Records of temperature and precipitation during Quaternary interglacial periods on Greenland are notably scarce, limiting assessment of the magnitude and rate of local environmental response to orbitally-driven Arctic warming. It is largely unknown if warming across Greenland was spatially uniform through past interglacials, and if warming was accompanied by major...
Solid acid fuel cells confer unique advantages over nearby technologies, such as polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) or solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), due to the solid acid electrolyte – a solid-state, anhydrous, intermediate-temperature proton conductor.Despite these encouraging unique properties, solid acid fuel cells have performed unfavorably in comparison...
In solar energy conversion ranging from artificial photosynthesis to photocatalysis, transition metal complexes (TMC) are essential building blocks due to several attractive properties: intense absorption within the solar spectrum, presence of charge-transfer excited state, and substrate binding capability through coordination geometry changes. In order to gain insight into controlling solar...
In this thesis, I explore the formation and evolution of neutron stars and millisecondpulsar populations in globular clusters using N-body simulations. In particular, I examine how the number of millisecond pulsars and the pulsar properties, including binary
properties and different pulsar types, depend on the dynamical cluster environment. I
demonstrate...
Movement and sensing fundamentally works in a synergistic manner. Animal's sensory organs --- be they independently movable like eyes or requiring whole body movement as in the case of electroreceptors --- are actively manipulated throughout stimulus-driven active sensing behaviors. Though these sensing-related motions have been individually reported and analyzed across...
Recent development on optogenetic methods offers reliable path to modulate cell activities with high level spatiotemporal precision. Application of this technology in behavior studies significantly improves our understanding in the neural principle that underpin animal behaviors, including ourselves. Full exploitation of optogenetic method in neuroscience behavior studies relies on...
Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two...
“(Being a) Feminist (is a) Struggle: Intersectional Feminist Politics in the Era of the Women’s March” argues that contemporary feminist politics are characterized by debates and contestations concerning the political demands of intersectionality. Contemporary feminist theory and politics are particularly and peculiarly preoccupied with making these judgements about the political...
Proteins represent a critical class of biomolecules, universally employed by all living organisms to fulfill essential structural, functional, and enzymatic roles necessary to support life. In nature, these polymers are composed generally of twenty natural amino acid (AA) building blocks, which can be modified with covalent adducts known as post-translational...
Methanotrophs, bacteria that can metabolize methane, remain a promising solution to mitigating the effects of climate change by removing atmospheric methane and converting it to useful chemical precursors. However, a full understanding of the main enzyme they use to oxidize methane, particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO), is critical for harnessing their...