knowledge and experience to future generations of the Solar PV team, we have been constructing a solar lab at Messiah for experimentation and training. We also are developing a curriculum to teach new team members about solar power and provide a framework for preserving new knowledge the team obtains in the future. Throughout the 2019-2020 year, the solar team has made significant progress towards the completion of these projects.https://mosaic.messiah.edu/engr2020/1011/thumbnail.jp

A decade of data from a specialist statewide child and adolescent eating disorder service: does local service access correspond with the severity of medical and eating disorder symptoms at presentation?

Background - Eating disorders affect up to 3% of children and adolescents, with recovery often requiring specialist treatment. A substantial literature has accrued suggesting that lower access to health care services, experienced by rural populations, has a staggering effect on health-related morbidity and mortality. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether lower service access foreshadowed a more severe medical and symptom presentation among children and adolescents presenting to a specialist eating disorders program. Method - The data source was the Helping to Outline Paediatric Eating Disorders (HOPE) Project registry (N ~1000), a prospective ongoing registry study comprising consecutive paediatric tertiary eating disorder referrals. The sample consisted of 399 children and adolescents aged 8 to 16 years (M =14.49, 92% female) meeting criteria for a DSM-5 eating disorder. Results - Consistent with the hypotheses, lower service access was associated with a lower body mass index z-score and a higher likelihood of medical complications at intake assessment. Contrary to our hypothesis, eating pathology assessed at intake was associated with higher service access. No relationship was observed between service access and duration of illness or percentage of body weight lost. Conclusions - Lower service access is associated with more severe malnutrition and medical complications at referral to a specialist eating disorder program. These findings have implications for service planning and provision for rural communities to equalize health outcomes

Lithic technological responses to Late Pleistocene glacial cycling at Pinnacle Point Site 5-6, South Africa

There are multiple hypotheses for human responses to glacial cycling in the Late Pleistocene, including changes in population size, interconnectedness, and mobility. Lithic technological analysis informs us of human responses to environmental change because lithic assemblage characteristics are a reflection of raw material transport, reduction, and discard behaviors that depend on hunter-gatherer social and economic decisions. Pinnacle Point Site 5-6 (PP5-6), Western Cape, South Africa is an ideal locality for examining the influence of glacial cycling on early modern human behaviors because it preserves a long sequence spanning marine isotope stages (MIS) 5, 4, and 3 and is associated with robust records of paleoenvironmental change. The analysis presented here addresses the question, what, if any, lithic assemblage traits at PP5-6 represent changing behavioral responses to the MIS 5-4-3 interglacial-glacial cycle? It statistically evaluates changes in 93 traits with no a priori assumptions about which traits may significantly associate with MIS. In contrast to other studies that claim that there is little relationship between broad-scale patterns of climate change and lithic technology, we identified the following characteristics that are associated with MIS 4: increased use of quartz, increased evidence for outcrop sources of quartzite and silcrete, increased evidence for earlier stages of reduction in silcrete, evidence for increased flaking efficiency in all raw material types, and changes in tool types and function for silcrete. Based on these results, we suggest that foragers responded to MIS 4 glacial environmental conditions at PP5-6 with increased population or group sizes, 'place provisioning', longer and/or more intense site occupations, and decreased residential mobility. Several other traits, including silcrete frequency, do not exhibit an association with MIS. Backed pieces, once they appear in the PP5-6 record during MIS 4, persist through MIS 3. Changing paleoenvironments explain some, but not all temporal technological variability at PP5-6.Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; NORAM; American-Scandinavian Foundation; Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia [SFRH/BPD/73598/2010]; IGERT [DGE 0801634]; Hyde Family Foundations; Institute of Human Origins; National Science Foundation [BCS-9912465, BCS-0130713, BCS-0524087, BCS-1138073]; John Templeton Foundation to the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State Universit

Post-operative Aspergillus mediastinitis in a man who was immunocompetent: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p><it>Aspergillus </it>spp. infections mainly affect patients who are immunocompromised, and are extremely rare in immunocompetent individuals.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p><it>Aspergillus </it>post-operative mediastinitis is considered to be a devastating infection, usually affecting patients undergoing cardiothoracic surgery with specific predisposing factors. We describe the case of an immunocompetent 68-year-old Caucasian man with severe chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension, who underwent pulmonary thromboendarterectomy and developed post-operative mediastinitis due to <it>Aspergillus flavus</it>. The environmental control did not reveal the source of <it>A. flavus </it>infection and, despite combined antifungal therapy, our patient died as a result of septic shock and multiple organ failure.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p><it>Aspergillus </it>mediastinitis mainly affects patients after cardiosurgery operations with predisposing factors, and it is unusual in patients who are immunocompetent. The identification of the <it>Aspergillus </it>spp. source is often difficult, and there are no guidelines for the administration of pre-emptive therapy in this population of at-risk patients.</p

Gene content evolution in the arthropods

Arthropods comprise the largest and most diverse phylum on Earth and play vital roles in nearly every ecosystem. Their diversity stems in part from variations on a conserved body plan, resulting from and recorded in adaptive changes in the genome. Dissection of the genomic record of sequence change enables broad questions regarding genome evolution to be addressed, even across hyper-diverse taxa within arthropods. Using 76 whole genome sequences representing 21 orders spanning more than 500 million years of arthropod evolution, we document changes in gene and protein domain content and provide temporal and phylogenetic context for interpreting these innovations. We identify many novel gene families that arose early in the evolution of arthropods and during the diversification of insects into modern orders. We reveal unexpected variation in patterns of DNA methylation across arthropods and examples of gene family and protein domain evolution coincident with the appearance of notable phenotypic and physiological adaptations such as flight, metamorphosis, sociality, and chemoperception. These analyses demonstrate how large-scale comparative genomics can provide broad new insights into the genotype to phenotype map and generate testable hypotheses about the evolution of animal diversity