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- All Subjects: Biology
- All Subjects: supernovae
- Creators: Department of Physics
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
As one example of the victimhood narrative, ABC News used to run a special called My Extreme Affliction as part of 20/20 until 2012. As the name implies, the specials covered people with disabilities, specifically extreme versions. One 2008 episode on Tourette’s syndrome described Tourette’s like it was some sort of demonic possession. The narrator talked about children who were “prisoners in their own bodies” and a family that was at risk of being “torn apart by Tourette’s.” I have Tourette’s syndrome myself, which made ABC’s special especially uncomfortable to watch. When not wringing their metaphorical hands over the “victims” of disability, many news outlets fall into the “supercrip” narrative. They refer to people as “heroes” who “overcome” their disabilities to achieve something that ranges from impressive to utterly mundane. The main emphasis is on the disability rather than the person who has it. These articles then exploit that disability to make readers feel good. As a person with a disability, I am aware that it impacts my life, but it is not the center of my life. The tics from my Tourette’s syndrome made it difficult to speak to people when I was younger, but even then they did not rule me.
Disability coverage, however, is still incredibly important for promoting acceptance and giving people with disabilities a voice. A little over a fifth of adults in the United States have a disability (CDC: 53 million adults in the US live with a disability), so poor coverage means marginalizing or even excluding a large amount of people. Journalists should try to reach their entire audience. The news helps shape public opinion with the stories it features. Therefore, it should provide visibility for people with disabilities in order to increase acceptance. This is a matter of civil rights. People with disabilities deserve fair and accurate representation.
My personal experience with ABC’s Tourette’s special leads me to believe that the media, especially the news, needs to be more responsible in their reporting. Even the name “My Extreme Affliction” paints a poor picture of what to expect. A show that focuses on sensationalist portrayals in pursuit of views further ostracizes people with disabilities. The emphasis should be on a person and not their condition. The National Center for Disability Journalism tells reporters to “Focus on the person you are interviewing, not the disability” (Tips for interviewing people with disabilities). This people-first approach is the way to improve disability coverage: Treat people with disabilities with the same respect as any other minority group.
Optometry is an important field in medicine as it allows people a chance to have their vision corrected and it serves as a health screening opportunity for those who receive a dilated eye examination. One of the largest barriers to receiving a dilated eye exam is insurance coverage. Most health insurance policies have limited optometric coverage. By expanding health insurance plans to be more inclusive of optometric care, people who use these health insurance plans will have a better access of care.
Lyme disease is a common tick-borne illness caused by the Gram-negative bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. An outer membrane protein of Borrelia burgdorferi, P66, has been suggested as a possible target for Lyme disease treatments. However, a lack of structural information available for P66 has hindered attempts to design medications to target the protein. Therefore, this study attempted to find methods for expressing and purifying P66 in quantities that can be used for structural studies. It was found that by using the PelB signal sequence, His-tagged P66 could be directed to the outer membrane of Escherichia coli, as confirmed by an anti-His Western blot. Further attempts to optimize P66 expression in the outer membrane were made, pending verification via Western blotting. The ability to direct P66 to the outer membrane using the PelB signal sequence is a promising first step in determining the overall structure of P66, but further work is needed before P66 is ready for large-scale purification for structural studies.
We present the isotope yields of two post-explosion, three-dimensional 15 M_sol core-collapse supernova models, 15S and 15A, and compare them to the carbon, nitrogen, silicon, aluminum, sulfur, calcium, titanium, iron, and nickel isotopic compositions of presolar SiC stardust. We find that material from the interior of a core-collapse supernova can form a rare subset of SiC stardust, called SiC D grains, characterized by enrichments of the isotopes 13C and 15N. The innermost material of these core-collapse supernovae is operating in the neutrino-driven regime and undergoes rapid proton capture early in the explosion, providing these isotopes which are not present in such large abundances in other stardust grains of supernova origin.
The first extrasolar planet discovered orbited the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12. These so-called "pulsar planets" have proved to be more uncommon than their early discovery might have suggested. The proximity of many known pulsar planets to their host neutron stars indicates that they formed post-supernova, possibly from material produced in the supernova. Any pre-existing planets that close would have been obliterated in the supernova. Material from the supernova falls back to an accretion disk around the neutron star analogous to a protoplanetary disk around a protostar. The composition of the supernova thus determines the composition of the planet-forming material. The pulsar planet then forms from collisions between particles within the disk. This research examines the composition of supernova remnants to explore this formation process. Chemical abundances of supernova ejecta were obtained from 3D supernova simulations. The velocities of particles containing silicate-mineral forming elements were filtered to determine what might stay in the system and thus be available for the formation of a fallback disk. The abundances of the remaining particles were compared to characterize the potential composition of such a fallback disk. Overall, the composition was roughly silicate-like, but the rates of mixing versus dust formation could lead to the production of highly exotic minerals.