The material related with orientation of Cyanine dyes and their behavior at the ends of duplex RNA is also documented in [110]. Cyanine dyes are widely used to study the folding and structural transformations of nucleic acids using fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). The extent to which FRET can be used to extract inter- and intra-molecular distances has been the subject of considerable debate in the literature; the contribution of dye and linker dynamics to...

A presentation given at the December meeting of the Five College Cataloging & Metadata Group, regarding running better and more effective meetings.

Though often overlooked due to their scale, networks of small sacral Christian architecture in the form of local churches, pilgrimage churches, chapels and small sacral sites, hold a significant importance in rural cultural landscapes in Europe and beyond. The networks are significant in their social stratification, diversity, distribution and abundance across cultural landscapes. The most significant development of networks of small sacral architecture in central and eastern Europe was during the Baroque under Catholicism, although...

Eswatini has the highest global prevalence of HIV despite universal access to free treatment. Lack of compliance continues to be a significant challenge for HIV care and management programs throughout the country. Studies investigating barriers to antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, particularly in women, who are the most vulnerable to HIV infections, are limited. The disproportionate impact of HIV on women can be attributed to multiple risk factors at the individual, household, and community/structural levels. Women...

Information Retrieval (IR) concerns about the structure, analysis, organization, storage, and retrieval of information. Among different retrieval models proposed in the past decades, generative retrieval models, especially those under the statistical probabilistic framework, are one of the most popular techniques that have been widely applied to Information Retrieval problems. While they are famous for their well-grounded theory and good empirical performance in text retrieval, their applications in IR are often limited by their complexity and...

Infectious diseases are a primary driver of bee decline worldwide, but limited understanding of how pathogens are transmitted hampers effective management. Flowers have been implicated as hubs of bee disease transmission, but we know little about how interspecific floral variation affects transmission dynamics. Using bumble bees (Bombus impatiens), a trypanosomatid pathogen (Crithidia bombi), and three plant species varying in floral morphology, we assessed how host infection and plant species affect pathogen deposition on flowers, and...

Winter habitat quality can influence breeding phenology and reproductive success of migratory birds. Using stable isotope ratios of carbon (δ13C) from bird claws and red blood cells collected in Massachusetts, USA, we assessed if winter habitat occupancy carried over to affect prairie warbler (Setophaga discolor) breeding arrival dates, body condition upon arrival, pairing success, first-egg dates, and reproductive success. In two of three years (in 2011 and 2012, but not in 2013), after-second-year (ASY) males...

This panel explores the heritage of religious sites in rural landscapes and communities of central and eastern Europe, and Morocco. Religious sites and their community networks within the rural landscape are often overlooked as a collective resource. However, they provide overlapping levels of order in the landscape that derive from various social classes and religious traditions. Often these layers of class and spiritual tradition are invisible to those outside of the class/social/cultural group that created...

The tantalizing promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here, we report using a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, corresponding to a computational state-space of dimension 2^53 ∼ 10^16. Measurements from repeated...

Bumble bee pollinators can be exposed to pathogens when foraging on flowers previously visited by infected individuals. Infectious cells may be deposited in floral nectar, providing a site for pathogens to interact with nectar secondary compounds prior to infecting bees. Some nectar secondary compounds can reduce pathogen counts in infected bumble bees, but we know less about how exposure to these compounds directly affects pathogens prior to being ingested by their host. We exposed the...

Understanding global diversity patterns has benefitted from a focus on functional traits and how they relate to variation in environmental conditions among assemblages. Distant communities in similar environments often share characteristics, and for tropical forest mammals, this functional trait convergence has been demonstrated at coarse scales (110-200 km resolution), but less is known about how these patterns manifest at fine scales, where local processes (e.g., habitat features and anthropogenic activities) and biotic interactions occur. Here,...

Environmental conditions can influence biological characteristics, such as phenology and body size, with important consequences for organismal fitness. Examining these fitness consequences under natural conditions through genetic pedigree reconstruction offers a lens into potential population responses to changing environments. Over 3 years (2013–2015), we introduced adult alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus), anadromous, iteroparous clupeids, into one Massachusetts (USA) lake to complete the first detailed examination of this species’ mating system and assess relationships among body size, reproductive...

Reduction of ecosystem connectivity has long-lasting impacts on food webs. Anadromous fish, which migrate from marine to freshwater ecosystems to complete reproduction, have seen their historically larger ecosystem role undercut by widespread riverine habitat fragmentation and other impacts mainly derived from anthropogenic sources. The result has been extensive extirpations and increased susceptibility to a suite of environmental factors that currently impede recovery. Under this present-day context of reduced productivity and connectivity, aggressive management actions and...

Disruptive natural selection within populations exploiting different resources is considered to be a major driver of adaptive radiation and the production of biodiversity. Fitness functions, which describe the relationships between trait variation and fitness, can help to illuminate how this disruptive selection leads to population differentiation. However, a single fitness function represents only a particular selection regime over a single specified time period (often a single season or a year), and therefore might not capture...

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the...

Skeletal muscle oxidative capacity plays a critical role in human health and disease. Although current models of oxidative phosphorylation sufficiently describe skeletal muscle energetics during moderate-intensity contractions, much is still unknown about the mechanisms that control and limit oxidative phosphorylation during high-intensity contractions. In particular, the oxygen cost of force generation is augmented during exercise at workloads above the lactate threshold. Presently, it is unclear whether this augmentation in muscle oxygen consumption is driven by...

Inclusion of students with disabilities is an area of interest for the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education. Educational policy plays an essential key to provide meaningful inclusion provisions to all types of children for academic and social success, but it is not clear if the policies adequately support inclusive education in Saudi Arabia. Much of that research conducted in the United States has demonstrated that teacher’ perceptions and knowledge of inclusion and students with disabilities...

1. Body mass is a key life history trait in animals. Despite being the largest animals on the planet, no method currently exists to estimate body mass of free-living whales. 2. We combined aerial photographs and historical catch records to estimate the body mass of free-living right whales (Eubalaena sp.). First, aerial photogrammetry from unmanned aerial vehicles was used to measure the body length, width (lateral distance) and height (dorso-ventral distance) of free-living southern right...

Elasmoid scales are the most common epithelial appendage among vertebrates, however an understanding of the genetic mechanisms that underlie variation in scale shape is lacking. Using an F2 mapping cross between morphologically distinct cichlid species, we identified >40 QTL for scale shape at different body positions. We show that while certain regions of the genome regulate variation in multiple scales, most are specific to scales at distinct positions. This suggests a degree of regional modularity...

Under the current amphibian biodiversity crisis, common species provide an opportunity to measure population dynamics across a wide range of environmental conditions while examining the processes that determine abundance and structure geographic ranges. Studying species at their range limits also provides a window for understanding the dynamics expected in future environments under increasing climate change and human modification. We quantified patterns of seasonal activity, density, and space use in the Eastern red-backed salamander (Plethodon cinereus)...

Nestlings of many bird species are hosts to hematophagous ectoparasites. Parasitism of nestlings is usually sub-lethal, but its effects can extend into the fledgling and adult stages. Nestling hosts lose enough blood to become anemic, but the effects of reduced oxygen-carrying capacity on metabolic rate are poorly understood. This study examined the consequences of parasitism by larval blow flies Protocalliphora sialia for nestling tree swallows Tachycineta bicolor. We found that nestlings with more parasites had...

Polymeric systems exhibit interesting macroscopic properties under different thermodynamic conditions and are prevalent in both biology and synthetic world. How a system of polymers behaves under different thermodynamic conditions is determined by the interplay of different possible interactions such as short-ranged Van der Waals and long-ranged electrostatic interactions and the entropy of individual components present in the system. This work is mostly focused on the theoretical study of the thermodynamic phase behaviors of charged polymers...