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The function of the immune system is to protect and keep us safe. The immune system surveillance will protect us from foreign antigens entering our body and rogue cells that are no longer under cell cycle control. Considering the most recent pandemic, our students must understand how our immune system works and the function of essential cells involved in this system. However, due to curriculum constraints, particularly at the community college, it may not be feasible for non-biology majors or biology majors to experience the fascinating inner workings of the immune system. Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory biology, immunology, or microbiology course may not fully grasp the magnitude of receptor diversity embedded in our T cells. The creation of an in-class activity highlights the T cell receptor and provides a deeper understanding of T cell receptor (TCR) diversity. Instructors can use the activity in a lecture or laboratory setting where students work in small groups and use clay to construct different TCRs. Students explore TCR diversity using an interactive V(D)J table of antigen codes. The activity sought to engage students in the classroom to reinforce how T cell diversity contributes to the receptor recognizing the many antigens our bodies encounter daily. The ASPECT (Assessing Student Perspective of Engagement in Class Tool) survey was used to determine students' level of collaboration within their group and their experience with the activity. Results show that students welcomed the activity and felt their contributions and actions during the activity promoted learning. 

Abstract The Institutional Grammar (IG) is a rigorous tool for analyzing the laws and policies governing nonprofit organizations; however, its use was limited due to the time-consuming nature of hand-coding. We introduce an advance in Natural Language Processing using a semantic role labeling (SRL) classifier that reliably codes rules governing and guiding nonprofit organizations. This paper provides guidance for how to hand-code using the IG, preprocess text for machine learning, and demonstrates the SRL classifier for automated IG coding. We then compare the hand-coding to the SRL coding to demonstrate its accuracy. The advances in machine learning now make it feasible to utilize the IG for nonprofit research questions focused on inter-organizational collaborations, government contracts, federated nonprofit organizational compliance, and nonprofit governance, among others. An added benefit is that the IG is adaptable for different languages, thus enabling cross-national comparative research. By providing examples throughout the paper, we demonstrate how to use the IG and the SRL classifier to address research questions of interest to nonprofit scholars. 

Crop production is among the most extensive human activities on the planet – with critical importance for global food security, land use, environmental burden, and climate. Yet despite the key role that croplands play in global land use and Earth systems, there remains little understanding of how spatial patterns of global crop cultivation have recently evolved and which crops have contributed most to these changes. Here we construct a new data library of subnational crop-specific irrigated and rainfed harvested area statistics and combine it with global gridded land cover products to develop a global gridded (5-arcminute) irrigated and rainfed cropped area (MIRCA-OS) dataset for the years 2000 to 2015 for 23 crop classes. These global data products support critical insights into the spatially detailed patterns of irrigated and rainfed cropland change since the start of the century and provide an improved foundation for a wide array of global assessments spanning agriculture, water resource management, land use change, climate impact, and sustainable development. 

The emerging optoelectronic material family of transition metal dichalcogenides may be useful in flexible electronics. However, only MoS₂ has been grown directly as thin films on polymer substrates, owing in part to the high deposition temperatures typically required to prepare these materials. Changing vapor deposition chemistry can allow much lower film growth temperatures. We show that when using tetrakis(dimethylamido)zirconium(IV), Zr(NMe₂)₄, and H₂S as precursors, low-temperature chemical vapor deposition affords films of zirconium(IV) sulfide (ZrS₂) directly on polymer substrates. Stoichiometric and crystalline ZrS₂ films can be deposited with good adhesion on polyimide (Kapton) and polyether ether ketone (PEEK) substrates at 150–200 °C. The films deposited on polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates were stoichiometric and crystalline, but not well adhered. Films on all substrates were polycrystalline with small (20–30 nm) grains, highly oriented in the [001] direction of the 1T ZrS₂ phase. The films grown on PEEK have resistivities ca. 625 Ω cm, two orders of magnitude higher than ZrS₂ films deposited at 800–1000 °C from ZrCl₄ and sulfur. The films grown on Kapton are similarly conductive, whereas films on PDMS are not conductive. 

While both daytime and nighttime temperatures are increasing with climate change, few studies have experimentally investigated their differential effects under field conditions. We conducted a factorial field experiment examining how day‐ and night‐warming impact the growth, survivorship, and behavior of cabbage white caterpillars (Pieris rapae). In this experiment, the night‐warming only treatment showed the highest rates of caterpillar growth, but also showed the highest mortality, the shortest maximum caterpillar lengths, the least accumulated herbivory, and reduced pupation. Caterpillars in the treatments that were not warmed during the day showed daytime‐shifted growth, and caterpillars in the combined day‐ and night‐warming treatment showed strongly night‐shifted herbivory. Both biotic (e.g., predation risk) and abiotic (e.g., thermal) factors could have contributed to these results. Broadly, these results show the importance of temperature‐mediated behavioral changes in diel activity for caterpillar development and survival. These results also support the emerging hypotheses that periods of reduced activity may be important for successful development, that warmer nighttime conditions could limit a temporal thermal refuge for caterpillars, and that increasing temperatures could increase the likelihood of metabolic meltdown. This experiment also illustrates the value of field studies to provide insights into how ectotherms might respond to ongoing climate change. 

SUMMARY Daily rhythms in physiology are obvious and widespread. While for millennia it was thought that these cycles represent passive responses to environmental cycles, we now recognize that many of them are governed by circadian oscillators. In plants, these cell‐autonomous oscillators regulate daily processes such as photosynthesis, organ growth, and hormone production, as well as seasonal transitions like flowering. Furthermore, the circadian system gates plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses, modulating susceptibility to pathogens and environmental extremes in a time‐of‐day‐dependent manner. Variants of circadian clock genes have been repeatedly selected during crop domestication and improvement, highlighting the importance of the circadian system to plants and its relevance for agriculture. Here, I review the history of circadian studies in plants and summarize our current understanding of the molecular nature of the circadian oscillator. I also discuss how this complex network both responds to and is buffered against changes in the environment. Next, I examine how circadian oscillators differ between various tissues and how their activities are coordinated throughout the plant body. Finally, I discuss emerging directions, such as ways in which this understanding can be applied to crop improvement in the face of climate change.