Navigating COVID-19 and racial trauma as a Black student at predominantly White institutions.

Black students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) contend with racial microaggressions that can lead to negative mental health and academic outcomes. The physical and mental health consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic are well-known. What remains unknown is how targeted racial hate during a pandemic might have a compounded effect on Black essential workers. The current study examines how future essential workers in helping professions cope with dual crises as they navigate mostly White universities. Study participants were Black university students attending PWIs in the United States enrolled in social work, public health, or psychology programs during the 2020-2021 academic year. Participants completed an online survey that measured racial microaggressions, COVID distress, sense of belonging, engagement in activism, and well-being. Hierarchical regression models revealed COVID distress predicted poorer well-being. Also, COVID distress interacted with racial microaggressions to predict well-being. Findings have implications for developing decolonized learning communities with a liberation pedagogy in community psychology and other helping professions.

Community Health Impacts From Natural Gas Pipeline Compressor Stations.

Compressor stations maintain pressure along natural gas pipelines to sustain gas flow. Unfortunately, they present human health concerns as they release chemical pollutants into the air, sometimes at levels higher than national air quality standards. Further, compressor stations are often placed in rural areas with higher levels of poverty and/or minority populations, contributing to environmental justice concerns. In this paper we investigate what chemical pollutants are emitted by compressor stations, the impacts of emitted pollutants on human health, and local community impacts. Based on the information gained from these examinations, we provide the following policy recommendations with the goal of minimizing harm to those affected by natural gas compressor stations: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and relevant state agencies must increase air quality monitoring and data transparency; the EPA should direct more resources to monitoring programs specifically at compressor stations; the EPA should provide free indoor air quality monitoring to homes near compressor stations; the EPA needs to adjust its National Ambient Air Quality Standards to better protect communities and assess cumulative impacts; and decision-makers at all levels must pursue meaningful involvement from potentially affected communities. We find there is substantial evidence of negative impacts to strongly support these recommendations.

mBLAST: Keeping up with the sequencing explosion for (meta)genome analysis.

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies require alignment algorithms and software that can keep pace with the heightened data production. Standard algorithms, especially protein similarity searches, represent significant bottlenecks in analysis pipelines. For metagenomic approaches in particular, it is now often necessary to search hundreds of millions of sequence reads against large databases. Here we describe mBLAST, an accelerated search algorithm for translated and/or protein alignments to large datasets based on the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) and retaining the high sensitivity of BLAST. The mBLAST algorithms achieve substantial speed up over the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) programs BLASTX, TBLASTX and BLASTP for large datasets, allowing analysis within reasonable timeframes on standard computer architectures. In this article, the impact of mBLAST is demonstrated with sequences originating from the microbiota of healthy humans from the Human Microbiome Project. mBLAST is designed as a plug-in replacement for BLAST for any study that involves short-read sequences and includes high-throughput analysis. The mBLAST software is freely available to academic users at www.multicorewareinc.com.