299 research outputs found
Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions
Public policies have actively responded to an emergent social and neuroscientific evidence base documenting the benefits of targeting services to children during the earliest period of their development. But problems of low utilization, inconsistent participation, and low retention continue to present themselves as challenges. Although most interventions recognize and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parent’s engagement, few take seriously the decision making roles of parents. Using insights from the behavioral sciences, we revisit assumptions about the presumed behavior of parents in a developmental context. We then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to augment the intended impacts of early development, education and care initiatives by improving parent engagement
Fidelity of Hyperbolic Space for Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference
Bayesian inference for phylogenetics is a gold standard for computing
distributions of phylogenies. It faces the challenging problem of. moving
throughout the high-dimensional space of trees. However, hyperbolic space
offers a low dimensional representation of tree-like data. In this paper, we
embed genomic sequences into hyperbolic space and perform hyperbolic Markov
Chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. The posterior probability is computed
by decoding a neighbour joining tree from proposed embedding locations. We
empirically demonstrate the fidelity of this method on eight data sets. The
sampled posterior distribution recovers the splits and branch lengths to a high
degree. We investigated the effects of curvature and embedding dimension on the
Markov Chain's performance. Finally, we discuss the prospects for adapting this
method to navigate tree space with gradients
Development of a mammalian neurosensory full‐thickness skin equivalent and its application to screen sensitizing stimuli
Human skin equivalents (HSEs) are an increasingly popular research tool due to limitations associated with animal testing for dermatological research. They recapitulate many aspects of skin structure and function, however, many only contain two basic cell types to model dermal and epidermal compartments, which limits their application. We describe advances in the field skin tissue modeling to produce a construct containing sensory-like neurons that is responsive to known noxious stimuli. Through incorporation of mammalian sensory-like neurons, we were able to recapitulate aspects of the neuroinflammatory response including secretion of substance P and a range of pro-inflammatory cytokines in response to a well-characterized neurosensitizing agent: capsaicin. We observed that neuronal cell bodies reside in the upper dermal compartment with neurites extending toward the keratinocytes of the stratum basale where they exist in close proximity to one another. These data suggest that we are able to model aspects of the neuroinflammatory response that occurs during exposure to dermatological stimuli including therapeutics and cosmetics. We propose that this skin construct can be considered a platform technology with a wide range of applications including screening of actives, therapeutics, modeling of inflammatory skin diseases, and fundamental approaches to probe underlying cell and molecular mechanisms
Inferring energy-composition relationships with Bayesian optimization enhances exploration of inorganic materials
Computational exploration of the compositional spaces of materials can
provide guidance for synthetic research and thus accelerate the discovery of
novel materials. Most approaches employ high-throughput sampling and focus on
reducing the time for energy evaluation for individual compositions, often at
the cost of accuracy. Here, we present an alternative approach focusing on
effective sampling of the compositional space. The learning algorithm PhaseBO
optimizes the stoichiometry of the potential target material while improving
the probability of and accelerating its discovery without compromising the
accuracy of energy evaluation
Prioritization and Planning to Improve Urban Tree Health in the Chicago Region
The Chicago Region Trees Initiative (CRTI) has collected one of the largest data sets on urban forestry in the United States. This data informs where and how CRTI prioritizes its work and capacity building. This data has been incorporated into interactive online resources that communities and neighborhoods can access to help decision makers, landowners, and managers understand where and what to plant, the value of the urban forest, impacts of woody invasive species, heat island challenges, and where opportunities exist for oak ecosystem enhancement. This data helps CRTI and its partners to prioritize action
Cross Sector Partnerships – Development of the Chicago Region Trees Initiative
The Chicago Region Trees Initiative (CRTI) is a partnership of more than 200 organizations across the seven county Chicago metro region. The CRTI believes that trees are critical to our quality of life, and its mission is to ensure that trees are more healthy, abundant, diverse, and equitably distributed to provide needed benefits to all people and communities in the Chicago region. Our key goals are to inspire people to value trees, increase the Chicago region’s tree canopy, reduce threats to trees, and enhance oak ecosystems. The CRTI has built upon the work and programs of others, and the experience of partners to shape the urban forest in the Chicago region by 2050
Sidechain control of porosity closure in multiple peptide-based porous materials by cooperative folding
Porous materials find application in separation, storage and catalysis. We report a crystalline porous solid formed by coordination of metal centres with a glycylserine dipeptide. We prove experimentally that the structure evolves from a solvated porous into a non-porous state as result of ordered displacive and conformational changes of the peptide that suppress the void space in response to environmental pressure. This cooperative closure, which recalls the folding of proteins, retains order in three-dimensions and is driven by the hydroxyl groups acting as H-bond donors in the peptide sequence through the serine residue. This ordered closure is also displayed by multipeptide solid solutions in which the combination of different sequences of amino acids controls their guest response in a non-linear way. This functional control can be compared to the effect of single point mutations in proteins, where the exchange of single amino acids can radically alter structure and functio
- …