The U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) has been a leader in weed science research covering topics ranging from the development and use of integrated weed management (IWM) tactics to basic mechanistic studies, including biotic resistance of desirable plant communities and herbicide resistance. ARS weed scientists have worked in agricultural and natural ecosystems, including agronomic and horticultural crops, pastures, forests, wild lands, aquatic habitats, wetlands, and riparian areas. Through strong partnerships with academia, state agencies, private industry, and numerous federal programs, ARS weed scientists have made contributions to discoveries in the newest fields of robotics and genetics, as well as the traditional and fundamental subjects of weed–crop competition and physiology and integration of weed control tactics and practices. Weed science at ARS is often overshadowed by other research topics; thus, few are aware of the long history of ARS weed science and its important contributions. This review is the result of a symposium held at the Weed Science Society of America’s 62nd Annual Meeting in 2022 that included 10 separate presentations in a virtual Weed Science Webinar Series. The overarching themes of management tactics (IWM, biological control, and automation), basic mechanisms (competition, invasive plant genetics, and herbicide resistance), and ecosystem impacts (invasive plant spread, climate change, conservation, and restoration) represent core ARS weed science research that is dynamic and efficacious and has been a significant component of the agency’s national and international efforts. This review highlights current studies and future directions that exemplify the science and collaborative relationships both within and outside ARS. Given the constraints of weeds and invasive plants on all aspects of food, feed, and fiber systems, there is an acknowledged need to face new challenges, including agriculture and natural resources sustainability, economic resilience and reliability, and societal health and well-being.

Ingestion of mycoprotein stimulates skeletal muscle protein synthesis (MPS) rates to a greater extent than concentrated milk protein when matched for leucine content, potentially attributable to the wholefood nature of mycoprotein. We hypothesised that bolus ingestion of mycoprotein as part of its wholefood matrix would stimulate MPS rates to a greater extent compared with a leucine-matched bolus of protein concentrated from mycoprotein. Twenty-four healthy young (age, 21 ± 2 years; BMI, 24 ± 3 kg.m2) males received primed, continuous infusions of L-[ring-2H5]phenylalanine and completed a bout of unilateral resistance leg exercise before ingesting either 70 g mycoprotein (MYC; 31·4 g protein, 2·5 g leucine; n 12) or 38·2 g of a protein concentrate obtained from mycoprotein (PCM; 28·0 g protein, 2·5 g leucine; n 12). Blood and muscle samples (vastus lateralis) were taken pre- and (4 h) post-exercise/protein ingestion to assess postabsorptive and postprandial myofibrillar protein fractional synthetic rates (FSR) in resting and exercised muscle. Protein ingestion increased plasma essential amino acid and leucine concentrations (P < 0·0001), but more rapidly (both 60 v. 90 min; P < 0·0001) and to greater magnitudes (1367 v. 1346 μmol·l–1 and 298 v. 283 μmol·l–1, respectively; P < 0·0001) in PCM compared with MYC. Protein ingestion increased myofibrillar FSR (P < 0·0001) in both rested (MYC, Δ0·031 ± 0·007 %·h–1 and PCM, Δ0·020 ± 0·008 %·h–1) and exercised (MYC, Δ0·057 ± 0·011 %·h–1 and PCM, Δ0·058 ± 0·012 %·h–1) muscle, with no differences between conditions (P > 0·05). Mycoprotein ingestion results in equivalent postprandial stimulation of resting and post-exercise myofibrillar protein synthesis rates irrespective of whether it is consumed within or without its wholefood matrix.

Determining appropriate topics and target audiences is essential to design effective educational outreach programs. Based on landowner responses to a mail survey, we determined both the importance and the availability of wildlife and forest management information topics to Mississippi landowners. Combining this information clearly identified the appropriate subject matter for outreach programs—topics important to landowners and for which information was relatively unavailable. The importance of wildlife and forest management information relative to its availability depended on the region, land use patterns, and landowner characteristics, thus demonstrating which segments of the population should be targeted to maximize program impact.

The problem of formulating knowledge bases containing action schema is a central concern in knowledge engineering for artificial intelligence (AI) planning. This paper describes Learning Object-Centred Models (LOCM), a system that carries out the automated generation of a planning domain model from example training plans. The novelty of LOCM is that it can induce action schema without being provided with any information about predicates or initial, goal or intermediate state descriptions for the example action sequences. Each plan is assumed to be a sound sequence of actions; each action in a plan is stated as a name and a list of objects that the action refers to. LOCM exploits assumptions about the kinds of domain model it has to generate, rather than handcrafted clues or planner-oriented knowledge. It assumes that actions change the state of objects, and require objects to be in a certain state before they can be executed. In this paper, we describe the implemented LOCM algorithm, the assumptions that it is based on, and an evaluation using plans generated through goal-directed solutions, through random walk, and through logging human-generated plans for the game of freecell. We analyze the performance of LOCM by its application to the induction of domain models from five domains.

During the late nineteenth century, contests over prohibition gripped hundreds of American towns and cities, nowhere with greater consequences than in the post-Reconstruction South. This article examines those effects in Greenville, South Carolina, a small marketing and manufacturing center in the white-majority upcountry. During the 1880s, prohibition split white Democrats who had “redeemed” Greenville's town government just a few years before and led to a surge in voter registration and participation among African Americans. The liquor question's repercussions for politics in the Gilded Age South have been largely neglected, both by social historians of prohibition and by political historians, who have failed to see it as one of the issues that roiled the region's politics between Reconstruction and the Populist rebellion. This article also emphasizes the overlooked importance of municipal elections and governance—even in so small a place as Greenville—as an arena for African Americans’ political activity. Greenville's black voters used their influence during the 1880s to achieve modest but tangible gains in education and municipal services and to erect at least a partial bulwark against the tide of white supremacy. These developments were part of a region-wide revival in African Americans’ municipal power, which Southern Democrats were careful to target in their disfranchising campaigns as the century drew to close.

The purpose of the study was to examine the zero-order and unique relations of effortful attentional and behavioral regulation, reactive impulsivity, and anger/frustration to Chinese first and second graders' internalizing and externalizing symptoms, as well as the prediction of adjustment from the interaction of anger/frustration and effortful control or impulsivity. A parent and teacher reported on children's anger/frustration, effortful control, and impulsivity. Parents reported on children's internalizing symptoms, and teachers and peers reported on children's externalizing symptoms. Children were classified as relatively high on externalizing (or comorbid), internalizing, or nondisordered. High impulsivity and teacher-reported anger/frustration, and low effortful control, were associated with externalizing problems, whereas low effortful control and high parent-reported anger were predictive of internalizing problems. Unique prediction from effortful and reactive control was obtained and these predictors (especially when reported by teachers) often interacted with anger/frustration when predicting problem behavior classification.This research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health (2 R01 MH60838) to Nancy Eisenberg and an Earmarked Research Grant (CUHK4620/05H) of the Research Grants Council, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China, to Lei Chang.