Sanctuary in the Richmond City Jail

The following article is a collaboration among four individuals about unique programs run through “The Sanctuary” at the Richmond City Jail in Virginia, US. The Richmond City Jail is one of few jails in the US to offer programs to inmates who serve only short sentences as compared to prisons where the incarcerated serve much longer. In addition to this anomaly, students from outside of the jail come inside to take college classes with the inmates. Programs include literature classes, yoga, religious studies, creative writing, and more. The article explores the impact of The Sanctuary on the spirit, confidence, and perceptions of self-worth among inmates as compared to incarceration without such programs. Practitioners may use the programs detailed as a model for other institutions and evidence of the success of community building and education inside jails and prisons

Tectonic determinations of lithospheric thickness on Ganymede and Callisto

The concept of the Maxwell time of a viscoelastic material (4.5) is used in conjunction with calculated thermal profiles to evaluate the significance of tectonic estimates of lithospheric thickness. Thermal lithospheric thicknesses provide fundamental constraints on planetary thermal histories that complement the constraints provided by dateable surface deposits of endogenic origin. Lithospheric constraints are of particular value on the icy satellites where our understanding of both rheology and surface ages is considerably poorer than it is for the terrestrial planets. Certain extensional tectonic features can and have been used to estimate lithospheric thicknesses on Ganymede and Callisto. These estimates, however, refer to the depth of the elastic lithosphere defined by the zone of brittle failure. The relation between the elastic lithosphere and the thermal lithosphere (generally defined by the zone of conductive heat transport) is not straightforward, because the depth of brittle failure depends not only on the thermal profile, but also on rheology and strain rate (or the characteristic time over which stresses build towards failure). Characteristic time considerations are not trivial in this context because stresses generating brittle failure on the icy satellites may be produced by impacts, with characteristic times of seconds to days, or by geologic processes with time scales of hundreds of millions of years

Predictive learning, prediction errors, and attention: evidence from event-related potentials and eye tracking

Prediction error (‘‘surprise’’) affects the rate of learning: We learn more rapidly about cues for which we initially make incorrect predictions than cues for which our initial predictions are correct. The current studies employ electrophysiological measures to reveal early attentional differentiation of events that differ in their previous involvement in errors of predictive judgment. Error-related events attract more attention, as evidenced by features of event-related scalp potentials previously implicated in selective visual attention (selection negativity, augmented anterior N1). The earliest differences detected occurred around 120 msec after stimulus onset, and distributed source localization (LORETA) indicated that the inferior temporal regions were one source of the earliest differences. In addition, stimuli associated with the production of prediction errors show higher dwell times in an eyetracking procedure. Our data support the view that early attentional processes play a role in human associative learning

Cellular mRNAs access second ORFs using a novel amino acid sequence-dependent coupled translation termination-reinitiation mechanism

Polycistronic transcripts are considered rare in the human genome. Initiation of translation of internal ORFs of eukaryotic genes has been shown to use either leaky scanning or highly structured IRES regions to access initiation codons. Studies on mammalian viruses identified a mechanism of coupled translation termination-reinitiation that allows translation of an additional ORF. Here, the ribosome terminating translation of ORF-1 translocates upstream to reinitiate translation of ORF-2. We have devised an algorithm to identify mRNAs in the human transcriptome in which the major ORF-1 overlaps a second ORF capable of encoding a product of at least 50 aa in length. This identified 4368 transcripts representing 2214 genes. We investigated 24 transcripts, 22 of which were shown to express a protein from ORF-2 highlighting that 3' UTRs contain protein-coding potential more frequently than previously suspected. Five transcripts accessed ORF-2 using a process of coupled translation termination-reinitiation. Analysis of one transcript, encoding the CASQ2 protein, showed that the mechanism by which the coupling process of the cellular mRNAs was achieved was novel. This process was not directed by the mRNA sequence but required an aspartate-rich repeat region at the carboxyl terminus of the terminating ORF-1 protein. Introduction of wobble mutations for the aspartate codon had no effect, whereas replacing aspartate for glutamate repeats eliminated translational coupling. This is the first description of a coordinated expression of two proteins from cellular mRNAs using a coupled translation termination-reinitiation process and is the first example of such a process being determined at the amino acid level

NN^k networks for Content-Based Image Retrieval

This paper describes a novel interaction technique to support content-based image search in large image collections. The idea is to represent each image as a vertex in a directed graph. Given a set of image features, an arc is established between two images if there exists at least one combination of features for which one image is retrieved as the nearest neighbour of the other. Each arc is weighted by the proportion of feature combinations for which the nearest neighbour relationship holds. By thus integrating the retrieval results over all possible feature combinations, the resulting network helps expose the semantic richness of images and thus provides an elegant solution to the problem of feature weighting in content-based image retrieval.We give details of the method used for network generation and describe the ways a user can interact with the structure. We also provide an analysis of the network’s topology and provide quantitative evidence for the usefulness of the technique

Low-velocity impact craters in ice and ice-saturated sand with implications for Martian crater count ages

We produced a series of decimeter-sized impact craters in blocks of ice near 0°C and −70°C and in ice-saturated sand near −70°C as a preliminary investigation of cratering in materials analogous to those found on Mars and the outer solar system satellites. The projectiles used were standard 0.22 and 0.30 caliber bullets fired at velocities between 0.3 and 1.5 km/s, with kinetic energies at impact between 10^9 and 4×10^(10) ergs. Crater diameters in the ice-saturated sand were ∼2 times larger than craters in the same energy and velocity range in competent blocks of granite, basalt and cement. Craters in ice were ∼3 times larger. If this dependence of crater size on strength persists to large hypervelocity impact craters, then surfaces of geologic units composed of ice or ice-saturated soil would have greater crater count ages than rocky surfaces with identical influx histories. The magnitude of the correction to crater counts required by this strength effect is comparable to the magnitudes of corrections required by variations in impact velocity and surface gravity used in determining relative interplanetary chronologies. The relative sizes of craters in ice and ice-saturated sand imply that the tensile strength of ice-saturated sand is a strong inverse function of temperature. If this is true, then Martian impact crater energy versus diameter scaling may also be a function of latitude

A sample of 6C radio sources designed to find objects at redshift z>4: III - imaging and the radio galaxy K-z relation

Peer reviewe

Male sexually coercive behaviour drives increased swimming efficiency in female guppies

Sexual coercion of females by males is widespread across sexually reproducing species. It stems from a conflict of interest over reproduction and exerts selective pressure on both sexes. For females, there is often a significant energetic cost of exposure to male sexually coercive behaviours. Our understanding of the efficiency of female resistance to male sexually coercive behaviour is key to understanding how sexual conflict contributes to population level dynamics and ultimately to the evolution of sexually antagonistic traits. Overlooked within this context are plastic physiological responses of traits within the lifetime of females that could moderate the energetic cost imposed by coercive males. Here, we examined whether conflict over the frequency and timing of mating between male and female guppies Poecilia reticulata can induce changes in swimming performance and aerobic capacity in females as they work to escape harassment by males. Females exposed to higher levels of harassment over a 5-month period used less oxygen to swim at a given speed, but displayed no difference in resting metabolic rate, maximal metabolic rate, maximal sustained swimming speed or aerobic scope compared to females receiving lower levels of harassment. The observed increase in swimming efficiency is at least partially related to differences in swimming mechanics, likely brought on by a training effect of increased activity, as highly harassed females spent less time performing pectoral fin-assisted swimming. Sexual conflict results in sexually antagonistic traits that impose a variety of costs, but our results show that females can reduce costs through phenotypic plasticity. It is also possible that phenotypic plasticity in swimming physiology or mechanics in response to sexual coercion can potentially give females more control over matings and affect which male traits are under selection