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When former Confederates and their conservative allies retook power in the South after Reconstruction, they rewrote state constitutions. Lawmakers in the individual states gave their governors different powers based on their state’s experience throughout Reconstruction and Redemption. The Texas Constitution of 1876 created a weak governor, producing a state governed by elected county leaders and court judges. The Florida Constitution of 1885 on the other hand, kept a strong executive but placed it underneath the power of a private organization, the Democratic State Executive Committee – the Democratic Party. The state governments - and governors – redeemers designed in the 1870s and 1880s still governed Texas and Florida well into the twenty first century. Reconstruction directly shaped the size and scope of these modern-day state executives.

Occurring in the context of the Cold War, the 1958 Lebanese Crisis forced U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and top policymakers to balance a multitude of factors when considering an appropriate response to the crisis. While Eisenhower claimed publicly that Operation Blue Bat was an intervention aimed at containing the every looming threat of communism, meeting records of top U.S. policy makers contradict such explanations and offer insight to the President’s true motivations. Eisenhower instead sought to maintain U.S. influence among a coalition of Middle Eastern conservative governments operating in a U.S. led regional military alliance. The crisis forced the President to reconcile his foreign policy objectives with the political and cultural reality of the region and prompted a major foreign policy reassessment in which Eisenhower turned away from top-down international alliance building and instead, worked to address the obvious need to court public opinion in the Arab world.

Living organisms synthesize and assemble complex bioinorganic composites with enhanced structure and properties to fulfill needs such as structural support and enhanced mechanical function. With the advent of advanced materials characterization techniques, these biomineral systems can be explored with high resolution to glean information on their composition, ultrastructure, assembly, and biomechanics. In this work, the endoskeletal features of two marine organisms are explored.
Acantharia are geographically widespread marine planktonic single-celled organisms. Their star-shaped SrSO4 endoskeleton consists of spicules emanating from a central junction, arranged to satisfy crystallochemical and spatial requirements of their orthorhombic crystal lattice. In this work, synchrotron X-ray nanotomography and deep-learning guided image segmentation methods were used to characterize the endoskeleton of 5 types of Acantharia and to extrapolate their growth mechanism. The results highlight the diverse morphology of the spicules and spicular junctions that Acantharia achieve whilst maintaining overall spatial arrangement. Fine structural features, such as interspicular interstices thought to play a role in the robustness of the overall endoskeleton, were resolved.

Using the Caenorhabditis elegans as a model we have employed forward genetic screens to uncover several novel genetic contributors to dopamine (DA) signaling(1). Follow-up characterization of some of these novel contributors have been detailed in published work from our lab(2), while follow-up studies on other pathways are still underway. Moreover, using the powerful Million Mutation Project library, we have uncovered an important link between primary cilium formation and the regulation of the DA transporter dat-1(3). The focus of the body of work detailed in this manuscript is on a glial expressed gene, swip-10, uncovered from our original genetic screen(1, 4, 5). Unlike the other pathways uncovered from our genetic screening, swip-10 does not affect DA signaling via DAT-1 regulation, instead, loss of swip-10 produces excess DA signaling in a glutamate-signaling-dependent manner to cause swimming-induced paralysis (Swip)(4) as well as premature DA neuron degeneration(5). Specifically, the primary aim here was to uncover the molecular pathway by which swip-10 supports these phenotypes.

The midline nuclei of the thalamus, previously characterized as “nonspecific” with undifferentiated connections with the cortex, have been shown to distribute in a specific and highly organized manner to subcortical and cortical structures. The midline thalamus consists of the paraventricular (PV) and paratenial (PT) nuclei, dorsally, and the reuniens (RE) and rhomboid (RH) nuclei, ventrally. The PV and RE nuclei have been examined to a far greater extent than either the PT or RH and have been shown to be involved in various affective and cognitive functions. Generally, PV is more associated with emotional and motivated behaviors such as arousal, feeding, drug addiction, fear, and anxiety, whereas RE is more involved in cognitive and mnemonic functions -- as RE represents a critical bridge between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the hippocampal formation.
As afferent projections to PT have not been systemically described, we examined the input to PT comparing it with that to PV, using retrograde anatomical tracer, fluorogold (FG). We found PT and PV are almost exclusively targeted by ‘limbic’ structures of the forebrain. Whereas afferents to PT and PV originate from very similar sources, PT receives stronger input from the cortex and PV from subcortical structures. Notably, PT receives prominent input from the mPFC and orbital (ORB) cortices, two regions associated with cognitive flexibility and decision making.

Many scholars discount the colonial poetic production of early America due to its
seemingly European-derivative nature of form or its repetitive focus on stringent pedagogy
regarding virtue and religiosity. Because of this, many overlook colonial poets and their poetry
as being of little significance to the modern reader; this could not be more incorrect. Through
analysis of the writings of the Puritan poets Michael Wigglesworth and Anne Bradstreet, as well
as those of Enlightenment poet Phillis Wheatley, a remarkable trend of subversion of the cultural
hegemony of colonial America emerges. This honors thesis analyses the ways in which colonial
American poets fought against the hegemonic oppression they faced by thoroughly breaking
down the overlooked canon of Wigglesworth, Bradstreet, and Wheatley. In doing so, the ways in
which the aforementioned poets protested their suppressed creativity, personhood, and freedom
become clear.

Flooding disasters pose a significant threat worldwide, with 2022 seeing them as the most common type of disaster. In the U.S. alone, four flooding disasters in 2023 cost more than $9.2 billion. Coastal urban areas face increasing threats from flooding disasters due to rising sea levels, changing precipitation patterns, and intensifying extreme weather events. This study focuses on Central Beach, Fort Lauderdale; the area's unique geographical, environmental, historical, and socio-economic characteristics make it a prime candidate for this analysis. The research objective is to comprehensively examine the factors contributing to water-related vulnerabilities of developed properties in Central Beach and assess localized impacts using regional models. The methodology involves developing probabilistic flood maps using GIS tools and the Cascade 2001 routing model. The flood scenarios consider groundwater table rise, extreme rainfall, high tides, storm surge, and sea level rise. Results indicate significant inundation risks, particularly for commercial and mobility infrastructure, under storm surge and sea level rise scenarios. The analysis highlights the importance of targeted mitigation efforts to protect these areas and reinforce resilience against future flooding events. The findings contribute valuable insights for policymakers, urban planners, and stakeholders, emphasizing the need for comprehensive strategies to mitigate flood risks in coastal urban areas.

Flood events are becoming more frequent and intense as time progresses, ushering in a “new normal” for life in South Florida, a life that presumably requires flood literacy for resilience. Utilizing a 45-question digital survey, flood literacy of 600 participants from Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Palm Beach counties was assessed. Using seven indices developed for this study including residency, flood terminology literacy, flood insurance literacy, floodplain literacy, flood experience, risk communication awareness, and mitigation strategies, it was found that less than 80% of participants were flood literate, with most indicating low experience with flooding and mitigation. Interaction with risk communications and consideration of flood impacts in residency decisions were indicated as moderate. Due to inconsistencies in parts of analysis, further stratification of index topics and unification of questions types would be beneficial for future iterations of this study.

The overall objective was to elucidate the effect of iron (Fe) on nitrogen (N) diagenesis in Lake Okeechobee. Somewhat counterintuitively, sediment ammonium (NH+4) inventories decreased during algal growth as dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) inventories increased. Whole core incubations were staged for denitrification experiments using isotopic N tracer. Core incubations showed the percentage of sediment N removal increase between summer (25 ± 21 %) and winter (39 ± 13 %). The amendment of Fe2+ enhanced this seasonal effect likely via dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium (DNRA). The isotopic signature of N2 flux also suggested an additional, sedimentary, N2 source via Fe coupled anaerobic oxidation of ammonium (feammox). Sediment slurry incubations supported the occurrence of both DNRA and feammox, showing first that nitrate (NO3−) was converted to NH4+ via DNRA, which contributed 23-26% of overall NO3− reduction.
Fe amendment in slurries similarly stimulated the feammox process. However, aged Fe minerals accumulated linearly with N bound to Fe (Fe-N) in a subseasonal sediment time series, suggesting Fe-organic matter aggregation may lower the sediment NH4+ equilibrium concentration and benthic flux.

Dynamical systems play a pivotal role across various scientific domains, encompassing disciplines from physics to biology and engineering. The long-term behavior of these systems hinges on the structure of their attractors, with many exhibiting multistability characterized by multiple minimal attractors. Understanding the structure of these attractors and their corresponding basins is a central theme in dynamical systems theory.
In recent years, machine learning algorithms have emerged as potent tools for clustering, prediction, and modeling complex data. By harnessing the capabilities of neural networks along with techniques from topological data analysis, in particular persistence homology, we can construct surrogate models of system asymptotics. This approach also allows for the decomposition of phase space into polygonal regions and the identification of plausible attracting neighborhoods, facilitating homological Conley index computation at reduced computational expense compared to current methods. Through various illustrative examples, we demonstrate that sufficiently low training loss yields constructed neighborhoods whose homological Conley indices aligns with a priori knowledge of the dynamics.