A Fundamental Test of the Nature of Dark Matter

Dark matter may consist of weakly interacting elementary particles or of macroscopic compact objects. We show that the statistics of the gravitational lensing of high redshift supernovae strongly discriminate between these two classes of dark matter candidates. We develop a method of calculating the magnification distribution of supernovae, which can be interpreted in terms of the properties of the lensing objects. With simulated data we show that >~ 50 well measured type Ia supernovae (\Delta m ~ 0.2 mag) at redshifts ~1 can clearly distinguish macroscopic from microscopic dark matter if \Omega_o \simgt 0.2 and all dark matter is in one form or the other.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, AASTeX, replaced to conform to the version to be published in ApJL. It is now more clearly written and addresses some possible systematic uncertaintie

Conceptual analyses of extensible booms to support a solar sail

Extensible booms which could function as the diagonal spars and central mast of an 800 meter square, non-rotating Solar Sailing Vehicle were conceptually designed and analyzed. The boom design concept that was investigated is an extensible lattice boom which is stowed and deployed by elastically coiling and uncoiling its continuous longerons. The seven different free-span lengths in each spar which would minimize the total weights of the spars and mast were determined. Boom weights were calculated by using a semi-empirical formulation which related the overall weight of a boom to the weight of its longerons

Trotula, women's problems, and the professionalization of medicine in the Middle Ages

The professionalization of medicine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led to an exclusion of women practitioners from the best paid and most respected medical positions. Male doctors controlled the teaching and theory of women's medicine, and their gynecological literature incorporated male experience, understanding and learning. The treatises attributed to Trotula, which survive in nearly 100 manuscripts, were the most popular texts used by academic physicians in the later Middle Ages. Although Georg Kraut's Strassburg edition of 1544 treats the treatises of "Trotula" as a single, unified work, three separate texts circulated in the Middle Ages, and on stylistic and other grounds it is likely that each was written by a different author. Reasonably solid evidence demonstrates the existence of a woman physician at Salerno named Trota or Trotula, but she was not a magistra (as is often asserted), and it seems that she did not write even one of the three texts attributed to her. Instead, she produced a Practica from which extracts appear in a Practica secundum Trotam, which survives as a single mansucript in Madrid, and in De aegritudinum curatione in the Wrociaw (Breslau) Codex Salernitanus. This paper is to be published by the Bulletin of the History of Medicine in 1985