Peculiar Quarantines: The Seamen Acts and Regulatory Authority in the Antebellum South

In 1824, the American schooner Fox sailed into Charleston harbor with seasoned mariner and Rhode Island native Amos Daley on board. When officials boarded the ship, they interrogated the captain and crew before cuffing Daley and hauling him off to the Charleston jail, where he remained until the Fox was set to leave harbor. Daley's detainment occurred because 16 months earlier the South Carolina General Assembly had enacted a statute barring the entrance of all free people of color into the state. Unlike other antebellum state statutes limiting black immigration, this law extended further, stretching to include in its prohibition maritime laborers aboard temporarily docked, commercial vessels. This particular section of the law was passed on the assumption that such sailors inspired slave insurrection and thereby posed a direct threat to the safety and welfare of the citizenry. Over the course of the next four decades, the states of North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas would join South Carolina in passing statutes, commonly referred to as the "Seamen Acts," which limited the ingress of free black mariners. Amos Daley was only one of ~10,000 sailors directly affected by these particularly Southern regulations

Overweight adolescents in West Virginia report healthier diet choices after a two-week residential camp

As the number of overweight adolescents in the United States continues to grow, effective methods of treatment intervention need to be established. The objective of this study was to determine if various methods of nutrition education is an effective approach to teach overweight 10-14 year-old adolescents (BMI ≥85th percentile on the CDC\u27s growth charts) in West Virginia to make healthier food choices. Twenty-four adolescents were recruited through schools, physician offices, and community programs to attend a two-week residential lifestyle-modification camp with three follow-up weekends over the next 12 months. Prior to attending the initial camp session, subjects were asked to complete a three-day diet journal. Three-months later, subjects were asked to complete a three-day diet journal before coming to the first follow-up weekend. While attending the camp session, subjects participated in four, 50 minute nutrition education lessons focusing on the Plate Method and \u27Always\u27 food choices vs. \u27Sometimes\u27 or \u27Sparing\u27 food choices. Only subjects with recorded pre- and post-camp diet journals were analyzed to determine statistical significance (N=10). Diet records prior to camp indicated that on average subjects were not meeting recommendations for servings of fruits, vegetables, milk, or whole grains, but were exceeding recommendations for soda/sweetened drinks and high fat/sugar foods. Diet records at follow-up indicate that on average subjects significantly increased fruit intake (P\u3c0.05) and significantly decreased soda/sweetened drink intake (P\u3c0.05) when compared to pre-camp diet journals. Diet records at follow-up indicate improvement in the number of times subjects reported eating vegetables, whole grains, and not eating high fat/sugar foods. No difference was noted in water consumption. Using a two-week residential camp to provide nutrition education is an effective way to help overweight adolescents make healthier food choices at snack- and meal-times

Eavesdropping on the enemy: The importance of chemical cues for inducible defenses

Many species rely on phenotypically plastic traits to defend themselves against predators and the induction of these phenotypes require reliable environmental cues. In aquatic systems, defensive phenotypes are induced by chemical cues emitted during predation events. Using larval amphibians as a model system, my dissertation focuses on how prey use the different types of chemical information available from predators (kairomones) and prey (alarm cues) and how prey integrate their defensive decisions in response to chemical cue variation over space and time. Predation cues contain information on the identity of the predator (kairomones) and the identity of the attacked prey (alarm cues). I have shown that different alarm cues (from different predator diets) induce different magnitudes of prey defense and discovered that the magnitude of the response depends on the evolutionary divergence time between the diet and the responding prey. Because chemical cues from consumed prey induce different suites of traits than cues from starved predators or damaged prey, I have also performed experiments to determine the role the predators themselves play in producing the cue (i.e. releasing a kairomone or digesting alarm cues). I found that digestion of the prey is essential to induce the complete suite of defensive traits. Because induced defenses have associated costs, prey should balance these costs and benefits by fine-tuning their responses to their environment over space and time. To do this, prey must be able to detect and respond to changes in risk when they move into new environments (spatially) or when predators come and go (temporally). I have found that tadpoles can detect small differences in risk, but that experiencing pulses of risk, when compared to a constant risk, largely does not alter their defensive decisions. Collectively, this work demonstrates the important role of environmental cues in understanding the ecology and evolution of inducible defenses

Mechanical and Thermal Properties of FDM Parts Manufactured with Polyamide 12

Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology which is used for prototypes, single-part production and also small batch productions. For use as a final product, it is important that the parts have good mechanical properties, high dimensional accuracy and smooth surfaces. The knowledge of the mechanical properties is very important for the design engineer when it comes to the component design. End-use products out of the FDM process have to resist applied forces. In this paper, investigations were conducted with the polymer Polyamide 12 (FDM Nylon 12) from Stratasys Inc. This polymer can be processed with three different tip sizes resulting in different layer thicknesses from 178 μm to 330 μm. Thus, the mechanical properties were determined for these layer thicknesses and for different orientations on the build platform. In addition to the mechanical properties the thermal properties (e.g. with a DSC analysis) are also investigated.Mechanical Engineerin

Materials

NASA Langley Research Center has successfully developed an electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF3) process, a rapid metal deposition process that works efficiently with a variety of weldable alloys. The EBF3 process can be used to build a complex, unitized part in a layer-additive fashion, although the more immediate payoff is for use as a manufacturing process for adding details to components fabricated from simplified castings and forgings or plate products. The EBF3 process produces structural metallic parts with strengths comparable to that of wrought product forms and has been demonstrated on aluminum, titanium, and nickel-based alloys to date. The EBF3 process introduces metal wire feedstock into a molten pool that is created and sustained using a focused electron beam in a vacuum environment. Operation in a vacuum ensures a clean process environment and eliminates the need for a consumable shield gas. Advanced metal manufacturing methods such as EBF3 are being explored for fabrication and repair of aerospace structures, offering potential for improvements in cost, weight, and performance to enhance mission success for aircraft, launch vehicles, and spacecraft. Near-term applications of the EBF3 process are most likely to be implemented for cost reduction and lead time reduction through addition of details onto simplified preforms (casting or forging). This is particularly attractive for components with protruding details that would require a significantly large volume of material to be machined away from an oversized forging, offering significant reductions to the buy-to-fly ratio. Future far-term applications promise improved structural efficiency through reduced weight and improved performance by exploiting the layer-additive nature of the EBF3 process to fabricate tailored unitized structures with functionally graded microstructures and compositions

Water Quality Regulation

While many of the water issues in New Mexico center around having an adequate supply of water, the quality of the water is just as important as the quantity in supplying water for drinking and other uses that rely on clean water. Protecting water quality is financially more feasible than conducting expensive cleanup programs. New Mexico has a strong interest in water quality regulation to protect public health and the environment and to minimize expenditures for mitigation of contaminated supplies. Water quality is a difficult subject to navigate; there is a complex web of statutes and agency involvement. This paper is intended to be a quick reference guide to an extremely complex topic

Estimation of the radioactive source dispersion from Fukushima nuclear power plant accident

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Annealing effect on coherent-incoherent interface tri-component nanoscale metallic multilayer thin films

Multilayer coatings provide an excellent medium for the study of nanoscale materials’ properties. It has previously been shown that Cu/Ni/Nb tri-component multilayers with coherent and incoherent interfaces have a greater capacity for strain hardening than a Cu-Ni/Nb system, in which only incoherent interfaces are present [1]. This experimental evidence supports the predictions of the confined layer slip model in that the modulus-mismatched coherent interfaces in the tri-layer system increase the capacity of the multilayer to store dislocations, leading to greater hardenability. In this work the same Cu/Ni/Nb tri-layers and Cu-Ni/Nb bilayers are investigated with regard to their thermal stability. In principle, the existence of coherent interfaces is expected to stabilise the tri-layer system against grain growth and hence softening of the multilayer following annealing. In actual fact, both the tri-layer and bilayer systems were observed to increase in hardness following annealing procedures at 300C and 500C (figure 1). X-ray diffraction (XRD) experiments suggest that microstructural changes are taking place in the coatings following even a modest anneal; peaks from Cu and Ni in the tri-layer system are observed to begin to merge and there is some evidence for new peaks forming. TEM specimens of the tri-layer and bilayer systems were produced in order to better investigate the microstructure of these multilayer systems before and after annealing. An FIB lift-out from an indented region of the as-deposited tri-layer indicates that the Cu/Ni interface is not completely coherent and that the three layers deform quite equally under indentation loading. Analysis of the annealed tri-layer and bilayer systems revealed that while the grain size is relatively stable, a Ni-Nb intermetallic is observed to form at the Ni/Nb, Cu-Ni/Nb and Cu/Nb interfaces (figure 2). It was also observed that considerable interdiffusion of Cu and Ni took place at 500C

Deformation and fracture mechanisms in nanocomposite and nanolaminate thin films revealed through combinatorial design and nanomechanical testing

We’ve integrated an atomic layer deposition (ALD), a physical vapor deposition (PVD) and a nanoparticle inert gas condensation (NP) deposition system into a single vacuum chamber. This combined system allows for PVD sputtering of micrometer thick films and incorporation of size filtered nanoparticles and/or controlled deposition of mono-layer highly conformal film coatings within a multilayer structure. In this way, unique model thin film microstructures can be architectured. We designed three thin films to understand the basic mechanism of plasticity and fracture in thin films: a) Al2O3 oxide films were deposited on combinatorial libraries of the ternary noble metal alloys with full compositional range to understand interfacial adhesion between oxide and noble metal alloys b) monosized tungsten nanoparticles were deposited at the interface of Cu/Ni multilayers to understand how thin film hardness and thermal stability can be engineered, c) ultrathin monolayers of Al2O3 layers were sandwiched between sputtered Al layers and micropillar compression was used to understand dislocation transmission and fracture across ultrathin ceramic layers. Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Impact of Monthly Radioxenon Source Time-Resolution on Atmospheric Concentration Predictions

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