Northern State University

Allura Red AC, often referred to as Red 40 food dye, is commonly found in beverages and other processed foods. Red 40 is currently being phased out of the US food system amidst concerns that the dye promotes neurological complications in children. While hyperactivity following Red 40 consumption has been reported to promote gut inflammation in animal models, the molecular mechanism driving this behavior remain unclear. One of the main hypotheses for how Red 40 induces hyperactivity is by promoting systemic inflammation. Our study investigates whether Red 40–induced hyperactivity is associated with hepatic inflammation in adult zebrafish. Consistent with previously published findings, male and female adult fish fed Red 40 (0.17, 0.75, or 7 mg/kg feed/day) for two weeks demonstrated increased hyperactivity relative to unsupplemented controls. Livers were collected and will be used to assess expression levels of genes involved in inflammation. Establishing a link between hepatic inflammation and behavior would provide important insight into how Red 40 consumption influences vertebrate physiology. This research is supported by funds from Northern State University and SD INBRE. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2026 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.

Nearly 23% (n = 60) of 271 surveyed U.S. pre-service teachers perceived having experienced bullying by students during their field experiences in K-12 (kindergarten to 12th grade) schools. Relational bullying was the most commonly reported type of bullying perpetrated by students against pre-service teachers. Longer pre-service field experience duration was associated with increased self-reported student-on-pre-service teacher bullying. Self-reported bullying resulted in negative psychological impacts (e.g., worry, sadness, self-doubt), as well as contemplation of changing professional paths. Some participants reported professional growth, support from colleagues, and an increased awareness of student bullying. Participants attributed student bullying of teachers to students' lack of respect for pre-service teachers, the common nature of bullying in schools, and students’ personal issues. U.S. teacher education programs must better equip pre-service teachers to address student bullying by integrating evidence-based training into their coursework.

Accurate forecasting of catch productivity in small-scale fisheries is difficult because of the inherent high variability that result from differences in fisher-specific productivity capacity, environmental factors, and spatial heterogeneity in productivity. Most current machine learning models fail at directly forecasting absolute catch since the target variable is a skewed distribution heavily affected by individual baseline productivity levels. In this manuscript, we introduce a baseline-residual machine learning framework that splits the total catch into a baseline derived from fisher-session historical productivity and a deviation from the environment calculated using mixture of environmental factors and fisher-specific variables. We compare model forecasts of absolute catch from 5 different learners including Ridge, ElasticNet, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting and XGBoost models. The results show that the baseline-residual decomposition significantly outperforms models that directly forecast absolute catch, with ElasticNet reaching an R of 0.892 and 28.83% reduction in prediction error. This approach leverages identification of Fisher baseline productivity with environmental effects, which facilitates directional stability in the model, producing stable and improved forecasting performance for small-scale coastal fishery decisions.