Many recent hot topic news headlines claim that attacks are being made on the separation of Church and state in the United States. These articles specifically list the Catholic Church as a chief culprit due to the religious beliefs of the governmental officials in question. An in-depth understanding of each institution's position on the doctrine of separation of Church and state is developed along with the foundational motivations of each position to better understand the general subject matter, where afterwards the validity of the claims can be determined. The historical American perspective on Church-state separation is developed from the combined thought of James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, where their thoughts are shown to have originated from John Locke. Next, the viewpoint of the Catholic Church is developed from a brief summary of historical Church-state relations and topical Papal encyclicals. Finally, each institutions’ position is motivated by their respective underlying foundations in the nature of man.

The first extrasolar planet discovered orbited the millisecond pulsar PSR B1257+12. These so-called "pulsar planets" have proved to be more uncommon than their early discovery might have suggested. The proximity of many known pulsar planets to their host neutron stars indicates that they formed post-supernova, possibly from material produced in the supernova. Any pre-existing planets that close would have been obliterated in the supernova. Material from the supernova falls back to an accretion disk around the neutron star analogous to a protoplanetary disk around a protostar. The composition of the supernova thus determines the composition of the planet-forming material. The pulsar planet then forms from collisions between particles within the disk. This research examines the composition of supernova remnants to explore this formation process. Chemical abundances of supernova ejecta were obtained from 3D supernova simulations. The velocities of particles containing silicate-mineral forming elements were filtered to determine what might stay in the system and thus be available for the formation of a fallback disk. The abundances of the remaining particles were compared to characterize the potential composition of such a fallback disk. Overall, the composition was roughly silicate-like, but the rates of mixing versus dust formation could lead to the production of highly exotic minerals.

Lunar meteorites are created when an asteroid impacts the Moon. In such events, the lunar surface, known as regolith, can experience extreme pressures and temperature conditions. Some of this regolith material can be ejected from the Moon and enter interplanetary space where it can be captured by Earth's gravity. Even after falling to Earth, the minerals of lunar meteorites preserve the history and conditions of lunar impact processes. One such mineral that has gained attention recently is tissintite due to its relatively specific temperature and pressure formation conditions. The lunar meteorite NWA 13967 and its mineral assemblage provided an opportunity for comparison to other lunar meteorites (Zhang et al. 2021). Based on its mineralogy and petrography, NWA 13967 likely experienced peak pressures of 18 to 24 GPa and peak temperatures above 2000℃, as indicated by the presence of intergranular melt, vesicles, and corundum. The occurrence of tissintite-II and coesite suggest crystallization during cooling and decompression, while other high pressure minerals likely back-transformed to lower pressure polymorphs.

Living in the Phoenix Valley, many have heard stories of people getting lost in the mountains whether it be on a hike, camping trip, or backpacking adventure. Secure Point Location Services believes that this area is a prime location to begin the development and sale of our real-time location tracking system to be licensed by NASA technologies. Over the last 9 months, Secure Point has made steps to identify a target market, reach out to potential partners, develop a website, create a marketing strategy, and generate traction with the help of the Founder’s Lab at Arizona State University as well as the highly-experienced business catalysts who have provided guidance along the way. The following report will go into detail to cover our entrepreneurial journey to validate an idea and generate traction.

This project was an exploratory take on outreach in the life sciences - looking into the existing literature and practices and formulating a proof of concept for future outreach with synthesizes my findings. The research culminated in the creation of an insect guide for the novice observer, which reads as a modern take on the dichotomous key and allows amateur insect observers to develop some skills of identification with relatively little entomological knowledge.

In a hypothetical Grand Unified Theory, magnetic monopoles are a particle which would act as a charge carrier for the magnetic force. Evidence of magnetic monopoles has yet to be found and based off of their relatively high mass (4-10 TeV) will be difficult to find with current technology. The goal of my thesis is to mathematically model the magnetic monopole by finding numerical solutions to the equations of motion. In my analysis, I consider four cases: kinks, cosmic strings, global monopoles, and magnetic monopoles. I will also study electromagnetic gauge fields to prepare to include gauge fields in the magnetic monopole case. Numerical solutions are found for the cosmic string and global monopole cases. As expected, the energy is high at small distance r and drops off as r goes to infinity. Currently numerical solutions are being worked towards for electromagnetic gauge fields and the magnetic monopole case.