Digital Commons Network^™

Intensive Care Unit Mortality And Length Of Stay Among Critically Ill Patients With Sepsis Treated With Corticosteroids: A Retrospective Cohort Study, Eric E. Chinaeke, Ismaeel Yunusa Ph.D., Bryan L. Love Pharm. D., Joseph Magagnoli, Claiborne E. Reeder

Faculty Publications

Objectives: Sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in critically ill patients worldwide, and corticosteroids are commonly used to treat it. However, the evidence supporting the use of corticosteroids in sepsis patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) is of low certainty, with conflicting results reported in previous studies. Thus, we aimed to investigate the potential association between corticosteroid treatment and various outcomes, including 30-day ICU mortality, ICU length of stay (LOS), mechanical ventilation use, new onset of infection, and hyperglycemia in patients diagnosed with sepsis and admitted to the ICU.

Materials and Methods: We conducted …

A Quieter Ocean: Experimentally Derived Differences In Attentive Responses Of Tursiops Truncatus To Anthropogenic Noise Playbacks Before And During The Covid-19-Related Anthropause, Paige E. Stevens, Veda Allen, Jason N. Bruck

Faculty Publications

The effects of anthropogenic noise continue to threaten marine fauna, yet the impacts of human-produced sound on the broad aspects of cognition in marine mammals remain relatively understudied. The shutdown of non-essential activities due to the COVID-19-related anthropause created an opportunity to determine if reducing levels of oceanic anthropogenic noise on cetaceans affected processes of sensitization and habituation for common human-made sounds in an experimental setting. Dolphins at Dolphin Quest Bermuda were presented with three noises related to human activities (cruise ship, personal watercraft, and Navy low-frequency active sonar) both in 2018 and again during the anthropause in 2021 via …

Microcanonical Thermodynamics Of Small Ideal Gas Systems, David S. Corti, Donya Ohadi, Ricardo Fariello, Mark J. Uline

Faculty Publications

We consider the thermal, mechanical, and chemical contact of two subsystems composed of ideal gases, both of which are not in the thermodynamic limit. After contact, the combined system is isolated, and the entropy is determined through the use of its standard connection to the phase space density (PSD), where only those microstates at a given energy value are counted. The various intensive properties of these small systems that follow from a derivative of the PSD, such as the temperature, pressure, and chemical potential (evaluated via a backward difference), while equal when the two subsystems are in equilibrium are nevertheless …

The Polypharmacological Effects Of Cannabidiol, Jorge Castillo-Arellano, Ana Canseco-Alba, Stephen J. Cutler Ph.D., Francisco León Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a major phytocannabinoid present in Cannabis sativa (Linneo, 1753). This naturally occurring secondary metabolite does not induce intoxication or exhibit the characteristic profile of drugs of abuse from cannabis like Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol (∆⁹-THC) does. In contrast to ∆⁹-THC, our knowledge of the neuro-molecular mechanisms of CBD is limited, and its pharmacology, which appears to be complex, has not yet been fully elucidated. The study of the pharmacological effects of CBD has grown exponentially in recent years, making it necessary to generate frequently updated reports on this important metabolite. In this article, a …

Partnership Grant And Shark Tank Competition: An Update, Hyun Kwon

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seminary Establishes The Center For Community Change, Cedric Vine

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Seeing Through Sonar: Detecting The Amazonian Manatee, Daniel Gonzalez-Socoloske, Isabella Koh

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Making A Change In Madagascar, Joel Raveloharimisy, Marlena Maier

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Tanzania Research: Mission Trip 2022, Sozina Katuli, Letrisha Stallard

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Trauma-Informed Academic Partnership, Ingrid Weiss Slikkers

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Predictors Of Suicide And Differences In Attachment Styles And Resilience Among Treatment-Seeking First Responder Subtypes, Warren Ponder, Jose Carbajal, James Whitworth, Donna Schuman, Jeanine Galusha, R Andrew Yockey

Faculty Publications

Objective: To identify the predictors of suicide for firefighters (FFs), emergency medical technicians (EMTs), and law enforcement officers (LEOs). Methods: We used baseline data from FFs/EMTs (n = 69) and LEOs (n = 81) to investigate the unique predictors for both first-responder subtypes. We conducted confirmatory factor analysis on validated assessments of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.Measures of attachment, resilience, PTSD, depression, generalized anxiety, trauma history, and substance use were the independent variables in two backward stepwise regressions predicting suicide. Results: Substance use and somatic depression were significant predictors for LEOs, whereas affective depression, anhedonia, externalizing …

From The Ashes Of The Old: The Old Left And The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957-1965, Matthew Nichter

Faculty Publications

How did the “Old Left”—the socialist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s—shape the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? Focusing on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this article examines several mechanisms of Old Left influence: personnel overlap, network ties, and organizational alliances. New findings on the Old Left backgrounds of Rev. Joseph Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers and friends are presented. The support that SCLC received from “red” labor unions is also highlighted. The picture that emerges is not the elaborate Communist conspiracy imagined by J. Edgar Hoover’s …

Show And Tell: Approaches For Effective Figures, Stephen R. Midway, Jennifer R. Brum, Matthew Robertson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Promoting Women's Advancement In The Judiciary In The Midst Of Backlash: A Comparative Analysis Of Representation And Jurisprudence In Key Domestic And International Fora, Shruti Rana

Faculty Publications

Women's advancement in the judiciary of the United States has been slow and uneven, and has long lagged behind other nations. Parity in representation remains distant, and the gains to date vulnerable to changes in administrations and fluctuating levels of state commitment to gender equality, with the recent global backlash to gender equality and international norms and institutions providing a critical example of this fragility. In this light, this Article argues that gender parity in the judiciary should not be viewed as merely a laudable goal. Rather, representation and parity should be viewed as fundamental state legal obligations under international …

Achieving The Achievable: Realistic Labor Law Reform, Rafael Gely

Faculty Publications

A common reprise among labor activists and scholars has been that for the fortunes of labor to change, the law must change. Prompted perhaps by a seeming surge in labor movement activity over the past few years, including headline-grabbing strikes and recent union victories at several U.S. Starbucks locations, various labor law activists and scholars have called to seize the moment and proposed the enactment of comprehensive labor law reform. We argue in this Article that broad-scale labor law reform is unlikely to be enacted by the current U.S. Congress or even have all its provisions pass muster when potentially …

Restrictions On Worker Mobility And The Need For Stronger Policies On Anticompetitive Employment Contract Provisions, Donald J. Polden

Faculty Publications

There is increasing concern in the United States about the difficulties that American workers are facing including concerns about limits on worker job mobility and how those limits affect workers’ wages and compensation, employee benefits, and finding their next job.2 Workers believe the challenges they face in changing jobs for better salary and benefits should be addressed so they have greater job mobility and opportunities for advancement. Workers are subject to restraints on job mobility across the spectrum of jobs, including those in executive-level positions as well as minimum- wage employees. Workers complain that they are not constrained in getting …

The Clinic As A Site Of Grounded Pedagogy, Madalyn K. Wasilczuk

Faculty Publications

Legal education tends to focus on teaching students federal law from hefty casebooks, inculcating the ability to "think like lawyers." In a sea of Socratic lectures and hypotheticals, students often take refuge in clinics as an island of practical skills-building, client centeredness, and individual fulfillment. Yet even clinics sometimes fail to highlight for students how the place where they practice, with its particular political context and history, shapes their clients' lives and legal problems. This Article describes the law school clinic as a site of grounded pedagogy: a teaching method that centers the con­nection between local history and the present …

Intersectional Management: An Analysis Of Cooperation And Competition On American Public Lands, Robin M. Rotman, Abigail M. Hunt

Faculty Publications

The United States government holds public lands in trust for the whole of the American people. This article focuses on National Monuments under the Antiquities Act. It argues that the federal government should renew its approach to the management of these lands by incorporating principles of environmental justice and long- term environmental viability. The article begins by examining the historical and legal foundations of federal lands in the United States, with a focus on the Antiquities Act. It then reflects on recent litigation and political controversy surrounding Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, to illustrate how the …

Real Mediation Systems To Help Parties And Mediators Achieve Their Goals, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article argues that it is time for a paradigm shift in our current general mediation theory because of numerous problems. Our current theory is incomplete at best and seriously misleading at worst. The traditional mediation models are oversimplified, poorly mapping onto the reality of practice. They combine multiple elements that are not necessarily correlated. Many practitioners ignore them because they are confusing or not helpful. People do not understand the theoretical meanings because the terms are not consistent with commonly understood language. Arguments about what is or is not real or good mediation have spawned unhelpful ideological divisions in …

Impacts Of Fda Approval And Medicare Restriction On Antiamyloid Therapies For Alzheimer’S Disease: Patient Outcomes, Healthcare Costs, And Drug Development, Rouen Brockmann, Joanna Nixon, Bryan L. Love Pharm D., Ismaeel Yunusa Ph. D.

Faculty Publications

In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to aducanumab, an antiamyloid antibody for early-stage Alzheimer's disease, despite a lack of clear clinical evidence demonstrating the drug's cognitive benefits. The manufacturer initially priced the drug at a staggering $56,000 per year, a price that was later reduced to $28,200. Unfortunately, these costs do not include the additional expenses associated with monitoring the treatment. However, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced that they will only cover individuals enrolled in clinical trials and will limit coverage of future antiamyloid antibodies. This discrepancy between the FDA …

Snacking Consumption Among Adults In The United States: A Scoping Review, Jean Pierre Enriquez, Elizabeth Gollub

Faculty Publications

Snacks are a staple of the American diet, contributing to approximately 20% of energy intake. Most U.S. adults consume one to three snacks/day, yet few reviews have focused on snacking among this population. This scoping review was conducted to characterize snacks and snacking occasions among U.S. adults to further inform healthy eating practices. The protocol was prepared following the PRISMA-Extension for Scoping Reviews. Three web databases were used to identify articles using snacking or eating occasions as primary or secondary outcomes among U.S. adults. A search strategy was developed using subject headings, truncation, and phrase searching in the title and …

Horizontally Transferred Genes As Rna Interference Targets For Aphid And Whitefly Control, Honglin Feng, Wenbo Chen, Sonia Hussain, Sara Shakir, Vered Tzin, Femi Adegbayi, Todd Ugine, Zhangjun Fei, Georg Jander

Faculty Publications

RNA interference (RNAi)-based technologies are starting to be commercialized as a new approach for agricultural pest control. Horizontally transferred genes (HTGs), which have been transferred into insect genomes from viruses, bacteria, fungi or plants, are attractive targets for RNAi-mediated pest control. HTGs are often unique to a specific insect family or even genus, making it unlikely that RNAi constructs targeting such genes will have negative effects on ladybugs, lacewings and other beneficial predatory insect species. In this study, we sequenced the genome of a red, tobacco-adapted isolate of Myzus persicae (green peach aphid) and bioinformatically identified 30 HTGs. We then …

Genome Resources For The Colletotrichum Gloeosporioides Species Complex: 13 Tree Endophytes From The Neotropics And Paleotropics, Stephen A. Rehner, Romina Gazis, Vinson P. Doyle, Willie A.S. Vieira, Philip M. Campos, Jonathan Shao

Faculty Publications

Thirteen draft genome assemblies are presented for four Colletotrichum gloeosporioides complex species, namely, Colletotrichum aeschynomenes, Colletotrichum asianum, Colletotrichum fructicola, and Colletotrichum siamense, which were isolated from tropical tree hosts as endophytes.

Melatonin Treatment Of Strawberry Fruit During Storage Extends Its Post-Harvest Quality And Reduces Infection Caused By Botrytis Cinerea, Surassawadee Promyou, Yenjit Raruang, Zhi Yuan Chen

Faculty Publications

Gray mold is a main disease of strawberry fruit (Fragaria × xananassa cv. Camino Real) caused by Botrytis cinerea, which leads to marketable value losses in the supply chain. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of exogenous melatonin (MT) on the physicochemical quality, antioxidant defense system, and disease resistance of strawberry fruit to B. cinerea infection. The results revealed that strawberry fruit immersed in 100 µM MT for 15 min effectively maintained its brightness and delayed the change in fruit color. MT also maintained the level of titratable acidity and slowed down the increase of total …

Riverine Nitrate Source And Transformation As Affected By Land Use And Land Cover, Xing Li, Y. Jun Xu, Maofei Ni, Chunlin Wang, Siyue Li

Faculty Publications

A mixed land use/land cover (LULC) catchment increases the complexity of sources and transformations of nitrate in rivers. Spatial paucity of sampling particularly low-resolution sampling in tributaries can result in a bias for identifying nitrate sources and transformations. In this study, high spatial resolution sampling campaigns covering mainstream and tributaries in combination with hydro-chemical parameters and dual isotopes of nitrate were performed to reveal spatio-temporal variations of nitrate sources and transformations in a river draining a mixed LULC catchment. This study suggested that point sources dominated the nitrate in the summer and winter, while non-point sources dominated the nitrate in …

Highly Socially Vulnerable Communities Exhibit Disproportionately Increased Viral Loads As Measured In Community Wastewater, William M. Baldwin, Robert D. Dayton, Aaron W. Bivins, Rona S. Scott, Andrew D. Yurochko, John A. Vanchiere, Terry Davis, Connie L. Arnold, Jose E.T. Asuncion, Mohammad A.N. Bhuiyan, Brandon Snead, William Daniel, Deborah G. Smith, Nicholas E. Goeders, Christopher G. Kevil, Jennifer Carroll, Kevin S. Murnane

Faculty Publications

Wastewater surveillance has proven to be a useful tool for evidence-based epidemiology in the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is particularly useful at the population level where acquisition of individual test samples may be time or cost-prohibitive. Wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 has typically been performed at wastewater treatment plants; however, this study was designed to sample on a local level to monitor the spread of the virus among three communities with distinct social vulnerability indices in Shreveport, Louisiana, located in a socially vulnerable region of the United States. Twice-monthly grab samples were collected from September 30, 2020, to March …

Environment-Tolerant Ionic Hydrogel–Elastomer Hybrids With Robust Interfaces, High Transparence, And Biocompatibility For A Mechanical–Thermal Multimode Sensor, Ya Lu, Yiying Yue, Qinqin Ding, Changtong Mei, Xinwu Xu, Shaohua Jiang, Shuijian He, Qinglin Wu, Huining Xiao, Jingquan Han

Faculty Publications

The human skin, an important sensory organ, responds sensitively to external stimuli under various harsh conditions. However, the simultaneous achievement of mechanical/thermal sensitivity and extreme environmental tolerance remains an enormous challenge for skin-like hydrogel-based sensors. In this study, a novel skin-inspired hydrogel–elastomer hybrid with a sandwich structure and strong interfacial bonding for mechanical–thermal multimode sensing applications is developed. An inner-layered ionic hydrogel with a semi-interpenetrating network is prepared using sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as a nanofiller, lithium chloride (LiCl) as an ionic transport conductor, and polyacrylamide (PAM) as a polymer matrix. The outer-layered polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomers fully encapsulating the hydrogel …

Regional Variation In Feeding Patterns Of Sheepshead (Archosargus Probatocephalus) In The Northwest Gulf Of Mexico, Elsa M. Gutierrez, Jeffrey D. Plumlee, Derek G. Bolser, Brad E. Erisman, R. J.David Wells

Faculty Publications

Feeding patterns of sheepshead, Archosargus probatocephalus, in the northwest Gulf of Mexico were examined from samples collected at two locations in Texas, USA; Galveston and Port Aransas. A total of 53 sheepshead stomachs (Galveston, n = 35; Port Aransas, n = 18) had their contents analyzed along with tissue samples from the muscle and liver for a stable isotope analysis (δ13C, δ15N, and δ34S) because they provide a contrast between short-term (liver) and long-term (muscle) measurements. Multiple species of amphipods made up the majority of the prey items in sheepshead from Galveston (%IRI = 61.79), whereas barnacles were the primary …

Low Species Turnover Of Upland Amazonian Birds In The Absence Of Physical Barriers, Cameron L. Rutt, W. Justin Cooper, Christian B. Andretti, Thiago V.V. Costa, Philip C. Stouffer, Claudeir F. Vargas, David A. Luther, Mario Cohn-Haft

Faculty Publications

Aim: One of the oldest and most powerful ways for ecologists to explain distinct biological communities is to invoke underlying environmental differences. But in hyper-diverse systems, which often display high species richness and low species abundance, these sorts of community comparisons are especially challenging. The classic view for Amazonian birds posits that riverine barriers and habitat specialization determine local and regional community composition. We test the tacit, complementary assumption that similar bird communities should therefore permeate uniform habitat between major rivers, regardless of distance. Location: Upland (terra firme) rainforests of central Amazonia. Methods: We conducted intensive whole-community surveys of birds …

Smartphone Prediction Of Skeletal Muscle Mass: Model Development And Validation In Adults, Cassidy Mccarthy, Grant M. Tinsley, Shengping Yang, Brian A. Irving, Michael C. Wong, Jonathan P. Bennett, John A. Shepherd, Steven B. Heymsfield

Faculty Publications

Background: Skeletal muscle is a large and clinically relevant body component that has been difficult and impractical to quantify outside of specialized facilities. Advances in smartphone technology now provide the opportunity to quantify multiple body surface dimensions such as circumferences, lengths, surface areas, and volumes. Objectives: This study aimed to test the hypothesis that anthropometric body measurements acquired with a smartphone application can be used to accurately estimate an adult's level of muscularity. Methods: Appendicular lean mass (ALM) measured by DXA served as the reference for muscularity in a sample of 322 adults. Participants also had digital anthropometric dimensions (circumferences, …