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Abstract Following disturbances such as wildfires, oak seedlings must form a symbiotic association with mycorrhizal fungi to survive. Wildfires, however, reduce available mycorrhizal fungal propagules in the soil. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi on oak seedlings sampled in severely burned (7 sites), moderately burned (7 sites), and unburned areas (8 sites) in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park were evaluated 21 months after the 2016 Chimney Tops 2 Wildfire by Sanger sequencing of the nuclear ribosomal DNA internal transcribed spacer region (nrITS; fungal barcode). Sequences were aligned and grouped into Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) based on well-supported phylogenetic clades and 98–100% nrITS sequence homology with sequences in GenBank. One hundred seventy-nine root-associated fungi comprising 124 OTUs were recovered after removing duplicates (the same fungus on two or more roots of the same plant). The ECM genusRussulawas the most diverse genus (25 OTUs), followed by theThelephora/Tomentellaclade (18 OTUs),Lactifluus(8 OTUs),Lactarius(4 OTUs), and Laccariaaff.laccata(2 OTUs).RussulaOTUs were identified more frequently on oak roots from burned areas and in burned soils, suggesting that someRussulataxa may have a selective advantage in burned areas. High alpha diversity occurred within each of the burn categories, but little overlap of taxa occurred between burn categories (high beta diversity). Approximately half of the recovered OTUs (100/179 total root-associated fungi = 55.9%) were found on a single plant. Oak seedlings growing in moderately and severely burned areas 21 months after a fire were capable of forming root associations with available fungi. In contrast to the expectation that root-associated fungal diversity would be reduced after a wildfire, diversity 1 year after the Chimney Tops 2 Fire was high with ectomycorrhizalLaccaria,Russulaceae, andThelephoraceaedominating. This study suggests that the availability of ECM fungi post-fire is not a barrier to oak re-establishment. 

Caring for a child with cancer involves navigating through complex medical information, often delivered through lengthy handbooks and consultations with healthcare providers. Overnight, parents are expected to become an expert on a domain which they knew noth- ing about. Conversational UIs, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and validated information sources, could play a key role in supporting caregivers. In this paper, we investigate the usability, acceptance, and perceived utility of an LLM-based conversational AI tool for pediatric cancer caregiving, grounded in the Children’s Oncology Group Family Handbook–the leading resource in pe- diatric oncology care. We employed a mixed-methods approach, interviewing and surveying 12 caregivers as they engaged with a functional prototype. We offer insights into caregiver’s needs and expectations from AI-driven tools, and design guidelines for devel- oping safer, more personalized, and supportive AI interventions for pediatric cancer care. 

Meals are a central (and messy) part of family life. Previous design framings for mealtime technologies have focused on supporting dietary needs or social and celebratory interactions at the dinner table; however, family meals involve the coordination of many activities and complicated family dynamics. In this paper, we report on findings from interviews and design sessions with 18 families from the Midwestern United States (including both partners/parents and children) to uncover important family differences and tensions that arise around domestic meal experiences. Drawing on feminist theory, we unpack the work of feeding a family as a form of care, drawing attention to the social and emotional complexity of family meals. Critically situating our data within current design narratives, we propose the sensitizing concepts of generative and systemic discontents as a productive way towards troubling the design space of family-food interaction to contend with the struggles that are a part of everyday family meal experiences. 

Hydrologic alterations associated with urbanization can weaken connections between riparian zones, streams, and uplands, leading to negative effects on the ability of riparian zones to intercept pollutants carried by surface water runoff and groundwater flow such as nitrate and phosphate. We analyzed the monthly water table as an indicator of riparian connectivity, along with groundwater NO3 and PO4concentrations, at four riparian sites within and near the Gwynns Falls Watershed in Baltimore, MD, from 1998 to 2018. The sites included one forested reference site (Oregon Ridge), two suburban riparian sites (Glyndon and Gwynnbrook), and one urban riparian site (Cahill) with at least two locations and four monitoring wells, located 5 m from the center of the stream, at each site. Results show an increase in connectivity as indicated by shallower water tables at two of the four sites studied: Glyndon and Cahill. This change in connectivity was associated with decreases in NO3 at Glyndon and increases in PO4 at Glyndon, Gwynnbrook, and Cahill. These changes are consistent with previous studies showing that shallower water table depths increase anaerobic conditions, which increase NO3 consumption by denitrification and decrease PO4 retention. The absence of change in the forested reference site, where climate would be expected to be the key driver, suggests that other drivers, including best management practices and stream restoration projects, could be affecting riparian water tables at the two suburban sites and the one urban site. Further research into the mechanisms behind these changes and site‐specific dynamics is needed. 

Sunlike stars can transmute into comparable mass black holes by steadily accumulating heavy nonannihilating dark matter particles over the course of their lives. If such stars form in binary systems, they could give rise to quasi-monochromatic, persistent gravitational waves, commonly known as continuous gravitational waves, as they inspiral toward one another. We demonstrate that next-generation space-based detectors, e.g., Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and Big Bang Observer (BBO), can provide novel constraints on dark matter parameters (dark matter mass and its interaction cross-section with the nucleons) by probing gravitational waves from transmuted sunlike stars that are in close binaries. Our projected constraints depend on several astrophysical uncertainties and nevertheless are competitive with the existing constraints obtained from cosmological measurements as well as terrestrial direct searches, demonstrating a notable science case for these space-based gravitational wave detectors as probes of particle dark matter. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

When a child is admitted to the hospital with a critical illness, their family must adapt and manage care and stress. CSCW researchers have shown the potential for collaborative technologies to support and augment care collaboration between patients and caregivers. However, as a field CSCW lacks a holistic, theory-driven understanding of how collaborative technologies might best augment and support the family caregiving circle as a socio-technical system. In this paper, we report findings from interviews with 14 parents of children with cancer admitted for extended hospitalizations. We use the resilience-based Family Adaptive Systems framework from family therapy as a lens to characterize their challenges and practices across four key subsystems: Emotion, Control, Meaning, and Maintenance. Then, we introduce a fifth system-the Information system-and draw on our empirical findings to suggest theory-driven opportunities for designing future collaborative technology to augment collaborative caregiving and enhance family resilience. 

When a child is hospitalized with a serious illness such as cancer, parents and other close family often take on new roles as caregivers. Previous qualitative studies indicate that caregiving coordination work changes systematically across illness and treatment phases, but less is known about individuals’ technology preferences and how technology needs might change over time. In this study, we employed Q-methodology, a sorting technique for quantitatively analyzing subjective opinion. We interviewed 20 caregivers of children with cancer, who sorted 25 statements about potential design solutions. We describe four distinct caregiving coordination technology archetypes at diagnosis, and show how caregivers’ preferences change over time, eventually converging on one set of priorities during extended hospitalization. 

ABSTRACT Animations permit visualisation of spatiotemporal data for a range of purposes. The example application documented here uses a Geographic Information System workflow to automate map creation of changing water temperatures along the length of a 16‐km stream network, using data collected by 204 temperature sensors installed at 50–100 m intervals with 5‐min time steps. Transforming static data sets into dynamic visual representations enhances the ability to detect patterns, trends, and anomalies that might be overlooked in traditional charts or graphs. This is demonstrated by the video we produced, which shows rapid downstream propagation of a series of temperature pulses in response to a short‐duration summer storm. Integration of these elements into data analysis provides a compelling way to communicate findings to a broader audience, enriching the interpretive power and communicative effectiveness of spatiotemporal data. 

TEE-based smart contracts are an emerging blockchain architecture, offering fully programmable privacy with better performance than alternatives like secure multiparty computation. They can also support compatibility with existing smart contract languages, such that existing (plaintext) applications can be readily ported, picking up privacy enhancements automatically. While previous analysis of TEE-based smart contracts have focused on failures of TEE itself, we asked whether other aspects might be understudied. We focused on state consistency, a concern area highlighted by Li et al., as well as new concerns including access pattern leakage and software upgrade mechanisms. We carried out a code review of a cohort of four TEE-based smart contract platforms. These include Secret Network, the first to market with in-use applications, as well as Oasis, Phala, and Obscuro, which have at least released public test networks.The first and most broadly applicable result is that access pattern leakage occurs when handling persistent contract storage. On Secret Network, its fine-grained access pattern is catastrophic for the transaction privacy of SNIP-20 tokens. If ERC-20 tokens were naively ported to Oasis they would be similarly vulnerable; the others in the cohort leak coarse-grained information at approximately the page level (4 kilobytes). Improving and characterizing this will require adopting techniques from ORAMs or encrypted databases.Second, the importance of state consistency has been underappreciated, in part because exploiting such vulnerabilities is thought to be impractical. We show they are fully practical by building a proof-of-concept tool that breaks all advertised privacy properties of SNIP-20 tokens, able to query the balance of individual accounts and the token amount of each transfer. We additionally demonstrate MEV attacks against the Sienna Swap application. As a final consequence of lacking state consistency, the developers have inadvertently introduced a decryption backdoor through their software upgrade process. We have helped the Secret developers mitigate this through a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, after which their state consistency should be roughly on par with the rest.