The dead shall be raised : Multidisciplinary analysis of human skeletons reveals complexity in 19th century immigrant socioeconomic history and identity in New Haven, Connecticut

In July 2011, renovations to Yale-New Haven Hospital inadvertently exposed the cemetery of Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut’s first Catholic cemetery. While this cemetery was active between 1833 and 1851, both the church and its cemetery disappeared from public records, making the discovery serendipitous. Four relatively well-preserved adult skeletons were recovered with few artifacts. All four individuals show indicators of manual labor, health and disease stressors, and dental health issues. Two show indicators of trauma, with the possibility of judicial hanging in one individual. Musculoskeletal markings are consistent with physical stress, and two individuals have arthritic indicators of repetitive movement/specialized activities. Radiographic analyses show osteopenia, healed trauma, and other pathologies in several individuals. Dental calculus analysis did not identify any tuberculosis indicators, despite osteological markers. Isotopic analyses of teeth indicate that all four were likely recent immigrants to the Northeastern United States. Nuclear and mitochondrial DNA were recovered from three individuals, and these analyses identified ancestry, hair/eye color, and relatedness. Genetic and isotopic results upended our initial ancestry assessment based on burial context alone. These individuals provide biocultural evidence of New Haven’s Industrial Revolution and the plasticity of ethnic and religious identity in the immigrant experience. Their recovery and the multifaceted analyses described here illuminate a previously undescribed part of the city’s rich history. The collective expertise of biological, geochemical, archaeological, and historical researchers interprets socioeconomic and cultural identity better than any one could alone. Our combined efforts changed our initial assumptions of a poor urban Catholic cemetery’s membership, and provide a template for future discoveries and analyses

Tevatron Combination of Single-Top-Quark Cross Sections and Determination of the Magnitude of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa Matrix Element Vtb\bf V_{tb}

We present the final combination of CDF and D0 measurements of cross sections for single-top-quark production in proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. The data correspond to total integrated luminosities of up to 9.7 fb$^{−1}$ per experiment. The t-channel cross section is measured to be σ$_t$=2.25$_{-0.31}^{+0.29}$ pb. We also present the combinations of the two-dimensional measurements of the s- vs t-channel cross section. In addition, we give the combination of the s+t channel cross section measurement resulting in σ$_{s+t}$=3.30$_{-0.40}^{+0.52}$ pb, without assuming the standard model value for the ratio σ$_s$/σ$_t$. The resulting value of the magnitude of the top-to-bottom quark coupling is |V$_{tb}$|=1.02$_{-0.05}^{+0.06}$, corresponding to |V$_{tb}$|>0.92 at the 95% C.L

Tevatron Run II combination of the effective leptonic electroweak mixing angle

International audienceDrell-Yan lepton pairs produced in the process pp¯→ℓ+ℓ-+X through an intermediate γ*/Z boson have an asymmetry in their angular distribution related to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the electroweak force and the associated mixing of its neutral gauge bosons. The CDF and D0 experiments have measured the effective-leptonic electroweak mixing parameter sin2θefflept using electron and muon pairs selected from the full Tevatron proton-antiproton data sets collected in 2001-2011, corresponding to 9–10  fb-1 of integrated luminosity. The combination of these measurements yields the most precise result from hadron colliders, sin2θefflept=0.23148±0.00033. This result is consistent with, and approaches in precision, the best measurements from electron-positron colliders. The standard model inference of the on-shell electroweak mixing parameter sin2θW, or equivalently the W-boson mass MW, using the zfitter software package yields sin2θW=0.22324±0.00033 or equivalently, MW=80.367±0.017  GeV/c2

Combined Forward-Backward Asymmetry Measurements in Top-Antitop Quark Production at the Tevatron

International audienceThe CDF and D0 experiments at the Fermilab Tevatron have measured the asymmetry between yields of forward- and backward-produced top and antitop quarks based on their rapidity difference and the asymmetry between their decay leptons. These measurements use the full data sets collected in proton-antiproton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of s=1.96  TeV. We report the results of combinations of the inclusive asymmetries and their differential dependencies on relevant kinematic quantities. The combined inclusive asymmetry is AFBtt¯=0.128±0.025. The combined inclusive and differential asymmetries are consistent with recent standard model predictions