Walnut consumption mostly has a positive implication for cardiovascular health. Walnut diet effects on the cardiac fatty acid (FA) metabolism of healthy rats and those with fructose diet-induced metabolic burden were analysed. Both walnuts and fructose increased CD36 transporter level and the nuclear content of some/all of Lipin 1/PPARα/PGC-1 complex partners, as well as cytosolic and nuclear FOXO1. However, fructose, independently of walnuts, increased the content of palmitic (PA), oleic, and vaccenic acid (VA), while in walnut-fed rats failed to increase palmitoleic acid (POA) level and the POA/PA ratio, as well as total MUFA content. In opposite, walnuts reduced the level of PA and VA and increased alpha-linolenic, eicosapentaenoic and docosapentaenoic acid level, regardless of fructose. In conclusion, both fructose and walnuts stimulated the uptake and oxidation of FA in the heart, but the walnuts, opposite to fructose, favourably altered cardiac FA profile in healthy and metabolically compromised rats.

Hepatopancreatic microsporidiosis (HPM) disease leads to retarded growth in shrimp resulting in a major loss for the shrimp industry worldwide. The causative agent of HPM is a microsporidian known as Enterocytozoon hepatopenaei (EHP). It is little understood how EHP infects its host and hijacks its cellular machinery to replicate more organisms. Lack of an immortal cell line is a bottleneck in studying the cellular and molecular basis of EHP infection in shrimp. For this reason, EHP cannot be propagated in in vitro culture and must be propagated in live shrimp. The use of live EHP-infected shrimp remains the only way to study EHP infectivity. It was hypothesized that supplementing EHP with fresh host cells will aid the propagation of EHP in vitro. Further research must be done but with the data collected at this point, this hypothesis is rejected. In addition to the challenges in amplifying EHP in in vitro culture, there is no antibody-based detection method for EHP. EHP infection in a shrimp is examined by Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) histology and real-time polymerase chain reaction based detection methods. Monoclonal antibodies that were previously characterized by Riggs and colleagues to detect Cryptosporidium parvum (C. parvum), successfully detected other parasites. Based on this, it was hypothesized that monoclonal antibodies against C. parvum may also detect EHP.

Twelve accessions of Bouteloua curtipendula were tested in a laboratory growth chamber to examine the effect of simulated winter temperature on the germination response of the selected accessions of B. curtipendula var. curtipendula (Michx.) Torr. and B. curtipendula var. caespitosa Gould & Kapadia, two botanical varieties of disparate origin. Accessions of the variety curtipendula had significantly higher total germination percentages compared to accessions whose variety was var. caespitosa under the winter treatment. Latitude was also significant with accessions whose origin was farther north exhibiting higher relative germination percentages under the winter treatment. Mean total germination percentage was significantly higher for accessions whose grains were from NPGS seed production facilities under the winter treatment compared to the mean of accessions from wild-collected populations. Mean seed (grain) mass was highly correlated (rs = 0.774) with relative germination percentages, suggesting seed vigor may be an important explanatory factor in germination under stressful conditions.

This thesis project encompasses a comprehensive overview of visual, literary, and archaeological evidence concerning wound care in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Analysis of this evidence will explore medical themes such as the different types of medical responses to wounds available in antiquity, preparation of treatments, and the importance of instructionally minded prose in medical writing. I have approached wound care from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of treatment types associated with injury during these periods. The scope of this project is diachronic and considers the development of wound care (specifically the use of bandages and plasters) from the 5th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Wound care can involve a range of treatments, but for this project I focus on bandages and plasters as the essential core of material technology which was used by Greco-Roman physicians to encourage wound healing. Currently, there are zero comprehensive studies of plaster as a unique classification of medical treatment. So, this thesis aims to begin approaching the topic in a comprehensive manner, placing it in association with wound care generally, and in contrast with the more well-known linen bandage. The second chapter begins this exploration by discussing visual evidence of bandages and injury as found in Greek and Roman art, to understand non-medical perspectives of wound care. Here, I argue that bandages can be used as a visual attribute for survival when representing important figures such as Patroclus, and, conversely, the lack of visable treatment represents a figure who will likely perish soon, or has already passed away. In the third chapter, I turn to the medical texts and explore how wound care treatments and recipes exist as instructional materials within the literature. Overall, this chapter further contributes to scholarly understanding of the instructional values, as described through the carefully crafted prose which encourages the dissemination of treatment methods and recipes to the reader. These chapters also explore how the Greco-Roman tradition of wound care expands from a much longer and generally Mediterranean medical tradition, derived in part from early Egyptian practices which directly inform the use of medical technology in the Greco-Roman world. This in turn has fundamentally structured our own modern approaches to injury and still informs the basic tenets of the wound care treatments we use every day. The remaining chapters are dedicated to exploring the logistics of ancient wound care using experimental archaeology techniques. Experimental analysis from these chapters explore how various versions of plaster treatments as described within the Hippocratic corpus, Celsus’ De Medicina, and other sources were created. This approach also shows how treatments written as recipes could be effectively recreated by the reader alone in most cases, and what types of common-sense knowledge might be required of the reader to do so successfully. I describe the sources and methodology used to re-create a few chosen plaster recipes known from antiquity, and present the results of each experiment in detail. These experiments were also undertaken in order to fully clarify what the ancient physician considered a plaster to be as a material product, and through this process I have developed a working definition for plaster treatments specifically. By forming these plaster type treatments in the modern day, it is possible to learn more about the limitations of their use, as well as how the treatments were categorized within medical thought. Discussion studies the variety of these treatments, as well as the common qualities and ingredients. Altogether, this approach confirms without a doubt that the medical treatises of Greco-Roman antiquity do have direct instructional value. The dissemination of knowledge through both medical and non-medical literature, as well as through art thus reflects the strength of these sources, and the relative importance they held in antiquity.

We describe numerical simulations to demonstrate the use of curvature polynomials introduced by Mahajan and Acosta in their paper “Zernike coefficients from wavefront curvature data” for determining the Zernike coefficients from wavefront curvature data. The wavefront curvature data was determined by evaluating the irradiance distributions in two planes that were symmetric about the focal plane. The irradiance distributions were calculated using the Zemax OpticStudio software program.For the aberration function, the wavefront curvature data was generated from the irradiance distributions. This data consists of the Laplacian of the wavefront across the pupil and its outward normal slope at its circular boundary. The inner products of the curvature polynomials and Laplacian of the wavefront are used to calculate the m ≠ n (i.e., non-harmonic) Zernike aberration coefficients, and the inner product of the boundary slope and curvature polynomials are required to calculate the m = n (i.e., harmonic) Zernike aberration coefficients. We explain the process of obtaining the Laplacian and slope of the wavefront from the two irradiance distributions. Independent case studies of different simulations are performed and explained in detail. The results obtained and limitations of the software are also presented.

Mining poses ecological and human health risks. The state of Arizona has naturally occurring metal(loid)s that can be concentrated and transported during mining activities. These activities can increase human exposure to the mined and processed metal(loid)s. Exposure to metal(loid)s such as arsenic (As), lead (Pb), manganese (Mn), and copper (Cu) are associated with cancer and noncancer outcomes. This work outlines a co-created community science process with the rural town of Superior, AZ, where the community is subject to potential environmental hazards from legacy, active, and proposed extraction activities. Gardenroots, a co-created community science environmental health project started in Superior, AZ in 2018. Community scientists and university researchers determined metal(loid) concentrations in drinking water, soil, and dust. After extensive data sharing efforts, participants began to question past remediation efforts and pose new research questions, e.g.: (1) What sites were remediated?; (2) What determined a site’s eligibility for remediation?; and (3) How can we protect families that are unknowingly moving into homes that may have contaminated soil?. Thus, to answer the community questions, Gardenroots efforts evolved and responded by: (a) maintaining community engagement, (b) identifying and consolidating past monitoring and remediation efforts in the area, (c) creating an interactive soil map that visualized As, Pb, Mn, and Cu concentrations in soil; and (c) determining site-specific Pb and As gastric bioavailability. The soil visualizations include soil data from pre- (126 property values) and post-smelter (17 property values) demolition. To determine the bioaccessible fraction (BAF) of Pb and As, In-Vitro Bioaccessibility Assays EPA Method 1340 was conducted using the Gardenroots residential soils. Our assay calculations indicate bioaccessible fraction for As (12%-53%) and Pb (3%-79%). To provide additional soil sampling and prompt further soil remediation efforts, we worked with local, state, and federal agencies to organize and hosted a Center for Disease Control – Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry soilSHOP on June 4, 2022. At this soilSHOP, we provided soil screening and health education to the Superior, AZ region. Based on community reporting and media tracking, Gardenroots and the soilSHOP prompted further action by Broken Hill Proprietary (BHP) Copper, to continue with their Voluntary Remediation Program (VRP) being overseen by the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. The VRP is designed to provide environmental monitoring and remediation in town. It is anticipated that the recent actions taken by BHP Copper and Resolution Copper are a result of the co-created community science and soilSHOP, both of which are designed to reduce information disparities and increase environmental health literacy.

Supergiant Games’ video game Hades (2020) tells the story of Zagreus, son of Hades and Persephone, as he repeatedly struggles to escape his father’s Underworld and, for the first time in his life, meet his mother upon the surface of Greece. While brief, this synopsis immediately speaks to some of the many ways in which Hades is a particularly fascinating work of classical reception. In this thesis, I will conduct case studies of certain “micro-receptions,” so to speak, within the game. I will begin with consideration of Zagreus, exploring what little is known about this mythological figure, and how Supergiant Games at once rejects and embraces contradictions in his extant myths. I will then devote a significant portion of time to considering the Infernal Arms, the weapons which Zagreus uses during his attempts to escape the Underworld. First, I will consider what the Arms tell us about the history of Hades’ storyworld. Second, I will elucidate how the Arms provide crucial context for the relationship between the Hades’ Greece and the rest of its storyworld. Third, examinations of each Arm individually will reveal yet more about Hades’ storyworld, while also speaking to the characters of some of the Arms’ wielders. Finally, I will show how the Infernal Arms are a gateway to understanding how Supergiant Games situated Hades within our world, focusing on its status as a product of gaming history, of the year 2020, and of the United States of America. Indeed, Supergiant Games navigates these contexts with thought and grace, producing an accessible, fun work of classical reception which, as a result, has effectively immersed its players in the classics, introducing newcomers to ancient Greece while setting the stage for countless classical receptions yet to come.

Anaerobic digestion or biodigestion shows potential to become a cost-effective waste management strategy whereby industrial solid or semi-solid waste is upcycled into an alternative source of energy in the form of biogas. Biogas is a mixture of organic and inorganic gases composed primarily of methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and trace gases. The general aim of this study was to test organic substrates with differing nitrogen contents for biogas production through biodigestion, which initially included the use of spent-mushroom-substrate (SMS), that is, the leftover straw/cotton seed substrate (70%/30%, respectively) following specialty mushroom production at the University of Arizona. The specific aim of this study was to investigate how three ratios of the substrate combination of oak wood pellets and soybean hull pellets, namely 1:3, 1:1, and 3:1 (oak:soy), using a 1000-L batch and stand-alone biodigester with horse manure providing the needed bacterial inocula, impacted biogas production and biogas composition. The results showed that the 1:3 treatment’s mean biogas yield of 2,854 L significantly exceeded that of the 1:1 treatment of 2,003 L (P<0.05), which in turn significantly exceeded that of the 3:1 treatment of 393 L (P<0.05). The biogas methane contents of the three treatments were statistically indistinguishable from one another (P<0.05); namely, 51% for the 1:3 treatment, 44% for the 1:1 ratio, and 48% for the 3:1 treatment. Similarly, the biogas CO2 contents of the three treatments were statistically indistinguishable (P<0.05); namely, 39% for the 1:3 treatment, 33% for the 1:1 ratio, and 36% for the 3:1 treatment. Thus, the 1:3 oak:soy treatment constituted the optimal treatment among the three treatments tested. This study is arguably the first or one of the first to investigate the use of oak wood and soybean hull as organic substrates for biogas production using biodigesters in the scale of 1000 L.

The North American Monsoon is a crucial component of the ecology and hydrology of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. Sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of California (GoC) are linked to the strength of the monsoon and therefore understanding their variability in this region is essential. However, there are limited instrumental observations and a persistent lack of high resolution paleoclimate records from the core monsoon region. This prevents a better understanding of the behaviors and drivers of this system on time scales from decades to millennia and limits the accuracy of local paleo-temperature estimates. Here we generate a new record of warm season SST using the alkenone-based, UK′37 paleotemperature proxy from sediments cores spanning 695 to 1980 CE. Spectral analyses of our reconstruction show a prominent bicentennial oscillation and multidecadal variability throughout the record. There is a slight cooling trend over the entire reconstruction, but the record lacks a clearly delineated Medieval Climate Anomaly or Little Ice Age. Colder periods in our record appear to be associated with reduced solar forcing and periods of increased volcanism, similar to Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions. Multidecadal SST variability in the GoC is likely linked to broader patterns of unforced variability in the Pacific. Our SST record provides novel temperature information that can be used to investigate the link between marine conditions and regional terrestrial precipitation during the Common Era.

We present experiments on the Richtmyer-Meshkov Instability (RMI) in reshock, conducted in a Dual-Driver Vertical Shock Tube (DDVST). The DDVST is a new shock tube that was designed, optimized, constructed, and utilized as part of this work. The DDVST, in effect, consists of two traditional single driver shock tubes, each consisting of a single driver and driven section, oriented vertically opposed on opposite sides of a test section. This new configuration permits a controllable time between the arrival of the first shock that initiates the RMI and the second shock that initiates the reshock regime. Additionally, the dual driver configuration also permits the strength of the first and second shocks to be individually controlled so as to allow for a prescribed post-reshock bulk interface velocity. This capability allows for the post-reshock bulk interface motion to be halted which in turn allows for the cameras used for imaging to be brought closer to the test section, increasing imaging resolution while maintaining a long temporal window in which the RMI may be observed. The DDVST was designed with the goal of achieving the longest post-reshock growth period possible within the physical and practical constraints of the laboratory setting in which the tube resides. The design process was assisted by coupling a numerical solver for 1D compressible flow within a shock tube to a genetic optimization routine with the aim of finding the combination of shock tube section lengths that produce the longest window in which the RMI in reshock may be observed. Different optimal designs corresponding to different light shock Mach numbers were calculated to examine whether a longer effective period of RMI evolution could be obtained for a given light shock Mach number. A single design was selected from these candidate designs based on its performance over a range of expected experimental parameters, which was then constructed and used for this work. The DDVST uses the method of Jones and Jacobs (Phys. Fluids \textbf{9} (10), October 1997) to generate the initial interface between the two test fluids without the use of a membrane which may influence the flow. This method forms the initial interface between two gases of differing density by flowing the more dense gas into to the tube from below a set of holes drilled at the desired interface location while simultaneously flowing a less dense gas from above the same holes. These two gas streams meet at the set of holes and flow out of the tube, forming a stable, stratified, and slightly diffuse interface. Multimode, three-dimensional, random initial perturbations are then imposed on the interface using a pair of voice coil actuators. The test gases for all experiments are Air and Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF$_6$) which yields an Atwood number of 0.67. The experiments presented as part of this work have a nominal light gas shock wave Mach number $M_L = 1.17~(\sigma = 0.007)$ and heavy gas shock wave Mach number $M_H = 1.18~(\sigma = 0.004)$ for all experiments, where $\sigma$ is the standard deviation. This results in the bulk interface motion being halted following the passage of the second shock. The experiments presented examine the influence of changing the length of time between shock and reshock on the behavior of the RMI in reshock for a range of shock to reshock times. Also examined is the influence on the order of arrival of the two shock waves, with both the traditional (light shock first) and reversed (Heavy shock first) configurations considered. The shock to reshock times examined are between -4.0 (Heavy shock first) and +3.8 (Light shock first) ms. The growth exponent, $\theta$, extracted from a fit of $h(t) = a t^\theta$ to the width of the mixing layer versus time for each experiment, appears to be insensitive to changes in the shock-to-reshock time or order of arrival of the two shocks, with an average value of $\theta_{H,W} = 0.365 \pm 0.018$ (95\%) and $\theta_{L,W} = 0.381 \pm 0.02$ (95\%) for heavy shock first and light shock first experiments, respectively, where (95\%) denotes the 95\% confidence interval of the result. The rate of decay of TKE appears to be affected by the order of arrival of the two shock waves, using a fit of $TKE(t) = a t^p$ to the total amount of TKE in the mixing layer for each experiment, yielding an average value of $p_H = -0.823 \pm 0.06$ (95\%) and $p_L = -1.061 \pm 0.032$ (95\%) for the heavy and light shock first experiments, respectively. The method of Thornber, Drikakis, Youngs, et al. (J. Fluid Mech. \textbf{654}, 2010) is used to extract a value of the growth exponent from these rate of decay of TKE measurements, yielding values of $\theta_{H,TKE} = 0.392 \pm 0.02$ (95\%) and $\theta_{L,TKE} = 0.312 \pm 0.011$ (95\%) for the heavy and light shock first experiments, respectively. Analysis of the anisotropy of the mixing layer over time is performed by examining the Reynolds anisotropy tensor in addition to the anisotropy ratio. An early time trend towards isotropy following reshock is found, with experiments with longer shock-to-reshock times demonstrating a more rapid trend towards isotropy than those with a shorter shock-to-reshock time. The anisotropy ratio of the mixing layer approaches an average minimum value of $A \approx 1.2$ for the longest shock-to-reshock times, and $A \approx 1.3$ for shorter shock to reshock times. The mixing layer becomes increasingly anisotropic over the remainder of the experiment, with no notable difference in the degree of anisotropy versus shock-to-reshock time or order of arrival of the two shock waves. The analysis of the spectrum of anisotropy shows that the largest scales of the flow have a trend towards anisotropy, but those at smaller scales tend to be isotropic. The Reynolds number, defined as $Re = h \dot{h} / \nu_{avg}$, is analyzed versus shock-to-reshock time. For shock-to-reshock times $\gtrapprox$ 1 ms, the Reynolds number is found to approach $Re \approx 1 \times 10^5$ for both heavy shock first and light shock first experiments. This is excess of the $Re > 1 \times 10^4$ proposed by Dimotakis (J. Fluid Mech. \textbf{409}, 2000) for a transition to turbulent mixing, though it does not meet the suggested critical value of $Re > 1.6 \times 10^5$ suggested by Zhou (Phys. Plasmas, \textbf{14} (8), 2007). Analysis of these experiments using the time-dependent turbulent length scales and associated turbulent transition criteria of Zhou, Robey, and Buckingham (Phys. Reveiw E, \textbf{67} (5), 2003) suggests that these experiments are beginning to transition to a fully turbulent state.