Jennifer Cartwright is the Science Coordinator for the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC). She is an ecologist with a background in GIS and hydrology and a focus on supporting effective natural-resource management. Her research has concerned climate-change impacts on a variety of terrestrial, wetland, and freshwater ecosystems across North America. Jen has overseen studies of forest drought impacts on local-to-regional scales, modeling of wetland ecohydrology leveraging remote sensing and field observations, identification of refugia from climate change, and assessments of climate impacts to at-risk ecosystems and species. She has been affiliated with the USGS Lower Mississippi-Gulf Water Science Center since 2009 and received her Ph.D. in Biology from Tennessee State University in 2014. Climate Change Impacts Across Tennessee The state of Tennessee encompasses many landscapes and ecosystems, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Climate change and other global-change processes are likely to impact a variety of natural resources and human communities throughout the state. This keynote address will offer a virtual “tour” of the state, touching on potential climate impacts to terrestrial ecosystems such as forests and grasslands, as well as freshwater systems such as streams, reservoirs, and wetlands, plus potential impacts to agriculture and cities. Increasingly, scientific information is becoming available to help anticipate climate-change influences on a variety of processes, including drought patterns, fire regimes, geographic ranges and seasonal timing for native species, hydrologic patterns, water quality and temperature, invasive species, and pest and pathogen dynamics. This keynote address will highlight some of these scientific resources to help researchers, natural-resource managers, and Tennessee residents better anticipate and prepare for climate impacts over the years ahead.

Abstract Capsaicinoids are a family compounds in peppers that explicitly trigger the transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) ion channel. TRPV1 of the body signals the brain that a food is spicy. It has been reported that capsaicinoid concentration can vary widely in peppers. In this study, the capsaicinoid concentration as a function of pepper color, pepper type, and the amount of nitrogen content in soil was determined from peppers bought or grown in Tennessee. Capsaicinoid concentration was determined in three different pepper types, including Jalapeño, Serrano, and Cayenne. A solid-liquid extraction was used to isolate the capsaicinoids, followed by UV-VIS spectroscopy to determine the amount of capsaicinoids in each pepper. The concentration of capsaicinoids in Jalapeño and Serrano peppers were not significantly different according to a pairwise t-test. However, Cayenne peppers have a lower concentration of capsaicinoids than Jalapeño or Serrano pepper. Our data indicated that the color of the pepper did not affect capsaicinoid concentration. Other factors, such as nitrogen content in fertilizer, can affect capsaicinoid concentration. Therefore, Cayenne peppers were planted by using store-bought seeds. After the seeds germinated, the plants were given different fertilizers. Miracle Gro fertilizer with 12% and 18% levels of nitrogen were used to treat the plants while the control did not receive fertilizer. According to the ANOVA followed by a Tukey comparison test, the results indicate that the capsaicinoid produced from plants treated with no fertilizer and plants treated with 12% nitrogen fertilizer were significantly different.

Adam Holley grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, but attended college in Pennsylvania, where he earned a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Haverford College. Uncertain about whether theoretical or experimental physics was right for him, he temporized by teaching high school physics in New York City, where he had the good fortune to collaborate on the development and teaching of a three-year research course for high school students. That experience ultimately helped him decide to become an experimentalist. This he did at North Carolina State University, joining a group of scientists developing the United States' first ultracold neutron (UCN) source at Los Alamos National Lab. He earned his Ph.D. as part of the associated UCNA experiment that for the first time used UCN to measure the neutron beta decay asymmetry. During his subsequent postdoc at Indiana University, Dr. Holley got involved in another beta decay experiment called UCNτ. He continued his involvement with that effort when he joined the faculty at Tennessee Tech, where he leverages unique aspects of UCN physics to involve undergraduates in the work. The Tortoise and the Hare: A Race for Answers to Big Questions about the Universe The production of energetic exotic particles has long been a primary method for discovering the rules that underlie what we observe about the universe. There are, however, a number of gaps in this understanding, which the study of more familiar systems, such as neutrons, atoms, or molecules, can help elucidate. As the overall precision of these experimental efforts increases, there are a growing number of tantalizing anomalies, any of which could point the way to a shift in our understanding of how the universe formed, what makes it up, and whether ours is the only universe or is one of many universes. The race to discover new fundamental physical behavior currently features a diverse array of high-precision approaches, spanning an enormous range of energies. “Ultracold” neutrons (UCN), with twenty orders of magnitude smaller energies than particles produced at the Large Hadron Collider, provide one example of how low-energy measurements can facilitate the requirement for high precision. A classic example of a UCN-based experiment is determination of the free neutron lifetime, an empirical observable involved in a number of potentially interesting anomalies. An experiment called UCNτ that operates at Los Alamos National Laboratory has set the standard for precise determinations of this quantity. Using UCNτ as an example of the physics, engineering, and computational challenges high-precision work entails, this talk will describe the ongoing race to answer some long-standing questions about the universe.

Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Tennessee Academy of Science Executive Committee Meeting Minutes, May 2020. Journal of the Tennessee Academy of Science 1 December 2021; 96 (1): 1–3. doi: https://doi.org/10.47226/96.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest Search