Sixteenth Century English-Spanish Rivalry in La Florida

For many years after its discovery la Florida was a vague geographical concept. Discovered by Ponce de Leon in 1513, it was first considered an island, though later recognized to be a diminutive tail wagging an immense dog. During much of the sixteenth century it embraced a large part of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and stretched mysteriously inland an infinite way. Ponce de Leon was followed by numerous other conquistadors such as Vazquez de Ayllon, Panfilio de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto, and Tristan de Luna y Arrellano, but they garnered little gold or silver and endured many privations, shipwrecks, and attacks by hostile Indians. Thus it was not unnatural that the main stream of Spanish conquest and colonization flowed to Mexico and Peru rather than to unrewarding Florida

Andrew Ranson: Seventeenth Century Pirate?

The later half of the seventeenth century saw the swashbuckling heyday of piracy in the West Indies. Here, English, French, and Dutch buccaneers, and audacious seafarers claiming no nation, roamed the seas almost at will, delighting particularly in preying on galleons flying the Spanish flag and in sacking and ransoming cities along the Spanish Main. It is true that the policy of European nations was changing from encouraging or winking at buccaneer activities to supporting legitimate trade with Spanish America, and some serious efforts were made to curb these seagoing marauders. Nevertheless, this was of little consolation to the inhabitants of Panama, which was ravished by the Englishman Henry Morgan in 1671, or to those of Maracaibo, which was destroyed by the Dutchman l’Olonnais in 1667, or to those of Vera Cruz, which was surprised by the Frenchman the Sieur de Grammont in 1683. In this same period similar fates befell many other cities, and their hapless residents endured unspeakable indignities

Lord Dunmore\u27s Loyalist Asylum in the Floridas

To the astonishment of many, Lord John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, member of the House of Lords, formerly controversial colonial governor of New York and Virginia, became governor of the Bahama Islands in 1787. Immediately eyebrows were lifted and questions raised as to why the Earl had accepted the apparently insignificant governorship of islands whose total population, black and white, was not appreciably greater than that of Williamsburg when the colonial assembly had been in session. Dunmore had returned to America late in 1781 and had expected to resume his role as the Virginia governor in the wake of Cornwallis’ victories; but the defeat at Yorktown was responsible for his arriving at British-occupied Charleston rather than the governor’s palace at Williamsburg. Examining Dunmore’s post-1781 career helps explain what eventually drew him to the Bahamas and also clarifies British policy toward the Floridas, Louisiana, and the entire Mississippi Valley in the 1782-1783 Paris peace negotiations

Changes in the gut microbiota of mice orally exposed to methylimidazolium ionic liquids

Ionic liquids are salts used in a variety of industrial processes, and being relatively non-volatile, are proposed as environmentally-friendly replacements for existing volatile liquids. Methylimidazolium ionic liquids resist complete degradation in the environment, likely because the imidazolium moiety does not exist naturally in biological systems. However, there is limited data available regarding their mammalian effects in vivo. This study aimed to examine the effects of exposing mice separately to 2 different methylimidazolium ionic liquids (BMI and M8OI) through their addition to drinking water. Potential effects on key target organs-the liver and kidney-were examined, as well as the gut microbiome. Adult male mice were exposed to drinking water containing ionic liquids at a concentration of 440 mg/L for 18 weeks prior to examination of tissues, serum, urine and the gut microbiome. Histopathology was performed on tissues and clinical chemistry on serum for biomarkers of hepatic and renal injury. Bacterial DNA was isolated from the gut contents and subjected to targeted 16S rRNA sequencing. Mild hepatic and renal effects were limited to glycogen depletion and mild degenerative changes respectively. No hepatic or renal adverse effects were observed. In contrast, ionic liquid exposure altered gut microbial composition but not overall alpha diversity. Proportional abundance of Lachnospiraceae, Clostridia and Coriobacteriaceae spp. were significantly greater in ionic liquid-exposed mice, as were predicted KEGG functional pathways associated with xenobiotic and amino acid metabolism. Exposure to ionic liquids via drinking water therefore resulted in marked changes in the gut microbiome in mice prior to any overt pathological effects in target organs. Ionic liquids may be an emerging risk to health through their potential effects on the gut microbiome, which is implicated in the causes and/or severity of an array of chronic disease in humans

Hepatic effects of tartrazine (E 102) after systemic exposure are independent of oestrogen receptor interactions in the mouse

Tartrazine is a food colour that activates the transcriptional function of the human oestrogen receptor alpha in an in vitro cell model. Since oestrogens are cholestatic, we hypothesised tartrazine will cause periportal injury to the liver in vivo. To test this hypothesis, tartrazine was initially administered systemically to mice resulting in a periportal recruitment of inflammatory cells, increased serum alkaline phosphatase activity and mild periportal fibrosis. To determine whether an oestrogenic effect may be a key event in this response, tartrazine, sulphonated metabolites and a food additive contaminant were screened for their ability to interact with murine oestrogen receptors. In all cases, there were no interactions as agonists or antagonists and further, no oestrogenicity was observed with tartrazine in an in vivo uterine growth assay. To examine the relevance of the hepatic effects of tartrazine to its use as a food additive, tartrazine was orally administered to transgenic NF-κB-Luc mice. Pre- and concurrent oral treatment with alcohol was incorporated given its potential to promote gut permeability and hepatic inflammation. Tartrazine alone induced NF- κB activities in the colon and liver but there was no periportal recruitment of inflammatory cells or fibrosis. Tartrazine, its sulphonated metabolites and the contaminant inhibited sulphotransferase activities in murine hepatic S9 extracts. Given the role of sulfotransferases in bile acid excretion, the initiating event giving rise to periportal inflammation and subsequent hepatic pathology through systemic tartrazine exposure is therefore potentially associated an inhibition of bile acid sulphation and excretion and not on oestrogen receptor-mediated transcriptional function. However, these effects were restricted to systemic exposures to tartrazine and did not occur to any significant effect after oral exposure

1.4 GHz polarimetric observations of the two fields imaged by the DASI experiment

We present results of polarization observations at 1.4 GHz of the two fields imaged by the DASI experiment ($\alpha = 23^{\rm h} 30^{\rm m}$, $\delta = -55^{\circ}$ and $\alpha = 00^{\rm h} 30^{\rm m}$, $\delta = -55^{\circ}$, respectively). Data were taken with the Australia Telescope Compact Array with 3.4 arcmin resolution and $\sim 0.18$ mJy beam$^{-1}$ sensitivity. The emission is dominated by point sources and we do not find evidence for diffuse synchrotron radiation even after source subtraction. This allows to estimate an upper limit of the diffuse polarized emission. The extrapolation to 30 GHz suggests that the synchrotron radiation is lower than the polarized signal measured by the DASI experiment by at least 2 orders of magnitude. This further supports the conclusions drawn by the DASI team itself about the negligible Galactic foreground contamination in their data set, improving by a factor $\sim 5$ the upper limit estimated by Leitch et al. (2005). The dominant point source emission allows us to estimate the contamination of the CMB by extragalactic foregrounds. We computed the power spectrum of their contribution and its extrapolation to 30 GHz provides a framework where the CMB signal should dominate. However, our results do not match the conclusions of the DASI team about the negligibility of point source contamination, suggesting to take into account a source subtraction from the DASI data.Comment: 7 pages, six figures, submitted to MNRA

Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Angular Power Spectra

We present the temperature and polarization angular power spectra of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) derived from the first 5 years of WMAP data. The 5-year temperature (TT) spectrum is cosmic variance limited up to multipole l=530, and individual l-modes have S/N>1 for l<920. The best fitting six-parameter LambdaCDM model has a reduced chi^2 for l=33-1000 of chi^2/nu=1.06, with a probability to exceed of 9.3%. There is now significantly improved data near the third peak which leads to improved cosmological constraints. The temperature-polarization correlation (TE) is seen with high significance. After accounting for foreground emission, the low-l reionization feature in the EE power spectrum is preferred by \Delta\chi^2=19.6 for optical depth tau=0.089 by the EE data alone, and is now largely cosmic variance limited for l=2-6. There is no evidence for cosmic signal in the BB, TB, or EB spectra after accounting for foreground emission. We find that, when averaged over l=2-6, l(l+1)C^{BB}_l/2\pi < 0.15 uK^2 (95% CL).Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, accepted by ApJ

Forecasting foreground impact on cosmic microwave background measurements

We explore the possible impact of galactic and extragalactic foregrounds on measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We find that, given our present understanding of the foregrounds, they are unlikely to qualitatively affect the ability of the MAP and Planck satellites to determine the angular power spectrum of the CMB, the key statistic for constraining cosmological parameters. Sufficiently far from the galactic plane, the only foregrounds that will affect power spectrum determination with any significance are the extragalactic ones. For MAP we find the most troublesome foregrounds are radio point sources and the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect. For Planck they are these same radio point sources and the Far Infrared Background. Prior knowledge of the statistics of the SZ component (either via theoretical calculation, or higher frequency observations of just a few percent of the sky, such as will be done by balloon-borne experiments) may significantly improve MAP's determination of the CMB power spectrum. We also explore the foreground impact on MAP and Planck polarization power spectrum measurements.Comment: 9 pages AAS LaTex with 4 included figure

Atmospheric phase correction using CARMA-PACS: high angular resolution observations of the FU Orionis star PP 13S*

We present 0".15 resolution observations of the 227 GHz continuum emission from the circumstellar disk around the FU Orionis star PP 13S*. The data were obtained with the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) Paired Antenna Calibration System (C-PACS), which measures and corrects the atmospheric delay fluctuations on the longest baselines of the array in order to improve the sensitivity and angular resolution of the observations. A description of the C-PACS technique and the data reduction procedures are presented. C-PACS was applied to CARMA observations of PP 13S*, which led to a factor of 1.6 increase in the observed peak flux of the source, a 36% reduction in the noise of the image, and a 52% decrease in the measured size of the source major axis. The calibrated complex visibilities were fitted with a theoretical disk model to constrain the disk surface density. The total disk mass from the best-fit model corresponds to 0.06 M_⊙, which is larger than the median mass of a disk around a classical T Tauri star. The disk is optically thick at a wavelength of 1.3 mm for orbital radii less than 48 AU. At larger radii, the inferred surface density of the PP 13S* disk is an order of magnitude lower than that needed to develop a gravitational instability

Status of CMB Polarization Measurements from DASI and Other Experiments

We review the current status and future plans for polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, as well as the cosmology these measurements will address. After a long period of increasingly sensitive upper limits, the DASI experiment has detected the E-mode polarization and both the DASI and WMAP experiments have detected the TE correlation. These detections provide confirmation of the standard model of adiabatic primordial density fluctuations consistent with inflationary models. The WMAP TE correlation on large angular scales provides direct evidence of significant reionization at higher redshifts than had previously been supposed. These detections mark the beginning of a new era in CMB measurements and the rich cosmology that can be gleaned from them.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures; To be published in the proceedings of "The Cosmic Microwave Background and its Polarization", New Astronomy Reviews, (eds. S. Hanany and K.A. Olive