Breathing Easy: Lung Health and Associated Conditions in the Day Care Setting

Introduction: Air pollutants are associated with many health risks. Children in the day care environment are uniquely suscept-ible to lung damage, infection, systemic illness & pollutant triggered hypersensitivity reactions. The latest public report by the CDC reports Vermont’s (VT) asthma rate is the high-est in the country at 11.1%. This project compared VT’s day care regulations regarding specific environmental factors linked with health risks to regulations in six surrounding New England states. We sought to assess whether VT’s regulations adequately protect children in day carehttps://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1064/thumbnail.jp

The CASTOR mission

CASTOR is a proposed wide-field ( 30 ′ × 30 ′ = 0.25 deg 2 ), high-resolution ( FWHM ∼ 0.15 ′′ ), 1-m-diameter space telescope that is under development by the Canadian Space Agency and the National Research Council of Canada. Optimized for UV/blue-optical wavelengths, the telescope uses dichroics to enable imaging in three channels (and up to five bands) that cover the 0.15 to 0.55 μ m spectral region, simultaneously. CASTOR will also feature low- and low-medium-resolution spectroscopic capabilities through the use of a deployable grism for low-resolution ( R ≲ 420 ) slit-less spectroscopy in its UV and u channels, and low-medium-resolution R ∼ 1400 multi-object spectroscopy in a parallel field using a digital micro-mirror device. High-speed, precision photometry will be possible using dedicated CMOS detectors in each of its three channels. We present an overview of the mission, including the optical design, instruments and detectors, payload layout, satellite bus, orbit, and ground segment. We describe the mission’s scientific capabilities and expected place within the astronomical landscape in the 2030s. The 5-year lifetime is baselined on a combination of legacy surveys, guest observer programs, and target-of-opportunity science. We summarize scientific plans for the mission in each of eight fields: cosmology, time domain and multi-messenger science, active galactic nuclei, galaxies, near-field cosmology, stellar astrophysics, exoplanets, and solar system studies. We conclude by describing ongoing development efforts, highlighting areas of particular relevance for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory

The Paternal-Age Effect in Apert Syndrome Is Due, in Part, to the Increased Frequency of Mutations in Sperm

t of men ascertained because they had a child with AS. No age-related increase in the frequency of these mutations was observed in leukocytes. Selection and/or quality-control mechanisms, including DNA repair and apoptosis, may contribute to the cell-type differences in mutation frequency. Much has been written about the "mutagenic male" (Hurst and Ellegren 2002) and the higher male-to-female mutation rate in many genetic disorders (Vogel and Rathenberg 1975; Crow 2000). Conventional wisdom says that the greater number of germ-cell divisions in males compared with females contributes to the higher mutation frequency in males (Penrose 1955), which manifests as an increased incidence with paternal age of de novo cases of disorders, as well as paternally derived mutations (Moloney et al. 1996; Shuffenecker et al. 1997; Wilkin et al. 1998; Glaser et al. 2000). However, the linear increase with age in the number of divisions does not fully explain the exponential increase with paternal ag