Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Near Real-Time Determination Of The Prevalence Of Cannabinoids, Cathinones, And Synthetic Opioids, Catherine O'Rourke, Bikram Subedi

Scholars Week

Unregulated new psychoactive substances (NPS) in “pure” or “preparation” forms are designed to mimic the effects of controlled substances, and are introduced and reintroduced in the market as a cheap substitute of established regulated drugs in quick succession to loophole the law enforcement efforts on combating drugs. For example, carfentanil, a synthetic opioid activates the opioid receptors similar to morphine but it is astoundingly potent compared to a typical drug of abuse (100 times more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times more powerful than morphine). Based on the cost- and time-intensive forensic analysis, National Drug Early Warning System reported the …

Studying The Glacial Melt Of Mount Baker Using Remote Sensing (1999 - 2019), Cole Fletcher

Scholars Week

With rising temperatures glaciers around the globe are beginning to melt. Melting of large glaciers should be concerning as they can raise the present sea-level which could potentially put near sea-level urban areas underwater. We must observe the rate at which glaciers are retreating. Mountain glaciers are a good resource to observe as they do give a clear visual of how fast glaciers are retreating. This project hopes to give a good visual representation and quantitative measurement of how much glacial melt is occurring at Mt Baker in Washington, United States, in the last 20 years. This project will use …

Modeling Distances Between Various Attractions And Nearest City Parks Using Exponential Distribution, Ashley Hall

Scholars Week

We examine the park data in Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (TCMA) to understand the distances between various attractions (water features, transit stops, bike paths, sport fields, etc.) and nearest city parks. We verify our research hypothesis that these distance variables are exponentially distributed using histograms and chi-squared goodness-of-fit test. Our findings suggest that most of the distance variables are indeed exponentially distributed except the one that measures the distance between the metropolitan area and the nearest city parks. Based on that, we further hypothesize that the locations of the various attractions relative to the nearest city parks follow the spatial …

Polycarbodiimides And Polyguanidines : Their Reactivity And Applications In Covalent Adaptable Networks, Alberto Melchor Bañales

Scholars Week

We have recently discovered a new chemical transformation in which N,N’,N’’ tri-substituted guanidines undergo a thermal exchange reaction. Kinetic investigations indicate that the transformation is first order with respect to the guanidine, indicating a dissociative mechanism in which a carbodiimide and amine are formed as intermediates. This new reaction has been applied to polymer systems. Polycarbodiimides were shown to undergo postpolymerization modification with amines to form polyguanidines at room temperature under an hour. Polyguanidines undergo the newly found chemical transformation to form different substituted polyguanidines. This exchange reaction will be applied to the preparation of a covalent adaptable network by …

Smart Home Simulation In The Virtual World, Thomas Jones-Moore, David Son

Scholars Week

The goal of this project is to produce a 'smart home' by using IoT and RFID like things in the virtual world to help solve problems. Some of these problems can be CPR training, etc. Used as an evaluation platform of suggested hardware to get a desired (or best fit) set of smart objects, or combinations with computer vision. Cost model to determine best fit based on: accuracy, lowest cost, easiest deployment, etc.

Vibrations On Networks, Zachary Pontrantolfi

Scholars Week

Studying vibrations on networks helps inform our understanding of random processes on other networks with similar geometry. We discuss two physical models to build up intuition about their eigenvectors. We conclude with a hidden connection between the rate of convergence of random walks, and the ground state energies of molecules.

Performance Annotation Framework, Quentin Jensen, Chloe Dawson

Scholars Week

Large scale applications developers have many tools at their disposal to optimize and verify their software. One of which is Caliper, an annotation-based performance measurement tool. Caliper is very powerful and versatile, however, can be cumbersome to apply to complex applications. To solve this problem, we have created a framework to automatically prepare an application for performance measurement. This framework provides a layer of abstraction between the user and the source-code annotations and library linking. As a result, the process of measuring the performance of an application can be fully automated away – a huge step towards automatic software optimization.

Resources For Interdisciplinary Understanding Of Energy, Alessandra Hughes, Jessica Trottier

Scholars Week

In most undergraduate curricula, students are expected to have the ability to apply, or transfer, a learned concept to new coursework. In the sciences, students are often introduced to energy ideas with discipline-specific vocabulary and tasks which encourage compartmentalized, surface-level understandings of energy concepts. Our research investigates student transfer of energy ideas within a coherent science course series, where physics is the foundational course. Similar modeling tools and vocabulary are used in the classes to help students see energy as a unifying framework. We seek to identify and describe what transfer “looks like” in this idealized context by interviewing students …

Spectral Analysis Of Stratigraphy At Eberswalde Crater, Mars, Cory Hughes

Scholars Week

We will analyze spectral characteristics of stratigraphy in the catchment and deposit at Eberswalde Crater, Mars. This crater is a frequent contender for the preferred destination of future Mars rover and human science missions in the search for evidence of life on the Red Planet.

Strategy Flexibility: Choosing Different Systems To Apply The Work Energy Principle, Grace Baker, Thanh Le

Scholars Week

An important goal of physics instruction is to help students become adaptive problem solvers so that they can approach a wide range of situations. One aspect of adaptive problem solving is strategy flexibility — knowing multiple ways to approach a problem and choosing the most appropriate approach. In this study, we examine the role of meta strategic judgements in students’ application of strategy flexibility. Specifically, we study students’ meta-strategic judgements when choosing a system with which to apply the work-energy principle to various scenarios. College students enrolled in an introductory mechanics course were interviewed about their rationales for their system …

Engineering Sortase; Activity And Selectivity Of New Hybrid And Ancestral Variants Of Sortase A, Sarah Struyvenberg

Scholars Week

Bacterial sortase enzymes are a beneficial tool in innovative mechanisms of protein engineering. However, important limitations to utilization of sortases for engineered purposes exist; namely, that sortase A (SrtA) is a relatively poor enzyme and very specific for the substrate containing LPATXG motif. Exciting previous work from our collaborators reveals that sortases from different species recognize different sequences and that activity can vary. Therefore, we wanted to create and investigate hybrid sortase enzymes between SrtA from S. aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae, wherein we swapped a substrate-interacting loop between the beta-E and beta-F strands. Our hypothesis is that these residues are …

A Quantitative Assessment Of The Diabetes Self-Management Education Program, Grace Mcfarlane

Scholars Week

A Diabetes Self-Management Education (DSME) program offered in an inner-city health center run by the Cincinnati Health Department, which started in 2014, was created to help those in an underserved population learn how to manage their diabetes. Two key measurements, A1C (glycated hemoglobin) and BMI (body mass index), were taken over time to monitor their progress. In this study, we analyzed quantitatively whether or not there was a significant improvement in their BMI and A1C values over the course of two years since they joined DSME program as any improvement would imply a potentially healthier lifestyle in regards to their …

A Simulation Platform For Generation Of Synthetic Videos For Human Activity Recognition, Gary Plunkett

Scholars Week

The field of human activity recognition from video data has recently made great strides. However, the large amount of labelled data needed to train activity recognition models remains a common bottleneck. We introduce a simulation platform to procedurally generate synthetic videos of household activities, which randomizes portions of the virtual scene like camera position, human model, and interaction motion to introduce video variation.

An Automated Spectrogoniometer System With Planetary Science Applications, Kathleen Hoza

Scholars Week

Reflectance spectroscopy is a major technique for characterizing the composition of planetary surfaces, and has led to key findings such as the characterization of alteration minerals indicative of an aqueous, neutral-pH environment in Mars’ past. When a reflectance spectrometer collects data, it does so at some viewing geometry, which is defined by the angular relationships between the light source illuminating the surface, the target material, and the detector. In the lab, this is usually at a standard viewing geometry (e.g. incidence=0, emission=30). In situ measurements taken by spacecraft, however, may be taken at a wide range of viewing geometries. This …

A Day In The Life Of A Supercomputer, William Clem, Sean Mcculloch

Scholars Week

We are developing an interactive dashboard for visualizing the statistics of how users interact with nodes of a supercomputer. The intended purpose of the dashboard is to periodically provide with the overview of the load and bandwidth utilization of the nodes of a large supercomputer and details of each node and job as selected by the user. The dashboard will be interactive which will enable users to zoom in on interesting parts of the visualizations to investigate in details.

Bottom-Up Shape Engineering Of Organic Molecular Single-Crystals, Griffin Reed

Scholars Week

The ability to fabricate complex submicron-scale components from inorganic crystalline semiconductor materials such as c-Si enables countless modern technologies, from microelectromechanical systems to integrated circuits. For single-crystal molecular materials on the other hand, comparable approaches to defining micron- and submicron-scale structure are much less well developed, in part because weak intermolecular binding forces make molecular crystals vulnerable to damage by conventional techniques such as reactive ion etching, wet etching, and energetic beam milling. Here we show how the same weak forces that are problematic for top-down patterning of molecular crystals can be exploited to enable controlled bottom-up growth, by leveraging …

Hour-Level Resolution On Consumption Pattern Of Substance Abuse, Jarrett Mauk, Rhiannon Huffines, Brittney Nelson, Tara Croft, Bikram Subedi

Scholars Week

Conventional survey-based approaches of determining the consumption statistics of drugs in communities are suffered from non-response biases, and typically underestimate the actual consumption. Time and cost-intensive conventional approaches, therefore, can’t be utilized to determine high-resolution temporal variability in drug consumption. In this study, the temporal trend of consumption of 10 illicit and 26 prescribed neuropsychiatric drugs was determined at hour-level resolution utilizing wastewater-based epidemiology. The hourly composite raw wastewater (every 10 minutes) samples were collected for three consecutive days in a typical week (total of 72 samples), analyzed for target drug residues using UPLC-MS/MS, and back-calculated the consumption rate of …

Uncertainties Treatment For Wastewater-Based Epidemiological Estimation Of The Consumption Of Illicit And Prescribed Neuropsychiatric Drugs In Two Urban Communities In Kentucky Using Ammonium Normalized Population And Monte Carlo Simulation, Rhinannon Huffines, Tara Croft, Manoj Pathak, Bikram Subedi

Scholars Week

The conventional estimation of the prevalence of substance use in a community based on self-reported surveys typically underestimates the actual consumption. Drug’s residues in raw wastewater collected from the centralized wastewater treatment plants were utilized – Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) – to determine the consumption rate of illicit and prescribed neuropsychiatric residues in two urban communities in eastern Kentucky and two rural communities in western Kentucky. The ammonical nitrogen content in raw wastewater samples was used to minimize the uncertainty associated with the population dynamicity. Uncertainties associated with the several WBE parameters to back-calculate the consumption rate of drugs such as …

Characteristics Of Soils Under Common Management Practices On Farms In Western Kentucky, River Dowell

Scholars Week

Characteristics of Soils under Common Management Practices

on Farms in Western Kentucky

River O. Dowell and Iin P. Handayani, Murray State University, Kentucky

ABSTRACT

Properly understanding the importance of soil properties and how they continuously change is a key to achieving sustainability in agriculture. This study was conducted to observe the changes of soil properties regarding common tillage systems in Kentucky. Undisturbed and disturbed soil samples were collected from Butler County, KY at depths of 0-7.5 cm and 7.5-15 cm from four sites representing the different management practices of conventional tillage, no-till, pasture, and woodlands. The samples were analyzed for …

Evaluating Soil Surface Properties In Two Contrasting Tillage Systems, Riley Mabe, Kaeden Mollett, Marcus Robertson

Scholars Week

Soil properties are affected by tillage practices. Tillage practices that provides an adequate growing environment for crops and maintains good soil structure is crucial. The objective of this study was to compare selected soil properties collected from no-till (NT) and conventional tillage (CT) systems in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Three undisturbed and three disturbed soil samples were taken from the topsoil at the depth of 0 to 7.5 cm. The samples were analyzed for bulk density (BD), water holding capacity (WHC), field capacity (FC), soil pH, soil organic matter (SOM), and compaction. Bulk density, WHC, and FC of the soil …

Delineation Of Ohio River Flood Zones In Ballard County Using Remote Sensing, Nathan Rister

Scholars Week

The purpose of this study was to use remote sensing to map flood zones in Ballard County as it correlates to the Ohio River flood gauges. This will help Wildlife managers to know which areas are most likely to be flooded by simply looking at river gauges and prevent them to having to check which areas are flooded in person. By using this technique wildlife managers will be able to save time and resources as well as better manage wildlife areas along the Ohio River.