Effects of Glacial Stressors on Sperm Maturation in Colonies of the Red Tree Coral, Primnoa pacifica

The red tree coral, Primnoa pacifica, is a large, colony forming species of cold- water coral which is often an important habitat for many commercially important species of fish and crab. This keystone species is long lived and found at much shallower depths in the fjords of Glacier Bay National Park (GBNP) than elsewhere in the northern Pacific Ocean because of the phenomenon known as deep-water emergence. Due to their proximity to tidewater glaciers in GBNP, corals likely have to endure glacial stressors such as freshwater runoff and sedimentation that is not typical of populations in deeper water, which can affect physiological processes such as growth and reproduction. This study compared male colonies of Primnoa pacifica between three regions of GBNP to determine the correlation between glacial proximity and the colonies’ ability to produce fully mature spermatocytes. This study found that there is no significant difference in the size of sperm nuclei in colonies from regions at different distances from the glaciers across GBNP. This could suggest that all male colonies across the West Arm of GBNP are synchronized in their reproductive cycles due to an environmental cue that is felt across the entire fjord. Further study to determine the nature of this potential environmental cue could be valuable in understanding how climate change and warming oceans could affect populations of cold-water coral

Southern Manhood At The Margins

The study of southern masculinity is robust, with historians examining diverse groups of men beyond the planter class that jumpstarted the field. These two works feature men at the South\u27s physical and cultural margins. Joseph M. Beilein Jr.\u27s work on Missouri guerillas depicts men who, although the...

A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War

Antebellum politicians knew that words mattered. In 1856 Louisianan Judah P. Benjamin complained in the Senate that remarks made by antislavery colleague William H. Seward “will be spread through the machinery of the federal post office. It is printed in your [Congressional] Globe. It will be read, probably, by millions of people.” “No such faint voice as mine,” Benjamin whined, “can follow it to every village, to every hamlet, to every cottage to which it has spread.”The prospect of antislavery sentiment invading southern villages, hamlets, and cottages worried this slaveholding politician. Years after the Compromise of 1850 had supposedly achieved “finality,” political disputes over slavery had not ceased and the acrimonious language of the Compromise debate still shaped how Americans thought about slavery, race, and sectionalism. In A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War, Stephen E. Maizlish explains why words alarmed. In this extensively researched work of political, intellectual, and cultural history, Maizlish recounts how the Compromise debate, far from mollifying sectionalism, only sharpened divisions between slave states and free states and established an ideological framework in which the ensuing sectional crisis would unfold

Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s

Navigating Troubled Waters Pundits and journalists are often quick to despair of America’s legislative branch when they perceive that partisanship or deep-seated ideological differences stymie congressional efficiency. Such alarmist assertions rest on the assumption that a golden age o...

An end-to-end framework for real-time automatic sleep stage classification.

Sleep staging is a fundamental but time consuming process in any sleep laboratory. To greatly speed up sleep staging without compromising accuracy, we developed a novel framework for performing real-time automatic sleep stage classification. The client-server architecture adopted here provides an end-to-end solution for anonymizing and efficiently transporting polysomnography data from the client to the server and for receiving sleep stages in an interoperable fashion. The framework intelligently partitions the sleep staging task between the client and server in a way that multiple low-end clients can work with one server, and can be deployed both locally as well as over the cloud. The framework was tested on four datasets comprising ≈1700 polysomnography records (≈12000 hr of recordings) collected from adolescents, young, and old adults, involving healthy persons as well as those with medical conditions. We used two independent validation datasets: one comprising patients from a sleep disorders clinic and the other incorporating patients with Parkinson's disease. Using this system, an entire night's sleep was staged with an accuracy on par with expert human scorers but much faster (≈5 s compared with 30-60 min). To illustrate the utility of such real-time sleep staging, we used it to facilitate the automatic delivery of acoustic stimuli at targeted phase of slow-sleep oscillations to enhance slow-wave sleep

Probing the connectivity of neural circuits at single-neuron resolution using high-throughput DNA sequencing

There is growing excitement in determining the complete connectivity diagram of the brain—the "connectome". So far, the complete connectome has been established for only one organism, C. elegans, with 302 neurons connected by about 7000 synapses—and even this was a heroic task, requiring over 50 person-years of labor. Like all current approaches, this reconstruction was based on microscopy. Unfortunately, microscopy is poorly suited to the study of neural connectivity because brains are macroscopic structures, whereas synapses are microscopic. Nevertheless, there are several large-scale projects underway to scale up high-throughput microscopic approaches to the connectome.
Here we present a completely novel method for determining the brain's wiring diagram based on high-throughput DNA sequencing technology, which has not previously been applied in the context of neural connectivity. The appeal of using sequencing is that it is getting faster and cheaper exponentially: it will soon be routine to sequence an entire human genome (~3B nucleotides) within one day for $1000.
Our approach has three main components. First, we express a unique sequence of nucleotides—a DNA "barcode"—in individual neurons. A barcode consisting of a random string of even 30 nucleotides can uniquely label 10^{18} neurons, far more than the number of neurons in a mouse brain (fewer than 100 million). Second, we use a specially engineered transsynaptic virus to transport “host” barcodes from one neuron to synaptically coupled partners; after transsynaptic spread, each neuron contains copies of "invader" barcodes from other synaptically coupled neurons, as well its own "host" barcode. Third, we join pairs of host and invader barcodes into single pieces of DNA suitable for high-throughput sequencing. 
Modern sequencing technology could in principle yield the connectivity diagram of the entire mouse brain. Similar approaches can be applied to Drosophila and C. elegans. 
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Preserving the White Man's Republic: The Democratic Party and the Transformation of American Conservatism, 1847-1860

In the late 1840s and 1850s, the American Democratic party redefined itself as “conservative.” Yet Democrats’ preexisting dedication to majoritarian democracy, liberal individualism, and white supremacy had not changed. Democrats believed that “fanatical” reformers, who opposed slavery and advanced the rights of African Americans and women, imperiled the white man’s republic they had crafted in the early 1800s. There were no more abstract notions of freedom to boundlessly unfold; there was only the existing liberty of white men to conserve. Democrats therefore recast democracy, previously a progressive means to expand rights, as a way for local majorities to police racial and gender boundaries. In the process, they reinvigorated American conservatism by placing it on a foundation of majoritarian democracy. Empowering white men to democratically govern all other Americans, Democrats contended, would preserve their prerogatives. With the policy of “popular sovereignty,” for instance, Democrats left slavery’s expansion to territorial settlers’ democratic decision-making. Democrats also applied democracy and individualism to temperance, religious liberty, and nativism. Democratic conservatism would protect white men against “fanaticism,” an ideology which countenanced governmental imposition of moral norms. Democratic principles united white men from the Slave States and Free States, Catholics and Protestants, conservative former Whigs, and native and foreign-born Americans with the promise of moral autonomy on issues like slavery. In addition to political principles, Democrats also ascribed to shared cultural prescriptions regarding whiteness, manhood, and domesticity. As became clear by the late 1850s, however, majoritarian democracy could actually destabilize racial and gender boundaries. Local democracy could undermine the white man’s republic, especially when marginalized Americans turned democracy to their own ends. In basing a conservative political order on the instability of democracy, Democrats failed to bulwark white supremacy and slavery, but did place American conservatism on a new, populist trajectory. The tenets of modern conservatism, culminating in the twentieth and twenty-first-century New Right, coalesced during the 1850s debates over white supremacy and slavery. Historicizing the conjunction of conservative thought and democratic practice reveals the point at which majoritarian democracy and “liberal” antistatism and individualism became the “conservative” means for upholding a specific racial and gendered order.Doctor of Philosoph

Half-baked men: doughface masculinity and the antebellum politics of household

In the antebellum politics of household, political legitimacy stemmed from domestic life. As white northern families and southern plantation households constituted distinct domesticities, northern Doughface Democrats betrayed the northern home by catering to southern planters. Doughfaces argued that they demonstrated a manly independence in treating all families equally. In reality, however, their doctrine of popular sovereignty unfairly benefited southern households in the federal territories in the late 1840s and 1850s. Antislavery northerners responded with accusations of unmasculine servility. In the 1856 presidential election, Democrats portrayed James Buchanan, a Doughface and a bachelor, as a man who transcended competing conceptions of the household. At the same time, they offered him to southern voters as a fellow paternalist. Northerners subsequently charged Buchanan with treason against the northern home and against the concept of household itself. Doughfacism illustrates the intersection of politics, gender, and domesticity, and how political culture began at home

Ship Ashore! : The Role of Risk in the Development of the United States Life-Saving Service and its Effects on Wrecking Patterns Along the North Carolina Coast

Prior to the 1870s bloated corpses, splintered masts, and floating cargoes often littered the isolated beaches of the Eastern United States, becoming a tragic but nearly ubiquitous sight. For those in peril upon the seas, the icy grip of death often consumed sailors with little hope of rescue. For centuries, the shifting sands of the North Carolina Outer Banks claimed hundreds of vessels, earning its nickname "the Graveyard of the Atlantic." It was on these narrow strands of barrier islands that, between 1874 and 1915, the United States Life Saving Service (USLSS) established twenty-nine stations along the North Carolina shoreline, becoming a major component of the area's cultural landscape. This thesis examines the development of the USLSS on the North Carolina coast and will specifically focus on the role of risk management and the Service's overall effect on wrecking patterns.   This thesis utilizes two distinct theoretical approaches regarding the study of risk and its affect on society, Anthony Giddens's Theory of Structuration and Stephen Crook's risk management strategies. Through the utilization of these two theoretical frameworks, one can examine the element of risk as a measurable entity that commanded considerable importance in the development of the USLSS and the subsequent effects on local wrecking patterns. Through the use of statistical and geospatial analysis, this thesis identifies quantifiable measures of risk in the operations of the USLSS and gauges the effects of risk on local wrecking patterns within a fifteen-mile radius of Oregon Inlet, NC.  M.A