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Academic medical centers (AMCs) face challenges in conducting research among traditionally marginalized communities due to long-standing community mistrust. Evidence suggests that some AMC faculty and staff lack an understanding of the history of distrust and social determinants of health (SDH) affecting their communities. Wake Forest Clinical and Translational Science Institute Program in Community Engagement (PCE) aims to build bridges between communities and Wake Forest Baptist Health by equipping faculty, clinicians, administrators, and staff (FCAS) with a better understanding of SDH. The PCE collaborated with community partners to develop and implement community tours to improve cross-community AMC understanding and communication, enhance knowledge of SDH, and build awareness of community needs, priorities, and assets. Nine day-long tours have been conducted with 92 FCAS. Tours included routes through under-resourced neighborhoods and visits to community assets. Participant evaluations assessed program quality; 89% reported enhanced understanding of access-to-care barriers and how SDH affect health; 86% acknowledged the experience would improve future interactions with participants and patients; and 96% agreed they would recommend the tour to colleagues. This work supports the use of community tours as a strategy to improve cross-community AMC communication, build trust, and raise awareness of community needs, priorities, and assets.

Health disparities between Appalachia and the rest of the country are widening. To address this, the Appalachian Translational Research Network (ATRN) organizes an annual ATRN Health Summit. The most recent Summit was held online September 22–23, 2020, and hosted by Wake Forest Clinical and Translational Science Institute in partnership with the Northwest Area Health Education Center. The Summit, titled “Community-Engaged Research in Translational Science: Innovations to Improve Health in Appalachia,” brought together a diverse group of 141 stakeholders from communities, academic institutions, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) to highlight current research, identify innovative approaches to translational science and community-engaged research, develop cross-regional research partnerships, and establish and disseminate priorities for future Appalachian-focused research. The Summit included three plenary presentations and 39 presentations within 12 concurrent breakout sessions. Here, we describe the Summit planning process and implementation, highlight some of the research presented, and outline nine emergent themes to guide future Appalachian-focused research.

We perform a thorough qualitative and quantitative comparison of theoretical predictions and direct numerical simulations for the two-dimensional, vertical impact of two droplets of the same fluid. In particular, we show that the theoretical predictions for the location and velocity of the jet root are excellent in the early stages of the impact, while the predicted jet velocity and thickness profiles are also in good agreement with the computations before the jet begins to bend. By neglecting the role of the surrounding gas both before and after impact, we are able to use Wagner theory to describe the early-time structure of the impact. We derive the model for general droplet velocities and radii, which encompasses a wide range of impact scenarios from the symmetric impact of identical drops to liquid drops impacting a deep pool. The leading-order solution is sufficient to predict the curve along which the root of the high-speed jet travels. After moving into a frame fixed in this curve, we are able to derive the zero-gravity shallow-water equations governing the leading-order thickness and velocity of the jet. Our numerical simulations are performed in the open-source software Gerris, which allows for the level of local grid refinement necessary for a problem with such a wide variety of length scales. The numerical simulations incorporate more of the physics of the problem, in particular the surrounding gas, the fluid viscosities, gravity and surface tension. We compare the computed and predicted solutions for a range of droplet radii and velocities, finding excellent agreement in the early stage. In light of these successful comparisons, we discuss the tangible benefits of using Wagner theory to confidently track properties such as the jet-root location, jet thickness and jet velocity in future studies of splash jet/ejecta evolution.

A hierarchy of models is formulated for the deflection of a thin, two-dimensional liquid jet as it passes over a thin air-cushioning layer above a rigid, flat, impermeable substrate. We perform a systematic derivation of the leading-order equations of motion for the jet in the distinguished limit in which the air pressure jump, surface tension and gravity affect the displacement of the centreline of the jet, but not its thickness or velocity. We identify thereby the axial lengthscales for centreline deflection in regimes in which the air layer is dominated by viscous or inertial effects. The derived lengthscales and reduced equations aim to expand the suite of tools available for future analyses of the evolution of lamellae and ejecta in impact problems. Assuming that the jet is sufficiently long that tip and entry effects can be neglected, we demonstrate that the centreline of a constant-thickness jet moving with constant axial speed is destabilised by the air layer for sufficiently small surface tension. Expressions for the fastest growing modes are obtained in both the viscous-dominated air and inertiadominated air regimes. For a finite-length jet emanating from a nozzle, we show that, in one particular asymptotic limit, the evolution of the jet centreline is akin to the flapping of an unfurling flag above a thin air layer. We discuss the distinguished limit in which tip retraction can be neglected and perform numerical investigations into the resulting model. We show that the cushioning layer causes the jet centreline to bend, leading to rupture of the air layer. We discuss how our toolbox of models can be adapted and utilised in the context of recent experimental and numerical studies of splash dynamics.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To establish an effective team of researchers working towards developing and validating prognostic models employing use of image analyses and other numerical metadata to better understand pediatric undernutrition, and to learn how different approaches can be brought together collaboratively and efficiently. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Over the past 18 months we have established a transdisciplinary team spanning three countries and the Schools of Medicine, Engineering, Data Science and Global Health. We first identified two team leaders specifically a pediatric physician scientist (SS) and a data scientist/engineer (DB). The leaders worked together to recruit team members, with the understanding that different ideas are encouraged and will be used collaboratively to tackle the problem of pediatric undernutrition. The final data analytic and interpretative core team consisted of four data science students, two PhD students, an undergraduate biology major, a recent medical graduate, and a PhD research scientist. Additional collaborative members included faculty from Biomedical Engineering, the School of Medicine (Pediatrics and Pathology) along with international Global Health faculty from Pakistan and Zambia. We learned early on that it was important to understand what each of the member’s motivation for contributing to the project was along with aligning that motivation with the overall goals of the team. This made us help prioritize team member tasks and streamline ideas. We also incorporated a mechanism of weekly (monthly/bimonthly for global partners) meetings with informal oral presentations which consisted of each member’s current progress, thoughts and concerns, and next experimental goals. This method enabled team leaders to have a 3600 mechanism of feedback. Overall, we assessed the effectiveness of our team by two mechanisms: 1) ongoing team member feedback, including team leaders, and 2) progress of the research project. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Our feedback has shown that on initial development of the team there was hesitance in communication due to the background diversity of our various member along with different cultural/social expectations. We used ice-breaking methods such as dedicated time for brief introductions, career directions, and life goals for each team member. We subsequently found that with the exception of one, all other team members noted our working environment professional and conducive to productivity. We also learnt from our method of ongoing constant feedback that at times, due to the complexity of different disciplines, some information was lost due to the difference in educational backgrounds. We have now employed new methods to relay information more effectively, with the use of not just sharing literature but also by explaining the content. The progress of our research project has varied over the past 4-6 months. There was a steep learning curve for almost every member, for example all the data science students had never studied anything related to medicine during their education, including minimal if none exposure to the ethics of medical research. Conversely, team members with medical/biology backgrounds had minimal prior exposure to computational modeling, computer engineering and the verbage of communicating mathematical algorithms. While this may have slowed our progress we learned that by asking questions and engaging every member it was easier to delegate tasks effectively. Once our team reached an overall understanding of each member’s goals there was a steady progress in the project, with new results and new methods of analysis being tested every week. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: We expect that our on-going collaboration will result in the development of new and novel modalities to understand and diagnose pediatric undernutrition, and can be used as a model to tackle several other problems. As with many team science projects, credit and authorship are challenges that we are outlining creative strategies for as suggested by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and other literature.

In Chapter 4, I stated that ‘interstellar matter provides the raw material for the formation of stars and planets’ and it should now be evident that interstellar matter may well have also been important starting material for the origin of life on Earth (Bernstein, 2006; Chyba et al ., 1990; Ehrenfreund & Cami, 2010; Ehrenfreund et al ., 2002). In fact, in Hazen’s phrase: The bottom line is that the prebiotic Earth had an embarrassment of organic riches derived from many likely sources. Carbon-rich molecules emerge from every conceivable environment. Amino acids, sugars, hydrocarbons, bases – all the key molecular species are there. (Hazen, 2005, p. 127) This being the case, and as there are so many plausible mechanisms for the synthesis of biogenic compounds in situ on planet Earth, it is surprising that so much attention has been given to the possibility that life came to Earth ready formed rather than originating here. The panspermia hypothesis claims that life exists throughout the Universe, with microbes drifting through interstellar and interplanetary space, transmitting life to the next habitable body they encounter. According to this view the Earth of long ago was colonised by microbes that had somehow escaped from their home planets to drift across the vast distances between the stars until they arrived on that primeval and sterile Earth. Panspermia should not be confused with pangenesis; the latter was Charles Darwin’s conjectural mechanism to explain heredity (he argued that inheritance depended on particles produced by each organ being transmitted from parent to offspring).

Although fungal hyphae have few unique morphological features and most fungal structures are poor candidates for preservation over long periods of time as fossils, a respectable fossil record for fungi has been assembled in recent years. By far the most impressive fungi of the Ordovician/Devonian Period are specimens of the fossil genus Prototaxites , which were terrestrial organisms found from the mid Ordovician (460 million years ago) to the early Devonian, suggesting that they lasted a period of at least 40 million years (Boyce et al ., 2007; Hueber, 2001). These fossils are among the ‘nematophyte phytodebris’ that constitutes the earliest evidence for terrestrial organisms. This ‘nematophyte phytodebris’ nomenclature was assigned in the middle of the nineteenth century and has no relevance to present-day understanding of taxonomy (that is, it does not necessarily indicate that the stuff was of plant origin); though it does indicate that confusion over the identification of the material is over 150 years old (see discussion in Hueber, 2001 and Taylor et al ., 2010). Prototaxites specimens are generally large: over a metre wide (Wellman & Gray, 2000) and up to 8 m tall (Hueber, 2001) (Figs. 12.1 and 12.2; illustrated in colour in Moore et al ., 2011, pp. 33–34). Prototaxites was also so common that it was a major component of these early terrestrial ecosystems, both in terms of abundance and diversity. Some of the earliest examples found were tree-like trunks constructed of interwoven tubes Prototaxites was fossilised did not (yet) include large vascular plants.

In the story of life on Earth we have now reached the start of the great spreading out of the eukaryotes, from about 2 billion years ago. This is called the Orosirian Period (2.05 to 1.8 billion years ago). The climate of the Earth at this time is reasonably temperate (the Huronian ice age ended 2.1 billion years ago); the Sun’s luminosity is at about 85% of the present-day level and the day length is about 19 hours (see Table 13.1, located at the end of this chapter). By the end of this period, bacteria are abundant and there has been sufficient prokaryotic photosynthesis for oxygen to start accumulating in the atmosphere. Geologically this is a period of intensive mountain development, which means that there were extensive expanses of terrain above sea level as well as high mountain areas and all the potential habitats that such regions represent. The period was bracketed by two major impact events: the impact 2.02 billion years ago that produced the 300 km meteor crater at Vredefort, South Africa, and the impact of 1.85 billion years ago that formed the 250 km crater at Sudbury, Ontario, Canada (you can find details in the Earth Impact Database at this URL: www.passc.net/EarthImpactDatabase/index.html). This is the global habitat into which ELCA, the eukaryote last common ancestor, first emerged, still in its biofilm and still surrounded by prokaryotes. Those prokaryotes gave birth to eukaryotes, in the sense that ELCA diverged from a prokaryotic ancestor; but they also compete with ELCA, so to become a success ELCA must immediately compete in the life game and win. By the time ELCA emerged the prokaryotes had had at least 1.5 billion years to diversify and spread themselves throughout the world. The descendants of ELCA will compete with all of these in due time, but at the beginning ELCA was in competition only with local prokaryotes within the biofilm in which it arose. Remember that one of the rules of the life game is that revolutionary advances in evolution take place in small volumes.

The first serious experimental attempts to make biogenic or prebiotic monomers by adding energy to simple gases were the spark discharge experiments that Stanley L. Miller carried out in Harold C. Urey’s laboratory at the University of Chicago. The original experiment consisted of running steam containing a simple gas mixture of hydrogen, ammonia and methane past electrodes supporting a corona spark discharge from an induction coil, then through a steam-condensing loop before emptying back into the boiling flask. The scale of the apparatus was modest; the steam was produced by boiling just 200 ml of water in a 5 l flask and after evacuating air, the apparatus was charged with 10 cm pressure of hydrogen, 20 cm of methane, and 20 cm of ammonia. The boiling and electrical discharge continued for a week; . . . the water in the flask became noticeably pink after the first day, and by the end of the week the solution was deep red and turbid. Most of the turbidity was due to colloidal silica from the glass. The red color is due to organic compounds adsorbed on the silica. Also present are yellow organic compounds, of which only a small fraction can be extracted with ether . . . (Miller, 1953) The conditions used by Stanley Miller were based on what were then assumed to be realistic conditions on the ancient Earth (Urey, 1952); specifically, that the early Earth would have had a moist and chemically reducing atmosphere of hydrogen, ammonia and methane with a warm liquid ocean (represented by the water in the boiler) and frequent lightning discharges (represented by the spark discharge). For the time the outcome was amazing, for when Miller analysed the solution by two-dimensional paper chromatography run first in butanol/acetic acid/water followed by water-saturated phenol, a ninhydrin spray (the standard way of detecting amino acids) revealed: . . . glycine, α-alanine and β-alanine are identified. The identification of the aspartic acid and α-amino-n-butyric acid is less certain because the spots are quite weak. The spots marked A and B are unidentified as yet, but may be β- and γ-amino acids. These are the main amino acids present, and others are undoubtedly present but in smaller amounts. It is estimated that the total yield of amino acids was in the milligram range . . . (Miller, 1953)

This book is a practical guide addressing the issues faced by philanthropists seeking to engage in international charitable activities and offers alternative approaches to traditional US-based foundations. A significant portion of the regulatory burdens facing US private foundations derives from tax benefits available to donors under US law. A charitable organization must initially qualify and then be maintained under a complex regulatory regime. If some or all of these tax benefits are either unavailable or not needed, or if the tax advantages are outweighed by the burdens of regulatory compliance, foundations can be established in foreign jurisdictions. Charitable activities can then be operated flexibly and privately outside the constraints of the US regulatory regime. For existing private foundations, this book suggests strategies designed to hedge against ever-increasing and intrusive regulation.

Active surveillance for laboratory-confirmed Salmonella serotype Enteritidis (SE) infection revealed a decline in incidence in the 1990s, followed by an increase starting in 2000. We sought to determine if the fluctuation in SE incidence could be explained by changes in foodborne sources of infection. We conducted a population-based case-control study of sporadic SE infection in five of the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) sites during a 12-month period in 2002–2003. A total of 218 cases and 742 controls were enrolled. Sixty-seven (31%) of the 218 case-patients and six (1%) of the 742 controls reported travel outside the United States during the 5 days before the case's illness onset (OR 53, 95% CI 23–125). Eighty-one percent of cases with SE phage type 4 travelled internationally. Among persons who did not travel internationally, eating chicken prepared outside the home and undercooked eggs inside the home were associated with SE infections. Contact with birds and reptiles was also associated with SE infections. This study supports the findings of previous case-control studies and identifies risk factors associated with specific phage types and molecular subtypes.

Introduction The method to be used for mitigating the impact of an asteroid on Earth depends on the nature of the asteroid. A compact rock would react very differently to almost any violent mechanical event than would an object that consisted of unconsolidated dust and fragments. A water-rich, comet-like object would react very differently to laser heating than a completely hydrated object. Thus, impact mitigation begins with scientific investigation. We have been investigating physical processes likely to be occurring on asteroids in connection with our efforts to understand the origin and history of meteorites and their relationship to asteroids. In this connection, we have been developing proposals for a near-Earth asteroid sample return mission called Hera (Sears et al . 2002c) (Fig. 15.1). Hera will visit three near-Earth asteroids, spend 3 months to 1 year in reconnaissance, and then nudge itself gently down to the surface to collect three samples from each asteroid at geologically significant sites (Britt et al . 2001). By returning weakly consolidated surface samples, the Hera mission will clarify many issues relating to the asteroid–meteorite connection and the origin and evolution of the solar system (Sears et al . 2001). In addition, interstellar grains in the samples will shed light on the relationship between our Sun and other stars. The major challenge of the Hera mission is the design of the collector and this depends on a knowledge of the nature of the surface.

In this chapter we examine the biotechnology that uses intact living organisms to produce commercially important products. In the main this means fungal fermentations in submerged liquid cultures, so we describe in detail the essential aspects of cultivating fungi: media, oxygen demand and supply, and fermenter engineering. We describe fungal growth patterns in liquid cultures; fermenter growth kinetics; growth yield; the stationary phase; and growth as pellets. Beyond the batch culture, we discuss fed-batch methods, chemostats and turbidostats. Then we look towards the industrial scene and examine the uses of submerged fermentations, with the specific examples: alcoholic fermentations; citric acid biotechnology; penicillin and other pharmaceuticals; enzymes for fabric conditioning and processing, and food processing; steroids and use of fungi to make chemical transformations; the Quorn™ fermentation and evolution in fermenters; and the production of spores and other inocula. We hark back to ruminant digestion to consider the ‘engineering aspects’ of natural digestive fermentations in herbivores, and try to work out just how many anaerobic fungi we are cultivating in our livestock. Many of the most important commercial (particularly food) fermentations take place in the solid state. So we look in a little more detail at the digestion of lignocellulosic residues, and then turn to our major foods: bread, cheese and salami manufacture; and soy sauce, tempeh and other food products, with a few comments about products like chocolate, coffee and even tea, which, though few people realise this, all depend on fermentation processes.

Fungal biomass is a high-quality food source because it contains a good content of protein (typically 20% to 30% crude protein as a percentage of dry matter), which contains all of the amino acids that are essential to human and animal nutrition. Add characteristically low fat content, a chitinous wall as a source of dietary fibre, useful vitamin content, especially of B vitamins, and carbohydrate in the form of glycogen, and fungal biomass can be considered an ideal food. Judging from archaeological and similar finds, mushrooms, toadstools and bracket fungi have been used by humans since before recorded history for both food and medicinal purposes. We currently depend on fungi and fungal products every hour of every day and this chapter will concentrate on the human fungal foodstuffs in current use (Moore, 2001). However, before turning to this aspect we want to deal with the ways that other animals exploit fungi for food. Fungi feature prominently in food webs, and wild fungi are picked commercially, too. But it's not solely a matter of ‘picking mushrooms’; fungal cells and mycelium are used as human food, and fungi are used to prepare many commonly used fermented foods, so there is a need to consider several different industrial cultivation methods. Finally, to make the point that we are not the only animals that cultivate fungi, we will discuss the relationship between gardening insects and their fungi, though we will describe these mutualisms in detail in Chapter 15.

When early humans gave up their nomadic hunter–gatherer existence and turned to agriculture to solve their food problem they would quickly have been challenged by the fungi. Early farmers must have learned very rapidly that crops are very uncertain resources, prone to variations in weather, fire, floods, weeds, insect pests, and those troubles that came to be referred to collectively as ‘blights’ which were due to various sorts of plant disease. Great plant losses, caused by any of these factors, can be suffered in natural ecosystems but by bringing the crops together into fields in the first place, the early agriculturalists created ideal conditions for the spread of plant disease. And the more selective their farming, the closer their crops came to being true monocultures, the greater the extent of agricultural losses due to any single agency like a particular plant disease, so in this chapter we look at fungi as pathogens of plants. Fungi are the main disease organisms of plants, being responsible for major losses of world agricultural production. Because of the number that exist, we can only give a few specific examples, so we limit these to the headline crop diseases: the rice blast fungus ( Magnaporthe grisea ), the bootlace or honey fungus ( Armillaria ), rusts, mildews and smuts (pathogens that produce haustoria which penetrate the plant cells), leaf spot ( Cercospora ), Dutch elm disease ( Ophiostoma ) and black stem rust of wheat ( Puccinia graminis ).