The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between colorism and police killings of unarmed African American suspects. The authors collected data from the Washington Post database, which reports unarmed African American victims from 2015–2021, and found that the victims who were killed by police were darker on average than a control population of African Americans that had not encountered the police.

The authors use molecular modeling to test analogs of the stearoyl-coenzyme A desaturase 1 (SCD1) inhibitor MF-438 with implications for future development of Parkinson's disease therapeutics.

The authors develop and test a machine learning algorithm for predicting diabetes diagnoses.

We know relatively little about how vegan diets and non-vegan diets compare when it comes to the gut microbiome. Gollamudi and Gollamudi tackle this challenge by investigating how changes in a participant's diet affected the diversity of their intestinal microbiome.

Here, the authors recognized the tendency of bacteria to form biofilms, where this behavior offers protection against threats such as antibiotics. To investigate this, they observed the effects of sublethal exposure of the antibiotic ampicillin on E. coli biofilm formation with an optical density crystal violet assay. They found that exposure to ampicillin resulted in the favored formation of biofilms over time, as free-floating bacteria were eradicated.

In this study, the authors developed a model named DNA Sequence Embedding Network (DNA-SEnet) to classify DNA-asthma associations using their genomic patterns.

Access to green space—an area of grass, trees, or other vegetation set apart for recreational or aesthetic purposes in an urban environment—and clean drinking water can be unequally distributed in urban spaces, which are often associated with income inequality. Little is known about public drinking water and green space inequities in the Bay Area. For our study, we sought to understand how public park access, drinking fountain access, and the quality of public drinking water differ across income brackets in the Bay Area. Though we observed smaller-scale instances of inequalities, in the park distribution in the Bay Area as a whole, and in the Southern Bay’s water quality and park distribution, our results indicate that other factors could be influencing water quality, and park and fountain access in the Bay Area.

Lipases are a common class of enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of lipids. Here the authors characterize the the activity of pancreatic lipase in different organic solvents using a choloremetric assay, as well as using molecular dynamic simulations. They report that the activity of pancreatic lipase in 5% methanol is more than 25% higher than in water, despite enzyme stability being comparable in both solvents. This suggests that, for industrial applications, using pancreatic lipase in 5% methanol solution might increase yield, compared to just water.

Cilia are little hair-like protrusions on many cells in the human body, including those lining the trachea where they play a role in clearing our respiratory tract of mucous and other irritants. Genetic mutations that impair ciliary function have serious consequences on our well-being making it important to understand how ciliary function is regulated. By using a simple organism, such as the worm C. elegans that use cilia to move, the authors explore the effect of certain genetic mutations on the cilia of the worms by measuring their ability to move towards or away from certain odorants.

The authors looked at how a student's own background influence their attitude towards integration of diverse cultures and ethnicities. While overall students viewed other groups positively, the authors found that groups still indicated they felt judged by their peers.