Mississippi State University

About: Mississippi State University is a education organization based out in Starkville, Mississippi, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Catfish. The organization has 14115 authors who have published 28594 publications receiving 700030 citations. The organization is also known as: The Mississippi State University of Agriculture and Applied Science & Mississippi State University of Agriculture and Applied Science.

An enhanced fear appeal rhetorical framework: leveraging threats to the human asset through sanctioning rhetoric

Abstract: Fear appeals, which are used widely in information security campaigns, have become common tools in motivating individual compliance with information security policies and procedures. However, empirical assessments of the effectiveness of fear appeals have yielded mixed results, leading IS security scholars and practitioners to question the validity of the conventional fear appeal framework and the manner in which fear appeal behavioral modeling theories, such as protection motivation theory (PMT), have been applied to the study of information security phenomena. We contend that the conventional fear appeal rhetorical framework is inadequate when used in the context of information security threat warnings and that its primary behavioral modeling theory, PMT, has been misspecified in the extant information security research. Based on these arguments, we propose an enhanced fear appeal rhetorical framework that leverages sanctioning rhetoric as a secondary vector of threats to the human asset, thereby adding the dimension of personal relevance, which is critically absent from previous fear appeal frameworks and PMT-grounded security studies. Following a hypothetical scenario research approach involving the employees of a Finnish city government, we validate the efficacy of the enhanced fear appeal framework and determine that informal sanction rhetoric effectively enhances conventional fear appeals, thus providing a significant positive influence on compliance intentions.

Molecular Evolution and Phylogeny of Elapid Snake Venom Three-Finger Toxins

Abstract: Animal venom components are of considerable interest to researchers across a wide variety of disciplines, including molecular biology, biochemistry, medicine, and evolutionary genetics. The three-finger family of snake venom peptides is a particularly interesting and biochemically complex group of venom peptides, because they are encoded by a large multigene family and display a diverse array of functional activities. In addition, understanding how this complex and highly varied multigene family evolved is an interesting question to researchers investigating the biochemical diversity of these peptides and their impact on human health. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to investigate the long-term evolutionary patterns exhibited by these snake venom toxins to understand the mechanisms by which they diversified into a large, biochemically diverse, multigene family. Our results show a much greater diversity of family members than was previously known, including a number of subfamilies that did not fall within any previously identified groups with characterized activities. In addition, we found that the long-term evolutionary processes that gave rise to the diversity of three-finger toxins are consistent with the birth-and-death model of multigene family evolution. It is anticipated that this “three-finger toxin toolkit” will prove to be useful in providing a clearer picture of the diversity of investigational ligands or potential therapeutics available within this important family.

Progress and perspectives in converting biogas to transportation fuels

Abstract: The discovery of abundant natural gas resources has greatly increased the study of using methane as a feedstock to produce transportation fuels. Biogas (primarily containing methane and CO2), which is generated from waste biomass via anaerobic digestion or landfills, is regarded as a renewable source of methane, and has the potential to achieve sustainable production of transportation fuels. Since biogas also contains a significant amount of impurities (e.g., H2S, NH3, and siloxane), a cleaning procedure is generally required prior to conversion to transportation fuels. Physical approaches, mainly compression and liquefaction, have been commercially applied to upgrade biogas to bio-compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied biogas (LBG). For chemical approaches, catalytic reforming is the dominant method for converting methane to syngas, followed by Fischer–Tropsch synthesis (FTS) or fermentation of syngas to a variety of alcohols (e.g., methanol, ethanol, and butanol) and liquid hydrocarbon fuels (e.g., gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels). High purity hydrogen, a clean fuel, can also be produced via reforming. Methanol can be produced by direct oxidation of methane, while interest in the biological conversion of methane to methanol has grown recently due to its mild operating conditions, high conversion efficiency, and potential for using raw biogas. The derived methanol can be further converted to gasoline via a methanol to gasoline (MTG) process. This paper provides a comprehensive review of major research progress on technologies for converting biogas/methane into transportation fuels, and discusses the principles, kinetics, operating conditions, and performance of each technology. Efficient direct conversion of biogas into ethanol and higher alcohol fuels (e.g. butanol), which is envisaged to be the focus of research pursuits in the near future, is also discussed, with emphasis on the development of methane-utilizing microbes through genetic engineering.