Abraham Lincoln and Unionism in East Tennessee

Often, the American Civil War finds itself painted in classrooms across the country as a conflict of clear-cut ideologies in the North and South. The citizens of the northern states wished to preserve the sacred Union, and northern forces fought valiantly while invading a rebellious South. The Unionists of eastern Tennessee put to rest the false generalization that all southerners were loyal to the Confederate States of America, as their struggle throughout the war on the behalf of the Union was a long and bloody event. On June 8, 1861, Tennessee voted to secede from the United States. The vote was far from unanimous, as 66 percent of the eligible voters of east Tennessee showed their northern tastes by voting to remain in the Union. Much to the dismay of these loyal Unionists, eastern Tennessee was soon brought under the control of the Confederacy. It was not until 1863 that a federal army entered eastern Tennessee, a full two years after the June of 1861 declaration of secession. President Abraham Lincoln heard the cry of the eastern Tennessean Unionists even prior to the state’s secession; the delay of liberation for the East was not from a lack of sympathies from the President. Lincoln wished to intervene quickly on the behalf of eastern Tennessee for both the protection of loyalists and the capture of a strategically important area, but an invading Union army was held back by non-cooperating Union generals. Indeed, pro-Union forces in east Tennessee created a situation that the Confederate government was unfamiliar with. Where most of the war was fought between North and South, the violence in east Tennessee was between neighbors. This violence was unlike anything else seen in the war, as the relative geographic isolation of east Tennessee led to a civil war inside the Civil War. The guerrilla warfare and subsequent bloody crackdown of Unionists created a difficult and unusual situation for the governments of both sides of the conflict to tackle

Does the inclusion of moderate amounts of red meat in the diet of exercising older women impact on faecal markers of bowel health, including faecal lactoferrin?

Background: High intakes of red meat may be associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer (CRC), however, to determine CRC risk, it is important to assess faecal changes related to protein and carbohydrate metabolism.Objective: To determine the influence of three weekly meals rich in red meat as opposed to a carbohydrate control diet on faecal markers which are involved in the aetiology of CRC.Design: Twenty post-menopausal women (aged 60-75) undertook, 3 times a week for 12 weeks, a 30 minute exercise session followed immediately by a cooked meal that was high in lean red meat, low in carbohydrate (n= 10) or low in lean red meat, high in carbohydrate (n=10). Dietary fibre intake and macronutrients were kept constant. At the beginning and end of the study, three-day faecal samples were collected and by-products of protein fermentation and carbohydrate metabolism, undigested fibre residues, and faecal output and colonic bacterial microbiota changes measured.Outcomes: No significant differences were observed in subjects on either diet when comparing faecal output, faecal pH, other faecal markers, nor faecal lactoferrin. There was a trend observed in changes in the population of colonic microbiota using FISH analysis. Bacteroides spp. and Prevotella spp. appeared to decrease in women consuming a high red meat diet compared with an increase in women consuming a high carbohydrate diet.Conclusions: In this pilot study the trend in colonic microbiota change is interesting and suggests that dietary influence of colonic microbiota, especially changes in Bacteroidetes, may be indicative of risk of gut damage and disease compared to other faecal markers.<br /

The auxiliary region method: A hybrid method for coupling PDE- and Brownian-based dynamics for reaction-diffusion systems

Reaction-diffusion systems are used to represent many biological and physical phenomena. They model the random motion of particles (diffusion) and interactions between them (reactions). Such systems can be modelled at multiple scales with varying degrees of accuracy and computational efficiency. When representing genuinely multiscale phenomena, fine-scale models can be prohibitively expensive, whereas coarser models, although cheaper, often lack sufficient detail to accurately represent the phenomenon at hand. Spatial hybrid methods couple two or more of these representations in order to improve efficiency without compromising accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel spatial hybrid method, which we call the auxiliary region method (ARM), which couples PDE and Brownian-based representations of reaction-diffusion systems. Numerical PDE solutions on one side of an interface are coupled to Brownian-based dynamics on the other side using compartment-based "auxiliary regions". We demonstrate that the hybrid method is able to simulate reaction-diffusion dynamics for a number of different test problems with high accuracy. Further, we undertake error analysis on the ARM which demonstrates that it is robust to changes in the free parameters in the model, where previous coupling algorithms are not. In particular, we envisage that the method will be applicable for a wide range of spatial multi-scales problems including, filopodial dynamics, intracellular signalling, embryogenesis and travelling wave phenomena.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 2 table

Trident: a universal tool for generating synthetic absorption spectra from astrophysical simulations

Hydrodynamical simulations are increasingly able to accurately model physical systems on stellar, galactic, and cosmological scales, however, the utility of these simulations is often limited by our ability to directly compare them with the datasets produced by observers: spectra, photometry, etc. To address this problem, we have created Trident}, a Python-based, open-source tool for post-processing hydrodynamical simulations to produce synthetic absorption spectra and related data. Trident} can (i) create absorption-line spectra for any trajectory through a simulated dataset mimicking both background quasar and down-the-barrel configurations, (ii) reproduce the spectral characteristics of common instruments like the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, (iii) operate across the ultraviolet, optical and infrared using customizable absorption line lists, (iv) trace simulated physical structures directly to spectral features, (v) approximate the presence of ion species absent from the simulation outputs, (vi) generate column density maps for any ion, and (vii) provide support for all major astrophysical hydrodynamical codes. The focus of Trident's development is for using simulated datasets to better interpret observations of the circumgalactic medium (CGM) and intergalactic medium (IGM), but it remains a general tool applicable in other contexts.Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures, published in ApJ, Code available at http://trident-project.or