Contagion and Enclaves

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines and new urban centres for Europeans. Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy and the social history of colonialism. It demonstrates that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. The book shows that the critical aspect of the enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy and international medical research

Editorial: photomechanics special issue

The term photomechanics refers to the use of light to determine distributions of quantities such as stress, displacement, strain and temperature in experimental solid and fluid mechanics. This special issue on photomechanics, comprising seven papers, provides a representative cross section of some of the current activity in this field, to illustrate trends in the technique development as well as new areas of application

Data on mass spectrometry based identification of allergens from sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) pollen proteome

AbstractAllergy is a type of abnormal immune reactions, which is triggered by environmental antigens or allergens and mediated by IgE antibodies. Now-a-days mass spectrometry is the method of choice for allergen identification based on homology searching. Here, we provide the mass spectrometry dataset associated with our previously published research article on identification of sunflower pollen allergens (Ghosh et al., 2015 [1]). In this study allergenicity of sunflower (Helianthus annuus) pollen grains were primarily investigated by clinical studies followed by detailed immunobiochemical and immunoproteomic analyses. The mass spectrometry data for the identification of allergens were deposited to ProteomeXchange Consortium via PRIDE partner repository with the dataset identifier http://www.ebi.ac.uk/pride/archive/projects/PXD002397

Particle-size dependence of orbital order-disorder transition in LaMnO3

The latent heat (L) associated with the orbital order-disorder transition at T_JT is found to depend significantly on the average particle size (d) of LaMnO3. It rises slowly with the decrease in d down to ~100 nm and then jumps by more than an order of magnitude in between d ~ 100 nm and ~30 nm. Finally, L falls sharply to zero at a critical particle size d_c ~ 19 nm. The transition temperature T_JT also exhibits an almost similar trend of variation with the particle size, near d ~ 30 nm and below, even though the extent of variation is relatively small. The zero-field-cooled (ZFC) and field-cooled (FC) magnetization versus temperature study over a temperature range 10-300 K reveals that the antiferromagnetic transition temperature decreases with d while the temperature range, over which the ZFC and FC data diverge, increases with the drop in d. The FC magnetization also is found to increase sharply with the drop in particle size. A conjecture of nonmonotonic variation in orbital domain structure with decrease in particle size - from smaller domains with large number of boundaries to larger domains with small number of boundaries due to lesser lattice defects and, finally, down to even finer domain structures with higher degree of metastability - along with increase in surface area in core-shell structure, could possibly rationalize the observed L versus d and T_JT versus d patterns. Transmission electron microscopy data provide evidence for presence of core-shell structure as well as for increase in lattice defects in finer particles.Comment: 26 pages including 5 figures; pdf only; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

The logic of location:Malaria research in colonial India, Darjeeling and Duars, 1900-30

This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of ‘location’ emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the ‘local’ emerged as both a prerequisite of colonial governance as well as a significant component of malaria research in the field. Despite the ambiguities that such a project entailed, tropical medicine was enriched from a diverse understanding of local ecology, habitation, and structural modes of production. Nevertheless, the locality itself did not benefit from anti-malarial policy undertaken either by medical experts or the colonial state. This article suggests that there was a disjuncture between ‘tropical medicine’ and its ‘field’ that could not be accommodated within the colonial plantation system