For people experiencing homelessness, lack of access to public bathroom facilities often forces the humiliating need to urinate or defecate in public. The bathroom options available to those ...experiencing homelessness do not meet the population’s needs. One solution that scholars and local leaders have proposed is to ban customers-only bathroom policies. Such bans pose difficult legal and political questions. Most significantly, the recent Supreme Court case Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid—which expanded takings doctrine and made government regulation of access rights more difficult—creates a complex legal roadblock for local lawmakers seeking to ban customers-only bathrooms. The academics, lawmakers, and activists who have discussed limitations or bans on customers-only bathrooms have yet to address the challenge posed by Cedar Point.
This Note seeks to fill that gap by analyzing the landscape of takings jurisprudence after Cedar Point. It reaches two related conclusions. First, banning customers-only bathrooms would likely not be a taking. While Cedar Point ostensibly limited a host of access-rights regulations, it carved out several exceptions. Bans on customers-only bathrooms would likely fall into one such exception. The Court’s broad holding may thus be less exacting than it appears. Second, regardless of whether these bans are takings, municipal leaders can best serve the public by providing just compensation for the access rights these bans carve out. This solution avoids the indeterminacies of Cedar Point, softens the political blow to business owners, and centers the experience and dignity of those living in homelessness.
Human populations feature both discrete and continuous patterns of variation. Current analysis approaches struggle to jointly identify these patterns because of modelling assumptions, mathematical ...constraints, or numerical challenges. Here we apply uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP), a non-linear dimension reduction tool, to three well-studied genotype datasets and discover overlooked subpopulations within the American Hispanic population, fine-scale relationships between geography, genotypes, and phenotypes in the UK population, and cryptic structure in the Thousand Genomes Project data. This approach is well-suited to the influx of large and diverse data and opens new lines of inquiry in population-scale datasets.
The field of red cell biology is undergoing a quiet revolution. Long assumed to be inert oxygen carriers, RBCs are emerging as important modulators of the innate immune response. Erythrocytes bind ...and scavenge chemokines, nucleic acids, and pathogens in circulation. Depending on the conditions of the microenvironment, erythrocytes may either promote immune activation or maintain immune quiescence. We examine erythrocyte immune function through a comparative and evolutionary lens, as this framework may offer perspective into newly recognized roles of human RBCs. Next, we review the known immune roles of human RBCs and discuss their activity in the context of sepsis where erythrocyte function may prove important to disease pathogenesis. Given the limited success of immunomodulatory therapies in treating inflammatory diseases, we propose that the immunologic function of RBCs provides an understudied and potentially rich area of research that may yield novel insights into mechanisms of immune regulation.
A review of UMAP in population genetics Diaz-Papkovich, Alex; Anderson-Trocmé, Luke; Gravel, Simon
Journal of human genetics,
01/2021, Volume:
66, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) has been rapidly adopted by the population genetics community to study population structure. It has become common in visualizing the ancestral ...composition of human genetic datasets, as well as searching for unique clusters of data, and for identifying geographic patterns. Here we give an overview of applications of UMAP in population genetics, provide recommendations for best practices, and offer insights on optimal uses for the technique.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that lekking birds exhibit considerable variation in form and degree of sociality away from the lek, yet this phenomenon has received very little theoretical or empirical ...research attention. Here, we provide the first synthetic literature review of off-lek sociality in birds and develop a conceptual framework for the potential adaptive function of off-lek sociality across lekking taxa. We then present a case study of the Long-wattled Umbrellabird (Cephalopterus penduliger), where we find support for the hypothesis that off-lek sociality is primarily driven by male reproductive incentives for coordinating lek attendance during the breeding season. During periods of high lekking activity, male umbrellabirds depart the lek in highly coordinated groups and maintain larger off-lek social groups relative to periods of low lekking activity. These seasonal differences in off-lek sociality do not occur in females, are not explained by patterns of foraging behavior, and are expected to confer individual-level benefits for participating males. Both the literature review and empirical study of umbrellabirds suggest that off-lek interactions and behavioral strategies may shape sexual selection processes at leks in important ways. Further research into this historically understudied area of lekking species' behavioral ecology will likely deepen our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of lek mating. Social behavior away from the lek may influence and interact with sexual selection processes in important ways, yet this component of lekking species' behavioral ecology remains very poorly known. A synthetic literature review suggests considerable diversity in the form and degree of off-lek sociality among lekking birds, both within and between species. Potential adaptive explanations for the function of off-lek sociality in a given species include foraging enhancement, predation avoidance, and mating benefits. In Long-wattled Umbrellabirds, we find that the size and coordination of male off-lek groups increases during the mating season. This pattern is not observed in females and is not related to the proportion of fruit in the diet. We suggest that off-lek sociality in umbrellabirds enables males to synchronize foraging and display periods, which is expected to confer individual-level reproductive benefits. Evidencia anecdótica sugiere que las aves que forman leks exhiben variación considerable en la forma y el grado de sociabilidad fuera del lek, pero este fenómeno ha recibido poca atención teórica o empírica. Aquí, presentamos la primera revisión sintetizada de la literatura sobre la sociabilidad fuera del lek en aves y desarrollamos una estructura conceptual para la función adaptativa potencial de la sociabilidad fuera del lek en taxones que forman leks. Luego, presentamos un estudio de caso del Pájaro Paraguas Longipéndulo (Cephalopterus penduliger), en donde encontramos sustento para la hipótesis que la sociabilidad fuera del lek es impulsada principalmente por incentivos reproductivos de los machos para coordinar la asistencia al lek durante la temporada de reproducción. Durante períodos de alta actividad en los leks, los machos se alejan del lek en grupos altamente coordinados y mantienen grupos sociales más grandes fuera del lek en relación con los períodos de baja actividad en los leks. Estas diferencias estacionales en la sociabilidad fuera del lek no ocurren en las hembras, no se explican por patrones de comportamiento de forrajeo, y se espera que otorguen beneficios a nivel individual para los machos participantes. Tanto la revisión de la literatura como los estudios empíricos del Pájaro Paraguas Longipéndulo sugieren que las interacciones fuera del lek y las estrategias de comportamiento pueden influir de manera importante en los procesos de selección sexual en los leks. Investigaciones adicionales en esta área históricamente poco estudiada de la ecología del comportamiento de las especies que forman leks probablemente profundizarán nuestra compresión de las dinámicas evolutivas de los sistemas de apareamiento en lek.
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•The poor stability of PSC devices hinders progress to their practical application.•We obtained an inspiration from 2D Ruddlesden–Popper perovskite solar cells.•We designed solar ...cells with a sandwich structure of three 3D perovskite films.•We used BMIM-BF4 and DDMAPS to decrease crystal grain dimensions.•The constructed PSCs have very high stabilities and PCEs.
Owing to the superior optoelectronic properties of perovskite materials, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been increased dramatically within several years, but the poor thermal, humidity, and light stability of these PSC devices hinders the progress to their practical application. We obtained an inspiration from two-dimensional (2D) Ruddlesden–Popper perovskite solar cells with good photovoltaic performance and placed the organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite layer inside two fully-inorganic CsPbI3 perovskite layers in the cubic α phase. The middle layer has lower stability than the two outer ones, which protect the middle layer by impeding the organic ions of the organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite middle layer from diffusing outside and causing damage to neighbor CTLs. Water molecules from air are also obstructed from reaching the hybrid perovskite layer. We used 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate (BMIM-BF4) ionic liquid and 3-(decyldimethylammonio) propane-1-sulfonate (DDMAPS) and obtained phase-stable fully-inorganic α phase CsPbI3. The constructed PSCs have extremely high stabilities and high PCEs. After 1000 h of illumination under AM1.5 illumination in air at 60 °C (Humility: ~60%), PSCs with a sandwich structure of three perovskite layers maintain nearly all the original PCE of 21.32%, while those without that only remain 76.63%.
Abstract
Recent reports have identified differences in the mutational spectra across human populations. Although some of these reports have been replicated in other cohorts, most have been reported ...only in the 1000 Genomes Project (1kGP) data. While investigating an intriguing putative population stratification within the Japanese population, we identified a previously unreported batch effect leading to spurious mutation calls in the 1kGP data and to the apparent population stratification. Because the 1kGP data are used extensively, we find that the batch effects also lead to incorrect imputation by leading imputation servers and a small number of suspicious GWAS associations. Lower quality data from the early phases of the 1kGP thus continue to contaminate modern studies in hidden ways. It may be time to retire or upgrade such legacy sequencing data.
Recent legislation in Tennessee regarding "divisive concepts" in secondary education negatively impacts teachers. It causes them to question previously taught content for fear that parents or ...administrators might deem it too controversial, which could put educators' jobs in jeopardy. Secondary educators used various approaches when handling potentially "divisive" material, such as changing "hot button" terms while teaching the same basic content, "watering down" lessons to ensure they will not be targeted, or cutting out all potentially controversial subjects altogether. These are examples of the "chilling effect" caused by certain types of legislation. Another example is the recent book banning in Tennessee that resulted in many teachers cutting out their classroom libraries completely to avoid trouble. The increasing legislative reach into secondary classrooms has important implications for both students and teachers, such as contributing toward the growing teacher shortage statewide or leaving students as unprepared voters and citizens. Therefore, educators must speak out about the negative impacts of legislative overreach.
This study investigated the performance on, and correlates of, the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test - Revised (BVMT-R) in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Participants included 100 patients ...with TBI and 100 demographically matched controls. We first used regression analysis to determine predictors of BVMT-R performance in the clinical group. We then used analysis of variance as well as logistic regression to determine how BVMT-R findings differed between the clinical and control groups.
Injury severity and visuospatial ability both contributed to the prediction of BVMT-R Total Recall and Delayed Recall scores in the TBI group. Mean differences between the TBI and control groups on these variables were statistically significant, but overall individual classification accuracy was limited at 59%.
The BVMT-R has some clinical utility in the evaluation of patients with TBI but should not be used in isolation.