Differential membrane trafficking and modulation of lipid domains establishes and maintains cellular polarity in epithelial cells – these events are controlled largely by small GTPases. We have shown previously that Rab14 acts upstream of Arf6 in the establishment of the apical membrane, but how it interacts with other trafficking machinery is unknown. Rab22 has a polarized distribution in activated T-cells, but its role in epithelial polarity is not known. Here we report the colocalization of Rab14 with Rab22a in endosomes of Madin Darby canine kidney (MDCK) cells. Interestingly, Rab22 localizes to the cell:cell interface of polarizing cell pairs, and Rab14 and Rab22 colocalize in adjacent endosomes. Knockdown of Rab22 results in a multi-lumen phenotype in 3D culture, and overexpression of Rab22 in Rab14 knock down cells, results in the production of Rab22-positive extensions. Because of the relationship between Rab14, Rab22, and Arf6, we investigated the interaction of Rab22 with Arf6 GEFs and found that Rab22 co-immunoprecipitates with the Arf6 GEF EFA6. Furthermore, EFA6 is retained in intracellular puncta in Rab22 KD cells. These results suggest that Rab22 acts downstream of Rab14 to regulate Arf6 activity in the establishment of polarity.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a detrimental impact on society, the economy, education, and mental and physical well-being of Americans across the United States. To date, over (insert appropriate number here) cases of COVID-19 and blank deaths have been repeatedly reported in the United States. The U.S government ordered/enacted specific legal policies and mandates to slow the transmission and spreading of the pandemic. The important roles of economic, physical, mental, and racial disparities and disadvantages altered compliance within areas of the United States. Society quickly divided into multiple groups either in support or opposition of these policies. The question is whether this divide was influenced by individual political leanings and beliefs? The “Psychology of COVID Prevention Behaviors in the United States” is focused on analyzing the role of people’s belief systems and the manner in which various psychological traits influence their individual attitudes toward COVID-19 mitigation policies. This study expands on the diverse belief system regarding COVID-19 and its influence on COVID-related policy and behavior. Additionally, incorporating the social theories and ideologies of partisanship, collectivism, individualism, and prejudice to supplement our findings. Our study interacted with populations within the University of Arizona and established with aid from society concentrated areas and prior data publications. According to our hypothesis, participants with a stronger means of individualistic beliefs demonstrate little to no compliance implemented by the government and abiding schools.

The Transformer architecture is a deep learning model that adopts the mechanism of self-attention, the ability of a Transformer model to attend to different parts of the input sequence when making predictions. The Transformer differentially weighs the significance of each part of the input data, learning context and meaning by tracking relationships in sequential data, such as the words in a sentence. For Natural Language Generation (NLG), the application of the Transformer was nothing short of a breakthrough. Self and multi-head attention models have proven their efficacy in a variety of textual tasks, including classification, translation, summarization, and generation. However, incorporating numerical information into textual tasks is a relatively novel frontier, especially when said information is vital for assessing the efficacy of automating the summary generation process. In this research, I focus on evaluating pre-trained Transformer-based NLG models, such as the widely popularized and open-source BERT and T5, on USDA grain reports to produce high-quality, information-rich summaries. I conduct a comparative analysis of these models’ performances on a small collection of numerically-oriented commodities reports, and compute two simple yet informative metrics to judge which models perform the best at relaying numerical information in their respective summaries.

Life satisfaction decreases as depression severity increases, but we wanted to explore how sleep quality factors into this relationship. Can higher sleep quality restore an individual’s level of life satisfaction, especially in those who are severely depressed? To answer this question, we ran a regression of life satisfaction on sleep quality among individuals of minimal (n=2178), mild (n=624), moderate (n=667), and severe (n=609) depression, using data we collected during a 13-month online cross-sectional study on mental health (April 2020-April 2021). This yielded a separate regression analysis for each depression severity group, with the total score on the Satisfaction With Life Scale as the dependent variable, and responses to Item 6 on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI)—“During the past month, how would you rate your sleep quality overall?” ranging from “very bad” (coded as 1) to “very good” (coded as 4)—as the independent variable. Our findings showed a significant positive correlation between total SWLS score and PSQI sleep quality score in minimally, mildly, moderately, and severely depressed groups (Rminimal=.187, p<.001; Rmild=.129, p=.001; Rmoderate=.180, p<.001; Rsevere=.438, p<.001). However, the R square value was far larger in the severely depressed group than it was in all other groups (R2adj/severe=.191; versus R2adj/minimal=.034, R2adj/mild=.015, and R2adj/moderate=.031). These findings indicate that better sleep quality more strongly predicts higher life satisfaction in severely depressed individuals, compared to those who are not severely depressed. Thus, interventions that focus directly on improving sleep quality would likely be a meaningful approach to increase life satisfaction in severely depressed individuals.

When looking at landmark Supreme Court cases, it becomes clear that there are two main styles of advocacy – one shotters and repeat players. These styles are defined by the tactics that they utilize when arguing in front of the Justices. Although it is not clear if one style is more successful than another, it is interesting to see how they compare to each other and what facts of the case they choose to emphasize. Each was formed in response in response to the court’s reduction of oral argument time and their increased aggression during their argument.

In order to improve survival rates for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), bystander defibrillation is imperative. Nationally, however, only 9 percent of patients who arrested in a public space in 2020 had an automated external defibrillator (AED) applied before medical personnel arrived on scene. The aim of this study was to understand why young adults might not apply an AED in response to a witnessed OHCA. A mixed methodology study was conducted to first quantify the baseline knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and AED use among young adults. Subsequently, qualitative data was obtained from focus groups to identify common barriers to early defibrillation and to discover interventions that might improve a bystander’s confidence to use an AED. Quantitative data was obtained using a Qualtrics survey distributed to students enrolled in select General Education courses at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Based on those responses, some students were invited to participate in the focus groups. The Qualtrics survey generated 431 responses, and 266 of those students (61.7 percent) had participated in a CPR training course at some point. While 57.9 percent of CPR-trained individuals felt confident about how to use an AED, only 32.7 percent were certain they would apply an AED before EMS arrived on scene. Of the CPR-trained individuals who were invited to participate in focus groups, only 28 students completed a session. Among those 28 students, 57.1 percent felt confident about how to use an AED, but only 42.9 percent believed they would follow through with device application. Potential barriers to early intervention included lack of confidence, inability to pinpoint the location of an AED, fear of litigation, or simply not realizing that defibrillation was time sensitive. Potential solutions included creating media campaigns that reinforce the simplicity of AED operation, building public AED registries, rehearsing CPR skills at more regular intervals with modalities that are free, fast, and convenient, and clarifying/enacting legislation that guarantees bystander protection. Realizing the significance of early defibrillation, young adults agreed that bystander involvement is necessary. They gauged that many of the barriers which preclude eyewitness involvement in OHCA would be eliminated by employing smartphone technology and/or garnering legislative support.

Piper Kerman’s memoir details her experiences within the federal prison system; however, much of her writing disputes the situations often associated with prison that are shown within the media. Media portrayals are often the only source of representation for those not involved in the prison system, and, as such, general audiences have come to expect perpetuated stereotypes. However, Kerman makes a point of sharing how she and her fellow inmates bonded and created a sort of pseudo-family to connect with others and have a support system. While Kerman expected to experience violence and forced sexual encounters, due to the influence of the media she found before entering prison, she was proven wrong. When Netflix adapted Kerman’s memoir to become an original television series, the platform decided to ignore these revelations about the reality of incarceration and instead focused on maintaining the stereotypes audiences have come to expect: violence, homosexuality, and a hypersexualized experience. Consequently, Orange Is the New Black was transformed from being one woman’s personal experience within the American prison system to being hypersexualized stories and images of women created to appease the male gaze.

The CA1 region of the hippocampus is essential for spatial navigation as it encodes locations and rewards using place cells and reward cells. Many of the navigation tasks using rodents involve the use of cue-rich reward areas to encourage behavior and adverse stimuli such as electrical foot shocks to elicit avoidance. Both reward locations and avoidance areas have been shown to have influences on the properties of CA1 place fields. We focused on the roles of distal and visual cues on rats’ ability to interact with unmarked (no cue, no boundary) positive and weakly cued (no boundary, small mark on the floor) negative zones on an open field arena. When the rat enters the positive zone, it was rewarded at a random feeder on the circumference of the arena, away from the zone. For negative zones, rather than actively punishing the rat with foot shocks, we use reward withdrawal to avoid fear and stress which are known to significantly depend on non-hippocampal structures such as the amygdala. When the rat entered the negative zone, the feeder that was cued was de-activated and a 10-second delay was initiated before another reward location became active. Each experimental session was divided into two halves, baseline and manipulation. During baseline, a local cue on the arena wall and a distal cue on the curtain surrounding the arena were associated with the zone. During the manipulation, 3 conditions were tested: the cues and the zone moved together to a new location; the cues moved, but the zone remained unchanged; or the zone moved, and the cues remained unchanged. Behaviorally, we found that the rats quickly learned to enter the positive zone and receive a subsequent reward elsewhere on the maze. They also learned to avoid the negative zone by gradually adjusting their trajectories. Rats were able to navigate more accurately into the positive zone and avoid the negative zone when the cues and zone moved together, but less so when the cues and zone were moved separately. These results show that pairing the zone and distal cues had a significant effect on the rats' behavior in this task.

Menstrual equity is a critical global health issue that affects billions of people around the world. Menstrual equity is a term used to define the systemic issues that affect the ability to adequately access menstrual products, washing facilities, waste management, and any other menstrual hygiene tools and education. Current estimates show that a quarter of college students that menstruate struggle with adequately accessing menstrual products at any point during the year, which can affect a student’s ability to regularly attend class. Due to the understood and assumed need for action to promote menstrual equity on the University of Arizona campus, a survey of undergraduate students was created, conducted, and analyzed to provide evidence to advocate for more free menstrual products on campus. Based on the survey results, 86.24% of respondents reported that adding more locations with free menstrual products on the University of Arizona campus would increase their ability to access menstrual products. In addition, respondents agreed that the University can do a better job at providing free menstrual products on campus. On top of needing an increase in free menstrual products on campus, there also needs to be an increase in knowledge of existing resources, as 76.6% of respondents reported not knowing about any on-campus resources. Overall, there needs to be an increase in education of current resources and increase in available resources to move towards menstrual equity at the University of Arizona.

Over the past century, the population of wild Mexican axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) has declined significantly. The native axolotl holds great cultural significance to Mexico and is an integral part of Mexican mythology and tradition. These amphibians are also commonly used in scientific research due to their advanced regeneration, complex genomes and various other unique attributes. Due to their cultural and scientific importance, scientists and locals are currently researching the decline of the last remaining populations in their only current habitat, Lake Xochimilco. This paper discusses urbanization’s role in the decline of the native axolotl, mainly how the urbanization of Mexico City has impacted their populations. This paper also looks at current axolotl conservation efforts and examines their effectiveness. What we found is that Mexico City’s pollution, destruction of habitat, and the introduction of more competitive species into Lake Xochimilco have caused irreparable damage to native populations of axolotl. There are many current projects seeking to restore the lake and through working with locals, these projects have seen success in many areas. Particularly, projects that work with local farms and businesses to raise awareness and create safe spaces for axolotls have been successful in raising funds and protecting the wild axolotl. Further research needs to be conducted on improving water quality in the lake and methods to reduce the pollution entering the lake from urban practices. By highlighting urbanization’s ramifications, this review aims to provide a clearer understanding of how to preserve this unique species.