Explore the vast range of titles available.

Disconjugate eye movements have been associated with traumatic brain injury since ancient times. Ocular motility dysfunction may be present in up to 90% of patients with concussion or blast injury. We developed an algorithm for eye tracking in which the Cartesian coordinates of the right and left pupils are tracked over 200 sec and compared to each other as a subject watches a short film clip moving inside an aperture on a computer screen. We prospectively eye tracked 64 normal healthy noninjured control subjects and compared findings to 75 trauma subjects with either a positive head computed tomography (CT) scan (n=13), negative head CT (n=39), or nonhead injury (n=23) to determine whether eye tracking would reveal the disconjugate gaze associated with both structural brain injury and concussion. Tracking metrics were then correlated to the clinical concussion measure Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 3 (SCAT3) in trauma patients. Five out of five measures of horizontal disconjugacy were increased in positive and negative head CT patients relative to noninjured control subjects. Only one of five vertical disconjugacy measures was significantly increased in brain-injured patients relative to controls. Linear regression analysis of all 75 trauma patients demonstrated that three metrics for horizontal disconjugacy negatively correlated with SCAT3 symptom severity score and positively correlated with total Standardized Assessment of Concussion score. Abnormal eye-tracking metrics improved over time toward baseline in brain-injured subjects observed in follow-up. Eye tracking may help quantify the severity of ocular motility disruption associated with concussion and structural brain injury.

The current health care system demands a highly qualified nursing workforce. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing has adopted the position that a doctorate should be the entrance requirement for advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) by 2015. This pressure, combined with guaranteed federal student loans, has resulted in increased student expenditures. Unfortunately, money attracts fraud. To avoid deception, nursing education “buyers” must be prepared to evaluate nursing programs. APRNs have a responsibility to protect their colleagues, public health and welfare, and the integrity of our profession by promoting awareness of education fraud.

Climate change is one of the major issues humans face in the 21st century. This decade is critical in shaping the future of Earth and the way humans live on it (IPCC, 2018). Changes in human behavior are necessary to mitigate and adapt to climate change. This series of studies explored factors important in communicating and implementing environmental behavior. The first study tested the effects of an online, interactive carbon calculator with moral interventions on three self-reported measures and one objective measure of behavior over a period of weeks. The interventions resulted in small changes in self-reported behavior and no change in electricity usage. Given participants adopted relatively few additional behaviors, the next study investigated the predictors when people perform or do not perform specific pro-environmental behaviors more in-depth. Participants were also asked whether they, businesses, non-profits, or governments were responsible for spearheading efforts on a behavior when they, as individuals, could perform the behavior but did not. The results indicate that most participants attributed responsibility to themselves. However, belief in one’s own ability to perform the behavior is important to behavioral decisions, and predictors vary between behaviors.

The purpose of this qualitative dissertation study was to examine the types of strategies that academic leaders utilized to address nursing faculty recruitment and retention in various universities. Four research questions were formulated, focusing on current strategies used to recruit and retain nursing faculty, the effectiveness of those strategies, external partnerships utilized, and reasons behind lack of recruitment and retention of nursing faculty. A pilot study and two case studies were conducted, in which nursing administrators and nursing faculty completed a demographic questionnaire and were interviewed using a nursing administrator interview protocol and a nursing faculty interview protocol. Participants at both case study institutions explained that low salary and high workload were the most significant factors in the lack of recruitment and retention of nursing faculty. Moreover, these individuals observed that if schools of nursing wish to increase recruitment and retention efforts, these factors should be modified. These findings were consistent with the literature. Recommendations for future practice and research were made. Further research should be conducted on the interrelationship of salary and workload with recruitment and retention of nursing faculty.

Pregnancy and parturition are intricately regulated to ensure successful reproductive outcomes. However, the factors that control gestational length in humans and other anthropoid primates remain poorly defined. Here, we show the endogenous retroviral long terminal repeat transposon-like human element 1B (THE1B) selectively controls placental expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) that, in turn, influences gestational length and birth timing. Placental expression of CRH and subsequently prolonged gestational length were found in two independent strains of transgenic mice carrying a 180-kb human bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) DNA that contained the full length of CRH and extended flanking regions, including THE1B. Restricted deletion of THE1B silenced placental CRH expression and normalized birth timing in these transgenic lines. Furthermore, we revealed an interaction at the 5' insertion site of THE1B with distal-less homeobox 3 (DLX3), a transcription factor expressed in placenta. Together, these findings suggest that retroviral insertion of THE1B into the anthropoid primate genome may have initiated expression of CRH in placental syncytiotrophoblasts via DLX3 and that this placental CRH is sufficient to alter the timing of birth.

Prediction errors (PEs) encode representations of rewarding and aversive experiences and are critical to reinforcement processing. The feedback-related negativity (FRN), a component of the event-related potential (ERP) that is sensitive to valenced feedback, is believed to reflect PE signals. Reinforcement is also studied using frontal midline theta (FMΘ) activity, which peaks around the same time as the FRN and increases in response to unexpected events compared to expected events. We recorded EEG while participants completed a monetary incentive delay (MID) task that included positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement conditions with multiple levels of the outcome, as well as control conditions that had no reinforcement value. Despite the overlap of FRN and FMΘ, these measures indexed dissociable cognitive processing. The FRN was sensitive to errors in both positive and negative reinforcement but not in control conditions, while frontal theta instead was sensitive to outcomes in positive reinforcement and control conditions, but not in negative reinforcement conditions. The FRN was sensitive to the point level of feedback in both positive and negative reinforcement, while FMΘ was not influenced by the feedback point level. Results are consistent with recent results indicating that the FRN is influenced by unsigned PEs (i.e., a salience signal). In contrast, we suggest that our findings for frontal theta are consistent with hypotheses suggesting that the neural generators of FMΘ are sensitive to both negative cues and the need for control.

Sphingolipids are important signaling molecules for maintaining metabolic and immune homeostasis in the host. These lipids are also produced by gut commensals, most notably by Bacteroides species. Despite the global prevalence of Prevotella copri in gut microbiomes of individuals, little is known about the types of sphingolipids they produce and whether they are similar in composition and structure to those produced by Bacteroides . Given the varied associations of P. copri with diverse sphingolipid-related health outcomes, such as rheumatoid arthritis and glucose intolerance, it is important to first characterize the specific sphingolipids produced by individual strains of P. copri and to identify the genes involved in their pathways of production. This characterization of P. copri -derived sphingolipids provides further insight into how bacterial sphingolipid production can serve as a mechanism for microbial modulation of host phenotypes.

Fossils provide the principal basis for temporal calibrations, which are critical to the accuracy of divergence dating analyses. Translating fossil data into minimum and maximum bounds for calibrations is the most important—often least appreciated—step of divergence dating. Properly justified calibrations require the synthesis of phylogenetic, paleontological, and geological evidence and can be difficult for nonspecialists to formulate. The dynamic nature of the fossil record (e.g., new discoveries, taxonomic revisions, updates of global or local stratigraphy) requires that calibration data be updated continually lest they become obsolete. Here, we announce the Fossil Calibration Database (http://fossilcalibrations.org), a new openaccess resource providing vetted fossil calibrations to the scientific community. Calibrations accessioned into this database are based on individual fossil specimens and follow best practices for phylogenetic justification and geochronological constraint. The associated Fossil Calibration Series, a calibration-themed publication series at Palaeontologia Electronica, serve as a key pipeline for peer-reviewed calibrations to enter the database.

Women and Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are underrepresented in economics. Among the factors contributing to the underrepresentation of these groups, past research has demonstrated a lack of diversity in introductory economics textbooks. We extend this research on representation to examples in economics lessons designed for K-12 audiences. We find that female and BIPOC examples are underrepresented. When present they are less likely to be economists, policymakers, or businesspeople. We also explore how author demographics predict diversity of examples. Authors and teams that include women are more likely to use female examples.