84 results match your criteria: "University of Maine-Orono[Affiliation]"

Fish stocking has been utilized for over a century to offset extirpations or declines in abundance of many native species. These historical declines and hatchery contributions have led to uncertainty surrounding whether many contemporary populations are native, introgressed with hatchery sources, or entirely of hatchery origin. Such uncertainty is problematic for the conservation of native biodiversity as it hampers management agencies' ability to prioritize the conservation of indigenous locally adapted populations.

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Pro-angiogenic paracrine/autocrine signaling impacts myocardial repair in cell-based therapies. Activin A receptor-like type 1 (, ALK1) signaling plays a pivotal role in cardiovascular development and maintenance, but its importance in human-derived therapeutic cardiac cells is not well understood. Here, we isolated a subpopulation of human highly proliferative cells (hHiPCs) from adult epicardial tissue and found that they express ALK1, a high affinity receptor for bone morphogenetic protein-9 (BMP9), which signals via SMAD1/5 to regulate paracrine/autocrine signaling and angiogenesis.

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Understanding the relationship between intraspecific trait variability (ITV) and its biotic and abiotic drivers is crucial for advancing population and community ecology. Despite its importance, there is a lack of guidance on how to effectively sample ITV and reduce bias in the resulting inferences. In this study, we explored how sample size affects the estimation of population-level ITV, and how the distribution of sample sizes along an environmental gradient (i.

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Editorial: unravelling the trifecta: obesity, cancer, and DNA damage.

Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care

July 2024

School of Food and Agriculture & Graduate School of Biomedical Science and Engineering, University of Maine Orono, Maine, USA.

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Selective breeding for production traits has yielded relatively rapid successes with high-fecundity aquaculture species. Discovering the genetic changes associated with selection is an important goal for understanding adaptation and can also facilitate better predictions about the likely fitness of selected strains if they escape aquaculture farms. Here, we hypothesize domestication as a genetic change induced by inadvertent selection in culture.

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Trees growing outside their native geographic ranges often exhibit exceptional growth and survival due in part to the lack of co-evolved natural enemies that may limit their spread and suppress population growth. While most non-native trees tend to accumulate natural enemies over time, it remains uncertain which host and insect characteristics affect these novel associations and whether novel associations follow patterns of assembly similar to those of native hosts. Here, we used a dataset of insect-host tree associations in Europe to model which native insect species are paired with which native tree species, and then tested the model on its ability to predict which native insects are paired with which non-native trees.

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The role of mindfulness and resilience in Navy SEAL training.

Mil Psychol

May 2024

Department of Sociology and Center for Population Health and Aging, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA.

Mindfulness and resilience are thought to be essential qualities of the military's special operations community. Both are tested daily in Special Operations Forces (SOF) assessment and selection efforts to prepare candidates to persist through grueling training and complex combat situations; but these qualities are rarely measured. While military leadership places value on the concepts of mindfulness and resilience, there is minimal empirical research examining the role that they play in the completion of training.

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Let be a point set with cardinality . We give an improved bound for the number of dot products determined by , proving that A crucial ingredient in the proof of this bound is a new superquadratic expander involving products and shifts. We prove that, for any finite set , there exist such that This is derived from a more general result concerning growth of sets defined via convexity and sum sets, and which can be used to prove several other expanders with better than quadratic growth.

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Introduction: In September 2022, The Jackson Laboratory Center for Alzheimer's and Dementia Research (JAX CADR) hosted a workshop with leading researchers in the Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) field.

Methods: During the workshop, the participants brainstormed new directions to overcome current barriers to providing patients with effective ADRD therapeutics. The participants outlined specific areas of focus.

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Catalytic fabrication of graphene, carbon spheres, and carbon nanotubes from plastic waste.

RSC Adv

January 2024

Electronic Materials Research Department, Advanced Technology and New Materials Research Institute (ATNMRI), City of Scientific Research and Technological Applications (SRTA-City) New Borg El-Arab City Alexandria 21934 Egypt.

In this study, we reported sustainable and economical upcycling methods for utilizing plastics such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polypropylene (PP) compiled from the garbage of a residential area as cheap precursors for the production of high-value carbon materials such as graphene (G), carbon spheres (CS), and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) using different thermal treatment techniques. Graphene, carbon spheres, and carbon nanotubes were successfully synthesized from PET, PP, and PET, respectively catalytic pyrolysis. XRD and FTIR analyses were conducted on the three materials, confirming the formation of carbon and their graphitic structure.

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Diffusion of atoms or ions in solid crystalline lattice is crucial in many areas of solid-state technology. However, controlling ion diffusion and migration is challenging in nanoscale lattices. In this work, we intentionally insert a CdZnS alloyed interface layer, with small cationic size mismatch with Mn(ii) dopant ions, as an "atomic trap" to facilitate directional (outward and inward) dopant migration inside core/multi-shell quantum dots (QDs) to reduce the strain from the larger cationic mismatch between dopants and host sites.

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Understanding animal movement across the annual cycle is critical for developing appropriate conservation plans, but the large size and high cost of tracking devices can limit the spatial and temporal resolution at which movement data can be collected, especially for small avian species. Furthermore, for species with low breeding site fidelity, the ability to obtain tracking data from small, archival tags is hindered by low recapture rates. We deployed satellite tracking devices on four adult Black Terns (), a declining waterbird with low site fidelity, to examine space use and selection of resources within individual breeding home ranges.

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Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

January 2024

Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, University of Maine Orono, ME 04473, USA.

How did human societies evolve to become a major force of global change? What dynamics can lead societies on a trajectory of global sustainability? The astonishing growth in human population, economic activity and environmental impact has brought these questions to the fore. This theme issue pulls together a variety of traditions that seek to address these questions using different theories and methods. In this Introduction, we review and organize the major strands of work on how the Anthropocene evolved, how evolutionary dynamics are influencing sustainability efforts today, and what principles, strategies and capacities will be important to guide us towards global sustainability in the future.

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Premise: Many plant communities across the world are undergoing changes due to climate change, human disturbance, and other threats. These community-level changes are often tracked with the use of permanent vegetative plots, but this approach is not always feasible. As an alternative, we propose using photogrammetry, specifically photograph-based digital surface models (DSMs) developed using structure-from-motion, to establish virtual permanent plots in plant communities where the use of permanent structures may not be possible.

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Saltmarsh () and Nelson's () sparrows are sister taxa that breed in tidal marshes along the coast of the Northeastern United States and Canada. The Saltmarsh Sparrow breeds from mid-coast Maine south to Virginia, while the Acadian Nelson's Sparrow breeds from the Canadian maritime provinces south to northern Massachusetts. Here, we present three extralimital observations of breeding Saltmarsh ( = 2) and Nelson's ( = 1) sparrows.

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Article Synopsis
  • Salp blooms significantly enhance the ocean's biological carbon pump (BCP) by facilitating the export of organic matter, even though their sporadic nature often leads to underrepresentation in models.
  • During a 2018 study in the northeast subarctic Pacific, it was found that salps produced fecal pellets that accounted for up to 82% of the particulate organic carbon (POC) from the entire epipelagic zooplankton community.
  • The rapid sinking and low degradation rates of salp fecal pellets contribute to a substantial increase in carbon export efficiency, elevating the BCP's functionality and enhancing carbon sequestration, especially in low flux ocean environments.
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Co-evolved natural enemies provide sustainable and long-term control of numerous invasive insect pests, but the introduction of such enemies has declined sharply due to increasing regulations. In the absence of co-evolved natural enemies, native species may attack exotic invasive pests; however, they usually lack adaptations to control novel hosts effectively. We investigated the potential of two native pupal parasitoids, and , to increase their developmental success on the invasive .

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Abundance estimation is a critical component of conservation planning, particularly for exploited species where managers set regulations to restrict harvest based on current population size. An increasingly common approach for abundance estimation is through integrated population modeling (IPM), which uses multiple data sources in a joint likelihood to estimate abundance and additional demographic parameters. Lincoln estimators are one commonly used IPM component for harvested species, which combine information on the rate and total number of individuals harvested within an integrated band-recovery framework to estimate abundance at large scales.

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Estimating the biomass of phytoplankton communities via remote sensing is a key requirement for understanding global ocean ecosystems. Of particular interest is the carbon associated with diatoms given their unequivocal ecological and biogeochemical roles. Satellite-based algorithms often rely on accessory pigment proxies to define diatom biomass, despite a lack of validation against independent diatom biomass measurements.

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Patterns of biodiversity provide insights into the processes that shape biological communities around the world. Variation in species diversity along biogeographical or ecological gradients, such as latitude or precipitation, can be attributed to variation in different components of biodiversity: changes in the total abundance (i.e.

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Introduction: Apolipoprotein E () ε4 is the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRDs), affecting many different pathways that lead to cognitive decline. Exercise is one of the most widely proposed prevention and intervention strategies to mitigate risk and symptomology of ADRDs. Importantly, exercise and ε4 affect similar processes in the body and brain.

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Rheological Analysis of Bio-ink for 3D Bio-printing Processes.

J Manuf Process

April 2022

Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Maine Orono, ME, United States.

3D bio-printing is an emerging technology to fabricate tissue scaffold in-vitro through the controlled allocation of biomaterial and cells, which can mimic the in-vivo counterpart of living tissue. Live cells are often encapsulated into the biomaterials (i.e.

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Cellulose nanofibril (CNF) is a natural biodegradable biopolymer with excellent mechanical and barrier properties. However, it is susceptible to moisture-induced deterioration of its properties. Attachment of phenolic acids can improve its hydrophobicity and provide additional active functionalities such as antioxidant properties.

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Addition of [UI(THF)(μ-OMe)]·THF (·THF) to THF solutions containing 6 equiv. of K[CH] generates the heteroleptic dimeric complexes [K(18-crown-6)(THF)][U(η-CH)(η-CH)(μ-OMe)]·4THF (·4THF) and {[K(THF)][U(η-CH)(η-CH)(μ-OMe)]} () upon crystallization of the products in THF in the presence or absence of 18-crown-6, respectively. Both ·4THF and are thermally stable in the solid-state at room temperature; however, after crystallization, they become insoluble in THF or DME solutions and instead gradually decompose upon standing.

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Atypical antipsychotic (AA) drugs, such as risperidone, are associated with endocrine and metabolic side effects, including impaired bone mineral density (BMD) acquisition and increased fracture risk. We have previously shown that risperidone causes bone loss through the sympathetic nervous system and that bone loss is associated with elevated markers of thermogenesis in brown and white adipose tissue. Because rodents are normally housed in sub-thermoneutral conditions, we wanted to test whether increasing housing temperature would protect against bone loss from risperidone.

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