Over the past decade the market for children’s digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for...
Different features of the visual world are conveyed to the retino-recipient regions of the brain by more than 40 types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCS). Feature detection by RGCs depends on a combination of intrinsic and morphological properties where the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory inputs occurs through local retinal...
Meiosis is a specialized form of cell division that gives rise to haploid reproductive cells by replicating the genetic material once and undergoing two rounds of partitioning. While most forms of cell division require centrosomes to assemble a bipolar microtubule-based spindle that segregates chromosomes, female gametes (oocytes) are unique in...
As opposed to the nanoscale deposition techniques often used for material syntheses, here, I focus on mesoscale material depositions and how to design interfaces to efficiently manage such deposition and potential accumulation. These deposition processes include condensation, condensation frosting, particle capture, and vaporization. Through the lens of energy and sustainability,...
Mindfulness is the dynamic process of building and maintaining awareness of one’s environment and paying attention to stimuli (Langer, 1989; Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). A cognitively effortful endeavor, mindfulness requires “the capacity to respond to unanticipated cues or signals from one’s context” (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006, p. 504). Mindful...
This thesis focuses on exploring the explanatory and discovery potential of the four-neutrino and enhanced neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments hypotheses when
applied to the NOvA/T2K discrepancy and the XENON1T anomaly, respectively. Firstly,
we study the effect of a very light (sub eV) sterile neutrino on the NOvA/T2K anom-...
Recommender systems (RSs) have become essential tools that provide personalized recommendations to their users. These systems may consider user, item provider, and system requirements simultaneously. With the inclusion of possibly clashing considerations, there is a growing focus on solving multiple-objective recommender system (MORS) problems as efficiently as possible. The constrained...
We establish the criterion for chaos in three-planet systems, for systems similar to those discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. Our main results are as follows: (i) The simplest criterion, which is based on overlapping mean motion resonances (MMRs), only agrees with numerical simulations at a very crude level. (ii) Much...
A great deal of work has been done in recent years to construct algebraic invariants ofLegendrian knots, and their higher-dimensional analogues. Here we employ the diagram-
matic calculus developed in [3], in order to develop an iterative method for computing the
so-called vexillary functions of a class of Legendrian surfaces....
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) are two of the most highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), each affecting roughly 2% of the population. Despite the need for therapies, few exist due to a myriad of challenges, such as the complex underlying genetic etiology and historic inaccessibility of neural...