The Young Blood Hungers : Mapping Young Black Manhood in Marita Bonner\u27s Frye Street Fiction

Marita O. Bonner, early twentieth century African American public intellectual and creative writer, wrote particularly about the experiences of blacks in Chicago. Though most Bonner scholarship focuses primarily on her working class female characters, this study provides close readings of the young male figures in the short stories, One Boy\u27s Story, The Makin\u27s, The Whipping, There Were Three, Tin Can, and Nothing New. I analyze how these texts confront notions of family, personal identity, and violence, and how Bonner configures young life as a volatile liminal space of human development. As seen in Bonner\u27s short stories and in her essay The Young Blood Hungers, she continually promotes childhood and adolescence as compelling and complicated aspects of the American black experience. Youth is an integral category in investigating not only Bonner\u27s works, but in examining the Harlem Renaissance era

Woods, Sidewalks, Highways, and Homes: Boundaries, Intersections, and Spaces of Agency in African American Children\u27s Literature

This dissertation seeks to define how place and space figure into key African American children\u27s literature texts of the twentieth and twenty first centuries. After sketching a brief history of this genre, this project explores how African American children\u27s literature can be imagined as an intersection between African American literature written for adults and (mainstream) children\u27s literature written primarily for a white audience, so the creation of African American children\u27s texts involves the construction of a crossroads between these two points. These works create their own spaces and develop specific meanings and uses for traditional literary landscapes. The spaces highlighted in this dissertation include the forest (chapter 1), the sidewalk, the street, and the crossroads (chapter 2), the open road (chapter 3), and the home (chapter 4.) Each chapter explores how these spaces are used in African American children\u27s literature, paying attention to the ways these texts diverge from other genres\u27 approaches (either adult African American children\u27s literature or white children\u27s literature) and noting how these novels build their own cultural geographical landscape within the discipline (as seen in the example of Sharon Draper\u27s Stella by Starlight and Mildred Taylor\u27s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.) The forest is noted as a paradoxical place that presents African American children with opportunties for education, privacy, and security. The sidewalk represents the urban space where racist actions are more clearly and easily acted upon. The open road is a dangerous space for young black characters, but it also allows them to flee their present situations to find freedom. The home is a sacred, complex hearth that can either be an oasis or a prison, depending on a child\u27s familial experiences. This dissertation engages with scholars\u27 discussions of the green topos, the roadway topos, and the sacred topos to fully examine how African American children\u27s texts explore the effect of region, geographically-based racism, and nature on African American children\u27s lives. This project also investigates the overarching political and cultural projects of a selected few of major authors in the field. Major authors examined include Mildred Taylor, Christopher Paul Curtis, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers, and Jacqueline Woodson

Type 2 Diabetes and Memory: Using Neuroimaging to Understand the Mechanisms

The most robust and frequently reported cognitive deficits in type 2 diabetes (DM2) are those that relate to memory. Behavioural research has identified a number of potential contributory physiological factors, including abnormalities in glucose metabolism, such as hyperglycaemia and hypoglycaemia. The impact of these mechanisms on memory has been further investigated through the use of both structural and functional neuroimaging. Structural brain imaging has indicated that memory impairments in DM2 are associated with global atrophy of the brain. Further data suggest that localised atrophy in the hippocampal area, a brain region critical to memory formation and consolidation, may be primarily responsible for the memory deficits seen in this population. Functional imaging data has corroborates these findings, with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggesting reduced connectivity between the hippocampus and surrounding brain regions, particularly the frontal and temporal gyri. Despite this, little functional neuroimaging research has directly investigated differences in regional brain activity between healthy and DM2 participants whilst memory tasks are being performed. By using neuroimaging techniques to their full potential, we can acquire a fuller, more comprehensive picture of the impact that DM2 has on memory

Diagnosis and treatment of dehydration after stroke: A synthesis of existing evidence

Dehydration after stroke is associated with poor health outcomes, increased mortality, and poses a significant economic burden to health services. Yet research suggests that monitoring and assessment of hydration status is not routinely undertaken. In this commentary, we critically appraise a systematic review which aimed to synthesise the existing evidence regarding diagnosis and treatment of dehydration after stroke. The review discusses common measures of dehydration, describes studies evaluating rehydration treatments, and highlights the link between dehydration and poorer health outcomes in both human and animal studies. The reviewers suggest, future research should focus on determining a single, validated, objective measure to clinically diagnose dehydration in stroke patients. Research designs should include clearly defined patient characteristics, type and severity of stroke, and type and time point of dehydration measurement, to enable comparison between studies. Management of hydration status is a crucial element of acute stroke care which should be routinely practiced

The Medical Action Ontology: A tool for annotating and analyzing treatments and clinical management of human disease.

BACKGROUND: Navigating the clinical literature to determine the optimal clinical management for rare diseases presents significant challenges. We introduce the Medical Action Ontology (MAxO), an ontology specifically designed to organize medical procedures, therapies, and interventions. METHODS: MAxO incorporates logical structures that link MAxO terms to numerous other ontologies within the OBO Foundry. Term development involves a blend of manual and semi-automated processes. Additionally, we have generated annotations detailing diagnostic modalities for specific phenotypic abnormalities defined by the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO). We introduce a web application, POET, that facilitates MAxO annotations for specific medical actions for diseases using the Mondo Disease Ontology. FINDINGS: MAxO encompasses 1,757 terms spanning a wide range of biomedical domains, from human anatomy and investigations to the chemical and protein entities involved in biological processes. These terms annotate phenotypic features associated with specific disease (using HPO and Mondo). Presently, there are over 16,000 MAxO diagnostic annotations that target HPO terms. Through POET, we have created 413 MAxO annotations specifying treatments for 189 rare diseases. CONCLUSIONS: MAxO offers a computational representation of treatments and other actions taken for the clinical management of patients. Its development is closely coupled to Mondo and HPO, broadening the scope of our computational modeling of diseases and phenotypic features. We invite the community to contribute disease annotations using POET (https://poet.jax.org/). MAxO is available under the open-source CC-BY 4.0 license (https://github.com/monarch-initiative/MAxO). FUNDING: NHGRI 1U24HG011449-01A1 and NHGRI 5RM1HG010860-04

Behavioral Coping Phenotypes and Associated Psychosocial Outcomes of Pregnant and Postpartum Women During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The impact of COVID-19-related stress on perinatal women is of heightened public health concern given the established intergenerational impact of maternal stress-exposure on infants and fetuses. There is urgent need to characterize the coping styles associated with adverse psychosocial outcomes in perinatal women during the COVID-19 pandemic to help mitigate the potential for lasting sequelae on both mothers and infants. This study uses a data-driven approach to identify the patterns of behavioral coping strategies that associate with maternal psychosocial distress during the COVID-19 pandemic in a large multicenter sample of pregnant women (N = 2876) and postpartum women (N = 1536). Data was collected from 9 states across the United States from March to October 2020. Women reported behaviors they were engaging in to manage pandemic-related stress, symptoms of depression, anxiety and global psychological distress, as well as changes in energy levels, sleep quality and stress levels. Using latent profile analysis, we identified four behavioral phenotypes of coping strategies. Critically, phenotypes with high levels of passive coping strategies (increased screen time, social media, and intake of comfort foods) were associated with elevated symptoms of depression, anxiety, and global psychological distress, as well as worsening stress and energy levels, relative to other coping phenotypes. In contrast, phenotypes with high levels of active coping strategies (social support, and self-care) were associated with greater resiliency relative to other phenotypes. The identification of these widespread coping phenotypes reveals novel behavioral patterns associated with risk and resiliency to pandemic-related stress in perinatal women. These findings may contribute to early identification of women at risk for poor long-term outcomes and indicate malleable targets for interventions aimed at mitigating lasting sequelae on women and children during the COVID-19 pandemic

Expansion of the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) knowledge base and resources.

The Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO)-a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities associated with 7000+ diseases-is used by thousands of researchers, clinicians, informaticians and electronic health record systems around the world. Its detailed descriptions of clinical abnormalities and computable disease definitions have made HPO the de facto standard for deep phenotyping in the field of rare disease. The HPO\u27s interoperability with other ontologies has enabled it to be used to improve diagnostic accuracy by incorporating model organism data. It also plays a key role in the popular Exomiser tool, which identifies potential disease-causing variants from whole-exome or whole-genome sequencing data. Since the HPO was first introduced in 2008, its users have become both more numerous and more diverse. To meet these emerging needs, the project has added new content, language translations, mappings and computational tooling, as well as integrations with external community data. The HPO continues to collaborate with clinical adopters to improve specific areas of the ontology and extend standardized disease descriptions. The newly redesigned HPO website (www.human-phenotype-ontology.org) simplifies browsing terms and exploring clinical features, diseases, and human genes

Recognition of stream drying based on benthic macroinvertebrates: a new tool in Central Europe

Many streams in the extensive Central European region have an intermittent flow regime. Conventional hydrological methods used to identify zero-flow conditions, and in particular drying events, have limited use when assessing large areas dominated by low-order streams. We developed a novel multimetric index to recognise antecedent stream drying based on the analysis of benthic macroinvertebrate communities. The data used to develop the index were collected in pristine streams with different flow permanence regimes between 2012 and 2014, using standard sampling methods for ecological status assessment. The data include 64 perennial, 19 near-perennial and 27 intermittent benthic macroinvertebrate samples. Metrics considered for the index included variables based on (i) the occurrence of indicator taxa, (ii) the proportion of biological and ecological traits, and (iii) structural community metrics. Linear discriminant analysis identified the metric combinations that best discriminated among the three flow permanence categories. Different metrics were used in the final multimetric index calculation for the autumn and spring season that followed stream drying. In both seasons, the index included the proportion of indicator taxa and the proportion of taxa with high body flexibility. In addition, the autumn index included the proportion of taxa with a preference for organic substrates, whereas in spring the index included total abundance. Independent data from regulatory monitoring activity were used to validate the accuracy of the index. The correct classification of independent samples was 92% and 96% for samples from perennial and non-perennial sites, respectively. The index can be calculated using data collected by routine monitoring programmes used to assess ecological status and provides information about stream intermittence where conventional hydrological monitoring is limited. As intermittent streams increase in extent in global regions including Central Europe, the tool may be of particular interest to those who use invertebrates to monitor or manage these ecosystems