As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the USA in early 2020, it became clear that knowledge of the prevalence of antibodies to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) among asymptomatic individuals could inform public health policy decisions and provide insight into the impact of the infection on vulnerable populations. Two Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Hubs and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set forth to conduct a national seroprevalence survey to assess the infection’s rate of spread. This partnership was able to quickly design and launch the project by leveraging established research capacities, prior experiences in large-scale, multisite studies and a highly skilled workforce of CTSA hubs and unique experimental capabilities at the NIH to conduct a diverse prospective, longitudinal observational cohort of 11,382 participants who provided biospecimens and participant-reported health and behavior data. The study was completed in 16 months and benefitted from transdisciplinary teamwork, information technology innovations, multimodal communication strategies, and scientific partnership for rigor in design and analytic methods. The lessons learned by the rapid implementation and dissemination of this national study is valuable in guiding future multisite projects as well as preparation for other public health emergencies and pandemics.

The Astrobiology Graduate Conference (AbGradCon) is an annual conference both organized for and by early-career researchers, postdoctoral fellows, and students as a way to train the next generation of astrobiologists and develop a robust network of cohorts moving forward. AbGradCon 2021 was held virtually on 14–17 September 2021, hosted by the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) of Tokyo Institute of Technology after postponement of the in-person event in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting consisted of presentations by 120 participants from a variety of fields, two keynote speakers, and other career-building events and workshops. Here, we report on the organizational and executional aspects of AbGradCon 2021, including the meeting participant demographics, various digital aspects introduced specifically for a virtual edition of the meeting, and the abstract submission and evaluation process. The abstract evaluation process of AbGradCon 2021 is unique in that all evaluations are done by the peers of the applicants, and as astrobiology is inherently a broad discipline, the abstract evaluation process revealed a number of trends related to multidisciplinarity of the astrobiology field. We believe that meetings like AbGradCon can provide a unique opportunity for students and early career researchers in astrobiology to experience community building, inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration, and career training and would be a welcome sight in other fields as well. We hope that this report provides inspiration and a basic roadmap for organizing future conferences in any field with similar goals.

Arash Abazari's Hegel's Ontology of Power is a superb study of the relevance of Hegel's logic to Marx's theory. Hegel is often dismissed by Marxists as an ‘idealist’ denying the reality of the world, as if Hegel were Bishop Berkeley with a German accent.1 Abazari recognizes this is not the case: ‘(T)he logical categories are not self-standing, but shadow, or track, the empirical world’ (Abazari 2020: 7). But the world in its full actuality does not simply consist of the objects we sense or perceive. It is intrinsically intelligible, and its intelligibility can be comprehended only in thought. When it is, the ‘idealist’ thesis of the identity (in difference) of thought and being holds. Anyone asserting a truth claim implicitly asserts this identity. In so far as Marx asserts that Capital comprehends the capitalist mode of production, he too is an ‘idealist’ in the Hegelian sense of the term.

Co-regulation of physiological arousal within the caregiver–child dyad precedes later self-regulation within the individual. Despite the importance of unimpaired self-regulatory development for later adjustment outcomes, little is understood about how early co-regulatory processes can become dysregulated during early life. Aspects of caregiver behavior, such as patterns of anxious speech, may be one factor influencing infant arousal dysregulation. To address this, we made day-long, naturalistic biobehavioral recordings in home settings in caregiver–infant dyads using wearable autonomic devices and miniature microphones. We examined the association between arousal, vocalization intensity, and caregiver anxiety. We found that moments of high physiological arousal in infants were more likely to be accompanied by high caregiver arousal when caregivers had high self-reported trait anxiety. Anxious caregivers were also more likely to vocalize intensely at states of high arousal and produce intense vocalizations that occurred in clusters. High-intensity vocalizations were associated with more sustained increases in autonomic arousal for both anxious caregivers and their infants. Findings indicate that caregiver vocal behavior differs in anxious parents, cooccurs with dyadic arousal dysregulation, and could contribute to physiological arousal transmission. Implications for caregiver vocalization as an intervention target are discussed.

Engaging students with the far-distant past can be a challenge. We established Hands Up Education, a non-profit community interest company, in 2017 in recognition of the need for materials that reflect the priorities of today’s students and teachers. Writing a new textbook series provided an opportunity to reevaluate the traditional perspective and prioritise what is important for students learning Latin in the 21st century.

This study examined mental health status among Hurricane Sandy survivors in the most severely damaged areas of New York and New Jersey in 2014, approximately 2 years after this disaster. We used the 2014 Associated Press NORC survey of 1009 Sandy survivors to measure the prevalence of probable mental illness and to analyze its association with selected socioeconomic characteristics of survivors, direct impact by Sandy, as well as social support and social trust. The study found major disparities in mental illness by race/ethnicity, age groups, and employment status. Higher Sandy impact levels were strongly associated with higher rates of mental illness and accounted for much of the disparity between blacks and Hispanics compared with whites in our study group. Social support was more strongly associated with lower rates of mental illness than was social trust. In addition, social support served as a significant mitigating factor in the mental health disparities between blacks and whites. The severity of mental illness among Sandy survivors differed significantly among racial and ethnic groups but was moderated by both the direct impact of this disaster on their lives and the degree of social support they received, as well as how trusting they were.

In this study an explicit Finite Difference Method (FDM) based scheme is developed to solve the Maxwell's equations in time domain for a lossless medium. This manuscript focuses on two unique aspects – the three dimensional time-accurate discretization of the hyperbolic system of Maxwell equations in three-point non-staggered grid stencil and it's application to parallel computing through the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The proposed temporal scheme is symplectic, thus permitting conservation of all Hamiltonians in the Maxwell equation. Moreover, to enable accurate predictions over large time frames, a phase velocity preserving scheme is developed for treatment of the spatial derivative terms. As a result, the chosen time increment and grid spacing can be optimally coupled. An additional theoretical investigation into this pairing is also shown. Finally, the application of the proposed scheme to parallel computing using one Nvidia K20 Tesla GPU card is demonstrated. For the benchmarks performed, the parallel speedup when compared to a single core of an Intel i7-4820K CPU is approximately 190x.

Dramatic increases in human populations and per capita consumption, climate change, overexploitation of marine and freshwater resources, and deforestation have caused a litany of negative consequences for biodiversity. Such doom-and-gloom scenarios are widely known, frequently cited and frankly depressing. Although accurate assessments of threats have clear value for intervention planning, we believe there is also a need to reflect on successes. Such reflection provides balance to negative scenarios and may shift attention towards constructive, positive action. Here we use a systematic evaluation of 90 success stories provided by conservation scientists and practitioners to explore the characteristics of the projects perceived as being associated with success. Success was deemed to have occurred for 19.4% of the projects simply because an event had occurred (e.g. a law was passed) and for 36.1% of projects quantitative data indicated success (e.g. censuses demonstrated population increase). However, for most projects (63.9%) there was no evaluation and success was defined by the subjective opinion of the respondent. Conservation community members viewed successful projects most often as those being long-term (88%), small in spatial scale (52%), with a relatively low budget (68%), and involving a protectionist approach alone or in combination with another approach. These results highlight the subjectivity of definitions of success in conservation but also the characteristics of conservation efforts that the conservation community perceives as indicative of success.

With the ATNF Mopra telescope we are performing a survey in the 12CO(1–0) line to map the molecular gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud. For some regions we also obtained interferometric maps of the high density gas tracers HCO+ and HCN with the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Here we discuss the properties of the elongated molecular complex that stretches about 2 kpc southward from 30 Doradus. Our data suggest that the complex, which we refer to as the ‘molecular ridge’, is not a coherent feature but consists of many smaller clumps that share the same formation history. Likely triggers of molecular-cloud formation are shocks and shearing forces that are present in the surrounding south-eastern Hi overdensity region, a region influenced by strong ram pressure and tidal forces. The molecular ridge is at the western edge of the the overdensity region where a bifurcated velocity structure transitions into a single disk velocity component. We find that the 12CO(1–0) and Hi emission peaks in the molecular ridge are typically near each other but never coincide. A likely explanation is the conversion of warmer, low-opacity Hi to colder, high-opacity Hi from which H2 subsequently forms. On smaller scales we find that very dense molecular gas, as traced by interferometric HCO+ and HCN maps, is associated with star formation along shocked filaments and with rims of expanding shell-like structures, both created by feedback from massive stars.

Thin-film piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate (PZT) is one of the most efficient electromechanical coupling transducer materials currently available for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This article reviews piezoelectric MEMS (piezo MEMS) technologies using PZT thin films in radio frequency (RF) devices for communications and radar applications and in the emerging field of millimeter-scale robotics. The electromechanical material properties of thin-film PZT uniquely enable insect-inspired and insect-scale autonomous robots. Recent progress on large force and displacement actuators for robotic leg joints, compact and high torque ultrasonic motors, and bioinspired millimeter-scale flapping wing platforms will be presented. The use of thin-film PZT to achieve high performance and low-voltage RF MEMS switches, ultralow power consumption nanomechanical logic circuits, and high coupling and low loss resonators, filters, and transformers are also reviewed.