This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributors draw on their years of experience in the field to identify the unique ethical and logistical challenges posed by COVID-19 and offer suggestions for how to adjust and continue research in the face of the pandemic’s disruptions. Key themes include how contingency planning must now be a central part of our research designs; how cyberspace has increasingly become “the field” for the time being; and how scholars can build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with “field citizens,” now and in the future.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research (CSER) Consortium. The authors then negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death.

The debate about how to manage individual research results and incidental findings in genetic and genomic research has focused primarily on what information, if any, to offer back to research participants. However, increasing controversy surrounds the question of whether researchers have any responsibility to offer a participant’s results (defined here to include both individual research results and incidental findings) to the participant’s relatives, including after the participant’s death. This question arises in multiple contexts, including when researchers discover a result with potentially important health implications for genetic relatives, when a participant’s relatives ask a researcher whether any research results about the participant have implications for their own health or reproductive planning, when a participant’s relative asks whether any of the participant’s results have implications for a child’s health, and when the participant is deceased and the participant’s relatives seek information about the participant’s genetic results in order to address their own health or reproductive concerns.

In the United States alone, ∼14,000 children are hospitalised annually with acute heart failure. The science and art of caring for these patients continues to evolve. The International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute was held on February 4 and 5, 2015. The 2015 International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute was funded through the Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Program Endowment, a philanthropic collaboration between All Children’s Hospital and the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida (USF). Sponsored by All Children’s Hospital Andrews/Daicoff Cardiovascular Program, the International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit assembled leaders in clinical and scientific disciplines related to paediatric heart failure and created a multi-disciplinary “think-tank”. The purpose of this manuscript is to summarise the lessons from the 2015 International Pediatric Heart Failure Summit of Johns Hopkins All Children’s Heart Institute, to describe the “state of the art” of the treatment of paediatric cardiac failure, and to discuss future directions for research in the domain of paediatric cardiac failure.

We assessed premorbid functioning during childhood and adolescence in 50 people with schizophrenia from multiply affected families, 39 of their unaffected siblings, 69 people with schizophrenia with no family history of psychosis, 67 of their unaffected siblings and 83 controls. People with schizophrenia had poorer premorbid social and academic adjustment and exhibited a decline between childhood and adolescence compared with controls. Unaffected siblings from multiply affected families also had poor academic functioning in adolescence, with a decline between childhood and adolescence. This may represent a familial (presumed genetic) effect.

The objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of starches with differing rates of hydrolysis on exposure to pancreatin in vitro on postprandial carbohydrate metabolism in healthy subjects and in subjects with type 2 diabetes. Two test starches, prepared from uncooked native granular starch products, and naturally enriched with 13C, were consumed in a randomized crossover design by eight healthy and thirteen type 2 diabetic subjects. One starch was characterized in vitro as being rapidly hydrolysed (R, 94% after 180min), and the other was more slowly hydrolysed (S, 51% after 180min). Each subject consumed 50g of each test starch. In addition, the type 2 diabetic subjects consumed 89·7g of the S starch on a separate occasion. Blood samples were taken at 10min intervals for 3h, and at 20min intervals for a further 3h during a 6h postprandial period. Breath 13CO2 enrichment was measured at the same time points, and indirect calorimetry was performed for seven 20min sessions immediately before and during the 6h postprandial period. With the R starch, plasma glucose concentrations and serum insulin concentrations rose faster and the maximum glucose change was approximately 1·8 times that for the S starch, averaged across both subject groups. The areas under the curves for glucose and insulin were, respectively, 1·7 and 1·8 times higher for the R starch compared with the S starch, averaged across both subject groups. The rate of 13CO2 output and the proportion of 13C recovered in breath after consumption of the R starch was similar for both subject groups. The results provide evidence that starches which have different rates of hydrolysis in vitro result in different patterns of glycaemia and insulinaemia in both healthy adults and in diet-controlled type 2 diabetic subjects. Data from the hydrolysis of novel starch products in vitro, therefore, are useful in predicting glycaemic responses in vivo.

MEMS devices have unique packaging considerations compared to conventional semiconductor devices. They tend to have relatively large die size and many architectures cannot tolerate elevated temperatures. Often these devices require a vacuum environment for efficient operation. While advances have been made in hermetic packaging of MEMS devices, vacuum packaging remains elusive. One significant problem in developing vacuum sealing has been the inability to determine, readily and non-destructively, the vacuum level inside the package. We have previously described the development of a silicon MEMS-based chip design, “SensorChip™,” with integrated photonic crystal and reflective optics, which uses narrow-band optical emission and absorption for selective identification of gas and chemical species. Because the power consumption required to maintain a specific temperature is directly related to the vacuum level, these devices effectively serve as microscopic Pirani gauges – local vacuum sensors in the moderate vacuum range (0.01 to 1.0 torr) of interest to MEMS devices. Using the membrane itself as a vacuum gauge during sealing has proven to be an invaluable tool in developing a robust vacuum seal in a leadless chip carrier package. It has enabled us to optimize choice of design, materials and processing.

We are reporting on the analysis of a new design for a thermal source exploiting Si-based suspended micro-bridge structures. A device consists of a metal film perforated by a periodic array of apertures extending into the Si substrate and each of size on order of the wavelength of the light. This perforated film permits resonant coupling of the incident radiation from the underlying silicon photonic crystal with surface plasmons at the metal surface. The coupling provides for unusually high optical emission efficiencies when the structure is thermally excited. The radiation emitted exhibits an enhancement over a narrow wavelength range in the infrared and its spectral response is highly dependent on the direction of observation. The positions of the main resonances, for both reflection and emission from our structures, scale linearly with the periodicity of the metallo-dielectric structure. As one moves off normal incidence, a single main resonance splits into several smaller resonances whose locations scale roughly linearly with observation angle. These structures have been used as emitter/detector sensor chips to selectively detect industrial pollutants like carbon dioxide. Control of the wavelength of resonance, bandwidth and direction of emission play an important role in improving the sensitivity and selectivity of these gas sensors.

A new type of gas sensor was developed that combines the principles of bolometric infrared detectors with photonic crystals.1,2 This paper describes a quantitative model used to optimize the materials, geometry, and electrical properties of this suspended membrane MEMS device. Fundamentally the model is concerned with the thermal response of the device using temperature dependent thermal conductivity, specific heat, and electrical resistance to calculate conduction, convection, and radiation losses for a negative temperature coefficient of resistance material. Variations in the electrical drive circuit, dc and ac response, low and high frequency sinusoidal and random noise, along with an exacting calculation of expected signal were used to improve design. The model follows the time evolution of the system. We show how look-up tables with scaling (derived from exact, off-line finite element models for thermal conduction, spectral emission, etc.) provided sufficiently accurate estimates with rapid calculation to enable running the model on a standard PC type computer. The simulations matched the experimental results, accurately predicted the unstable operating regimes, and maximized the signal to noise ratio for the device.

The paper describes the initial results from renewed investigations at Niah Cave in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, famous for the discovery in 1958 of the c. 40,000–year old ‘Deep Skull’. The archaeological sequences from the West Mouth and the other entrances of the cave complex investigated by Tom and Barbara Harrisson and other researchers have potential implications for three major debates regarding the prehistory of south-east Asia: the timing of initial settlement by anatomically modern humans; the means by which they subsisted in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene; and the timing, nature, and causation of the transition from foraging to farming. The new project is informing on all three debates. The critical importance of the Niah stratigraphies was commonly identified – including by Tom Harrisson himself – as because the site provided a continuous sequence of occupation over the past 40,000 years. The present project indicates that Niah was first used at least 45,000 years ago, and probably earlier; that the subsequent Pleistocene and Holocene occupations were highly variable in intensity and character; and that in some periods, perhaps of significant duration, the caves may have been more or less abandoned. The cultural sequence that is emerging from the new investigations may be more typical of cave use in tropical rainforests in south-east Asia than the Harrisson model.

Here we describe the evolution of a silicon, MEMS-based chip design developed for infrared gas and chemical detection. The “Sensor-Chip,” with integrated photonic crystal and reflective optics, employs narrow-band optical emission/absorption for selective identification of gas and chemical species. Gas concentration is derived from attenuated optical power, which results in a change in device set point. This change in temperature results in a change in device resistance, via the TCR of the Si. Thermal non-uniformity across the device results in optical “noise” and accelerates localized thermal and electrical failures. This paper reports the influence of processing and design, on achieving uniformly heated, high reliability devices. Specifically, we examine the role of contacts, drive scheme, and device thermal distribution on chip design. Experimentally the temperature uniformity was characterized using an infrared camera. Experimental results indicate that the design of the contact areas in combination with the device design is essential for the reliable performance of the Sensor-Chip. Redesigned devices were fabricated and demonstrated as highly-selective gas and chemical sensors.

We have developed a thermally stimulated narrow-band infrared source for sensing, spectroscopy and thermophotovoltaic applications by combining the unique advantages of two different structures: a photonic crystal that consists of an array of holes etched into a dielectric substrate and a periodically perforated metallic thin film. The dielectric photonic crystal structure is passive and exhibits a strong absorption at resonance. This acts as a radiation reservoir for the conductive array, which plays an active role through plasmon interactions and is opaque at all wavelengths except those at which coupling occurs. We have fabricated the arrays on silicon, silicon dioxide and silicon nitride substrates using MEMS-based processing methods. Infrared spectroscopic studies were used to characterize reflection, absorption and emission in the 2 to 14 micron range showing narrow band resonance. Spectral tuning was accomplished by controlling symmetry and lattice spacing of the arrays. The effects of the etch depth, metal and dielectric properties have been studied experimentally and theoretically. These structures have been used as an emitter/detector sensor chip to selectively detect industrial pollutants like carbon dioxide.

A sensor chip has been designed and tested that uses a MEMS strip heater as both source and detector of infrared radiation. An optical cavity reflects infrared radiation back onto the source filament. Changes in reflected light intensity modify heater temperature, and the measured signal is a change in resistance. The effects of processing on electrical and thermal isolation were characterized and used to evaluate device performance. Thermally isolated, uniformly heated emitters are achieved using a backside release etch process. The fully released devices demonstrated superior electric to thermal-optical conversion, with the requisite narrow band emission for CO2 detection. Using these sensor-chips, CO2 detection was demonstrated, with projected sensitivities ≤0.1%.