Impact of reproductive processes upon female health has yielded conflicting results; particularly in relation to the role of
reproduction-associated stress. We used the viviparous tsetse fly to determine if lactation, birth and involution lead to
damage from oxidative stress (OS) that impairs subsequent reproductive cycles. Tsetse females carry an intrauterine...
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Michalkova1,2., Joshua B. Benoit1*.
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, GeoffreyM. Attardo1, Jan Medlock3, Serap Aksoy1
1 Department of
Impact of reproductive processes upon female health has yielded conflicting results; particularly in relation to the role of
reproduction-associated stress. We used the viviparous tsetse fly to determine if lactation, birth and involution lead to
damage from oxidative stress (OS) that impairs subsequent reproductive cycles. Tsetse females carry an intrauterine...
Impact of reproductive processes upon female health has yielded conflicting results; particularly in relation to the role of
reproduction-associated stress. We used the viviparous tsetse fly to determine if lactation, birth and involution lead to
damage from oxidative stress (OS) that impairs subsequent reproductive cycles. Tsetse females carry an intrauterine...
In this thesis I explore the ways in which twenty-first century Americans have access
to Geoffrey Chaucer and his works. I look at issues surrounding Chaucer within the
canon debate, high school history and literature textbooks, and Chaucer in popular
culture, such as in movies like A Knight's Tale. I...
This thesis presents a decentralized communication planning algorithm for cooperative terrain-based navigation (dec-TBN) with autonomous underwater vehicles. The proposed algorithm uses forward simulation to approximate the value of communicating at each time step. The simulations are used to build a directed acyclic graph that can be searched to provide a...
Multi-robot systems are versatile and extremely capable of exploration tasks in complex environments. Increasingly sophisticated planners, which incorporate new features of a multi-robot system, are necessary for the operation of the systems. Marsupial robots are multi-robot systems consisting of a carrier robot (e.g., a ground vehicle), which is highly capable...
As robotic systems become increasingly prevalent in our lives (e.g., by harvesting food, assisting with disaster response and defense, and transporting persons and our goods around the world) there is a growing need to ensure that they can cooperate to achieve their intended goals. Robotic cooperation in the real-world is...
Emerging applications for robotic data collection include ocean monitoring, emergency response and urban search and rescue. At the core of these applications is a robot's ability to make informed decisions on incomplete data. This dissertation addresses this problem by developing novel techniques for modeling and estimating structured environments using deep...
The data presented in this report demonstrate significant improvements
in the ability to constrain trace element and Sr isotopic
concentrations in sediments overlying ridge-flank hydrothermal
systems. Improved sampling methods orchestrated by the Integrated
Ocean Drilling Program (i.e., advanced piston coring and
anoxic sample processing) enabled the collection of reactive pore...
My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
Human-robot teams are invaluable for mapping unknown environments, exploring difficult-to-reach areas, and manipulating inaccessible equipment. However, guiding autonomous robots requires dealing with these dynamic domains while synthesizing a significant amount of data and balancing competing objectives. Current mission planning methods often involve manually specifying low-level parameters of the mission, such...
In shared autonomy, a robot and human user both have some level of control in order to achieve a shared goal. Choosing the balance of control given to the user and the robot can be a challenging problem since different users have different preferences and vary in skill levels when...
While robotic systems may have once been relegated to structured environments and automation style tasks, in recent years these boundaries have begun to erode. As robots begin to operate in largely unstructured environments, it becomes more difficult for them to effectively interpret their surroundings. As sensor technology improves, the amount...
Underwater robots beneath ocean waves can benefit from feedforward control to reduce position error. This thesis proposes a method using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to predict and counteract future disturbances from an ocean wave field. The MPC state estimator employs a Linear Wave Theory (LWT) solver to approximate the component...
Deep learning has recently revolutionized robot perception in many canonical robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. However, a similar transformation has yet to occur in more harsh environments including underwater and underground. This is due in part to the difficulty in deploying robots in these environments, which lack large real...
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has grown out of traditional research and military applications and has captivated the commercial and consumer markets, showing the ability to perform a spectrum of autonomous functions. This technology has the capability of saving lives in search and rescue, fighting wildfires in environmental monitoring, and...
Tensegrity structures are composed of pure compressional elements that are connected via a network of pure tensional elements. The concept of tensegrity promises numerous advantages to the field of robotics. Tensegrity robots are, however, notoriously difficult to control due to their oscillatory nature and nonlinear interaction between the components. Multiagent...
Information gathering tasks, such as terrestrial search and rescue, aerial inspection, and marine monitoring, require robotic unmanned systems to make decisions on how to travel within an environment to maximize or minimize a path-dependent information objective function. The distribution of information throughout the environment is the result of various processes,...
Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, specifically for package delivery applications. However, the size, complexity and sheer numbers of expected UAVs makes conventional air traffic management that relies on human air traffic controllers infeasible. To enable UAVs to safely and...
We present a method for decentralized, multi-robot exploration in adverse environments where communication is minimal. A key conceptual feature of our method is enabling implicit coordination between robots by training a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as a heuristic for planning using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). Our method consists of...
Breeding ecology of long-billed curlews in Umatilla and Morrow Counties, Oregon, was studied during the spring and summer of 1978
and 1979. The first curlews were observed in the study areas on 16 and 19 March of 1978 and 1979, respectively. Earliest clutch completion and onset of incubation was on...
In this dissertation, new theory and its applications are developed to predict three properties of complex ecological communities: stability, equilibrium response, and non-equilibrium dynamics. First, a graph-theoretic analysis identifies the interconnections in a complex ecosystem that promote or diminish stability (Chapter 2). The hierarchy of interactions that influences stability and...
Imbalanced deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) pools are mutagenic for DNA synthesis in both intact cells and cell-free replication systems. Almost certainly, such mutagenesis involves competition between correctly and incorrectly base-paired precursors at replication sites. However, there are certain differences between the intact cell and cell-free systems that do not always allow...
Levels of activity of glucose-6-phosphate- , 6-phosphogluconate- , and isocitric- dehydrogenase were measured in the
soluble and particulate fractions of heart, brain and liver at
several ages throughout the development of the chick embryo.
Compared to isocitric dehydrogenase, levels of glucosesphosphate-
, and 6-phosphogluconate- dehydrogenase are generally
low. This suggests...
Dynamic modeling of the atmospheric flight mechanics of a projectile equipped with an uncontrolled internal rotating disk is investigated and a modified projectile linear theory is established. It is shown through modeling of this type of projectile that several coefficients of the epicyclic dynamics are altered, leading to changes in...
Two light sensitive mutants of the green alga Scenedesmus obliquus strain D₃ have been characterized. The photodynamic nature of their sensitivity has been established, the subchloroplast site of photodamage has been investigated, and their noncarotenogenic character has been verified. The two mutants possess several similarities, although mutant L. S. -41...
This study investigates the atmospheric flight dynamics of a munition system and the effect of a tether reel resistance mechanism for limiting the impact that the unreeling process has on the munition system. The munition system consisting of two projectiles connected by a tether line is released from an aircraft...
Commercially bottled, vitamin C-fortified, cranberry
juice cocktail and cranberry-apple (cranapple) juice
drinks were stored at 5°C under simulated home-use
conditions. Ascorbic acid (AA) and dehydroascorbic acid
(DHA) levels were evaluated over a period of seven days by
high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Total
vitamin C content was also determined by...
The population genetic structure of ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa Dougi.) in the Willamette Valley of Oregon was investigated. Cones were collected from native stands of ponderosa pine from the Willamette Valley, eastern Oregon, southwest Oregon and the Puget Sound Basin of Washington. Seeds were subjected to isozyme analysis of 12...
The dissertation introduces community-based adaptive watershed management (CAWM) as a holistic conservation framework. The CAWM
framework integrates social and ecological suitability to achieve conservation outcomes. The core theoretical concepts consist of adaptive management, adoption-diffusion,
symbolic interactionism, community-based conservation, spatial analysis and watershed management. The CAWM framework is applied to the...
This thesis analyzes the ways in which the practices of yoga, mindfulness and meditation can be of benefit to hospice and palliative care practitioners in addressing job-related stress. The research suggests that these contemplative practices can be effective in addressing compassion fatigue among hospice and palliative care professionals. The thesis...
This thesis argues for the importance of justice of recognition not only for humans, but the entire non-human world in the face of environmental destruction and climate crisis. The common response to the degradation of the world’s ecological sphere is to act with technological, scientific, and material based responses. However,...
Tribal water rights and instream flows for species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have been a source of tensions in the western United States, particularly when tribes have undetermined water rights to support tribal fisheries listed under the ESA. Understanding the mechanics of past tribal settlements and their...
We present concentrations of germanium and silicon in sediment pore waters, basaltic formation fluids,
and bulk sediment from three ridge flank hydrothermal systems (RFHS). Basaltic formation fluids from
warm (>30°C) RFHS have much higher Ge concentrations and Ge:Si molar ratios than overlying sediment
pore waters, requiring seawater-basalt reactions to dominate...
Underwater monitoring and manipulation with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are active avenues of research in the Field Robotics Community. The purpose of this document is to briefly summarize some of the more promising research applications as well as provide information from four companies working in the area of marine renewable...
A wide variety of hydrodynamic theories are utilized to approximate a Wave Energy Converter’s (WEC) equation of motion. Numerous theories have been refined in order to improve numerical approximations of WEC dynamics. When incorporating refined hydrodynamic theories into numerical models, there are distinct impacts on WEC rigid body motions, cable...
Cephalopod-inspired soft robot arms have been studied as a new type of manipulator. These arms have been proposed for reach and grab tasks, underwater locomotion via swimming and walking, and robotic surgery. However, the capabilities of existing soft arms are limited to simple motions and light loads. Arm design has...
We propose three sampling-based motion planning algorithms for generating informative mobile robot trajectories. The goal is to find a trajectory that maximizes an information quality metric (e.g. variance reduction, information gain, or mutual information) and also falls within a pre-specified budget constraint (e.g. fuel, energy, or time). Prior algorithms have...
Robots have the potential to protect health care workers, provide patient care, and ultimately save lives in infectious disease outbreaks. Nevertheless, infectious disease outbreak scenarios present unique technological and social challenges for robotics. This work explores what robots can and should do in the fight against infectious diseases. We present...
Reef fish traded alive for table food is a high value-to-volume fishery, with demand centred in luxury markets in Hong Kong and southern mainland China. Approximately twenty countries in the Asia-Pacific region supply these markets. A number of economic, environmental and social issues have arisen from the trade; including the...
This work proposes a technique for distributed multi-robot exploration that leverages novel methods of map inference. The inference technique uses observed map structure to infer unobserved map features. The team then coordinates to explore both the inferred and observed portions of the map. Individual robots select exploration poses by accounting...
Current research into path planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has placed a major focus on accomplishing the goals of various agents while avoiding collisions between each other. However, there has been little focus on whether the planned trajectories are fair for each agent.
This work provides an answer to...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Building Information Modeling (BIM) offers a variety of tools to help a wide range of stakeholders in the construction industry. There has been substantial research on the advantages and challenges of implementing BIM for large and medium-sized construction companies; however, there is a dearth of research on the benefits and...
Among the suite of water resources management strategies, water banking can be a tool for water resource management in areas with high water demands or localized water scarcity. This research aims to further the understanding of water banking by conducting a review and analysis of relevant state legislation. This research...
State-of-the-art personal robots need to perform complex manipulation tasks to be viable in complex scenarios. However, many of these robots, like the PR2, use manipulators with high degrees of freedom. High degrees of freedom are desirable from a functionality standpoint, but make the learning task more difficult by adding a...
Multiagent coordination has many real-world applications such as self-driving cars, inventory management, search and rescue, package delivery, traffic management, warehouse management, and transportation. These tasks are generally character-ized by a global team objective that is often temporally sparse - realized only upon completing an episode. The sparsity of the shared...
Mystical experiences are ineffable, thus defining mysticism itself is a difficult feat. To aid in the construction of a definition of mysticism it is imperative to break down the unique elements of a mystical experience and try to give examples of where we can see all of these elements interacting....