Segregation and mortality over time and space.

Few studies have been able to measure the evolution of segregation on health disparities or assess whether those disparities existed in rural communities prior to the Great Migration of African Americans to urban centers. We use a newly developed measure of historical racial residential segregation based on individual-level data. The measure exploits complete census manuscript files to identify the races of next-door neighbors.

Single-strand stacking free energy from DNA beacon kinetics.

DNA beacons are short single-stranded chains which can form closed hairpin shapes through complementary base pairing at their ends. Contrary to the common polymer theory assumption that only their loop length matters, experiments show that their closing kinetics depend on the loop composition. We have modeled the closing kinetics and in so doing have obtained stacking enthalpies and entropies for single-stranded nucleic acids.