The search for life beyond Earth is one of the big questions in the modern science community, and a primary motivation behind a range of NASA's ground-based and space-bourne missions. In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope, LUVOIR, and HabEx will characterize the atmospheres of nearby Earth-like exoplanets....
Recent discoveries of black hole (BH) candidates in galactic and extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) have ignited interest in understanding how BHs dynamically evolve in a GC and the number of BHs (NBH) that may still be retained by today's GCs. Numerical models show that even if stellar-mass BHs are retained...
Investigating the drug response at the transcriptional level is powerful for understanding the mechanism of drug adverse effects, elucidating inter-individual drug response variability and developing personalized therapies. However, drug perturbation experiments are limited to immortal cell lines which do not reflect the true physiology and gene expression of the liver,...
Air pollution increases mortality risk up to 18 percent due to cardiovascular causes. Poor air quality occurs more when meteorological components prevent the dispersal of pollutants in the lower atmosphere. The atmospheric and hydrological patterns change as global warming alters the pattern of circulations seasonally. The purpose of this study...
The advent of next-generation sequencing has made it increasingly feasible to survey microbes in situ, including inside buildings where many people spend extended periods of time. Microbes in buildings, and specifically in dust, are linked to various health outcomes, and the amount of antimicrobial chemicals in dust is associated to...
The sexual network topology of individuals and their communities may affect the spread of infectious disease both within and across specific populations. To better understand this process, we collected ego-centric data on the personal sexual networks of 175 young men who have sex with men. Respondents were asked to nominate...
Numerical simulations have shown that black holes (BHs) have significant influence on the evolution of globular clusters (GCs), and therefore shape their observational features. Recently, a BH-main sequence star (MS) binary system has been observed in the Milky Way GC NGC 3201. Our group uses Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) code...
Objectives: Poor infant health is associated with lower wellbeing later in life. Food insecurity has been associated with higher rates of some morbidities in young children. However, this relationship has not been well studied in infants younger than six months or in Kenya. Thus, we sought to determine the relationship...
The ideology scores of US Congress members over time, quantified from how similarly they voted on bills. I present an interactive visualization for the US Congress members’ ideology. The data used are ideology scores of US Congress members 1789-2015. The ideology scores are quantified from the Congress members’ voting records...
Using ab initio calculations, we discovered a quasi two-dimensional copper–bismuth nano sheet, which we call cubine. According to our predictions, single layers of cubine can be isolated from the recently reported high-pressure CuBi bulk material at an extremely low energetic cost, comparable to values to separate single layers of graphene...
Psychometric analyses can help illuminate how people approach clinical tests. To understand how health literacy (i.e., literacy for health information) might lead to biased assessment of emotional distress, we examined the psychometric properties of anxiety and depression questionnaires, using differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. Items were flagged for DIF if...
Our research group is currently working to develop the first cross-culturally validated household water insecurity scale. In order to do this, we have partnered with numerous collaborators to implement the survey in diverse ecological settings. As part of the survey, participants are asked to recall how long it takes to...
Firefly is an interactive tool that allows users to fly through any 3 dimensional dataset by rendering it on-the-fly. Here we present simulation data created as part of the FIRE galaxy formation collaboration. Interactively exploring data generates powerful intuition and helps one isolate regions of interest in the data using...
Levitation—the rising or hovering of an object in apparent defiance of gravity—is a captivating phenomenon with a wide range of applications. In this visualization, we demonstrate our newly discovered form of fluid dynamical levitation of small particles that may be 10, 100, or even 1000 times as dense as the...
A fractal is created by a Piecewise Isometry (PWI) which cuts a 2D object into pieces and rearranges those pieces to recreate the original object in a scrambled form. The PWI studied here splits a hemispherical shell into four pieces along cutting lines and rearranges them into a shuffled hemisphere....
Massive Black Holes, millions to billions of times more massive than our sun, exist in the centers of most galaxies. However, the formation and evolution of these objects through accretion of gas and mergers with other black holes is still a great mystery. LISA, a future space-based gravitational wave detector,...
This work introduces a novel optical 3D sensor principle and its implementation: the ‘single-shot 3D movie camera’. The camera is designed for the 3D measurement of macroscopic objects with scattering surfaces, e.g. human faces. It combines the acquisition of a dense point cloud displaying physically limited lateral resolution and depth...
These images show how the Facebook networks of 121 LGBTQ youth (Mage = 24.13 years) differ depending on how “out” these young people are about their identities. Using cluster analysis of survey data, we found LGBTQ youth managed outness in one of four ways: high overall outness (63.82%), low overall...
This visualization shows two-photon imaging of GCamp6f in hippocampal pyramidal neurons as a mouse navigates a virtual reality maze. These techniques give us an indirect measure of activity in neurons or small compartments of neurons in an awake, behaving animal. The hippocampus has been well characterized as playing an essential...
Mixing due to cutting-and-shuffling is studied at a fundamental level using 2D mappings known as Piecewise Isometries (PWI) which can create beautiful mixing patterns. The PWI studied here splits a hemispherical shell (HS) into four curved triangular pieces that are rearranged to make a shuffled HS. Applying the PWI repeatedly...