Dead fungal biomass (“necromass”) is an important yet understudied component of soil, which represents the Earth’s largest terrestrial reservoir of carbon. Necromass is decomposed by a diverse microbial community, including both fungi and bacteria. How these different groups of microbes interact during the process of necromass decomposition, however, is not understood. This study aimed to identify the importance of interactions among the dominant fungal and bacterial taxa that naturally co-occur on decomposing fungal necromass.

Malignant melanoma is a common cause of brain metastases that develop when melanoma cells that have entered the bloodstream transmigrate across the blood brain barrier (BBB) and begin to proliferate. This transmigration of melanoma cells across the BBB has yet to be understood comprehensively.

Reinforcement learning is a form of machine learning where an agent explores an environment to determine how to complete a given task. The agent receives a stream of data, known as observations, and chooses actions to take. In the context of robotics, observations are typically frames from a camera feed. Frames are represented as vectors with tens of thousands of entries. At each time step, only a few components of the environment are relevant.

Background: With the rise in obesity in adolescents, there is an urgency to provide low-cost and low-commitment prevention and intervention methods (Wasil et al., 2020; Simmonds et al., 2015). Prior research indicates that the surge in unhealthy food advertisements has negative implications for adolescents' health; notably, increased exposure to advertisements results in increased unhealthy food consumption (Cervi et al., 2017).

Lately in Astronomy, lots of attention has been given to analyzing the variables in the equations modeling star and black hole collisions, especially with respect to their generated kilonovae. In order to have better data surrounding these events and understand the conditions under which these collisions occur, it is necessary to analyze the light curves of these kilonovae.

As schools enforce disciplinary zero tolerance policies as a method to combat school safety, these implementations are disproportionately designed against youth of color with a communication disorder. Many youth of color with a communication disorder show impairments in regulating their social and emotional behaviors, alongside deficiencies in language skills, and may be challenged to decipher the language and culture behind zero tolerance policies; these youth become predisposed to criminalization in schools under the pathway of the School-to-Prison pipeline.

The theory of plate tectonics is a paradigm of Earth science, and it provides a theoretical link among many of Earth’s processes. Serval major aspects of plate tectonics, such as plate boundary formations, explain the existence of volcanoes, fault lines, and the formation of new continental crust. For instance, in order for a new plate boundary to form there must be a localized weakness in Earth’s lithosphere, which would lead to subduction or transform fault formation.

Introduction: In the United States, food advertisements make up roughly 11% to 29% of all advertisements with about 70% of those commercials advertising unhealthy food (Kelly et al., 2010). Adolescents, in particular Black and Hispanic youth, are at an increased risk with food marketers disproportionately targeting them with unhealthy food advertisements (Story & French, 2004; Harris et al., 2019).

This project sought to develop a synthetic cell line with increased Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus (rAAV) titer by downregulating GFP production. Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus (rAAV) is a gene delivery platform that has shown considerable promise for use in gene therapy. However, difficulty producing rAAV presents a significant challenge to its therapeutic application.

The mammalian neocortex is composed of millions of neural cells called neurons. Neurons acquire specific physiological characteristics and organize into six layers throughout development. The organization of neurons within and across these neocortical layers underlies the function and formation of different cortical areas. The formation of these areas involves cues intrinsic to the cortex, such as transcription factor gradients, and extrinsic cues from the thalamus. Both of these systems have temporal and spatial specificity and interact reciprocally to achieve cortical organization.