Class Warfare: Did Socioeconomic Divisions Undermine The South?

There is no mistaking the theme of this passionate book: the Confederacy lost the Civil War because of the arrogance and avarice of the planter class. The planters started a conflict that they alone wanted, contends David Williams, and they did nothing during the course of the rebellion to win the ...

Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign

Revitalizing the Importance of the Prairie Grove Campaign If further proof were needed of William L. Shea’s mastery of the Civil War campaign history, this is it. A professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, Shea has previously coauthored splendid studies of the ...

Deoxyfluorination using CuF2 : enabled by a Lewis base activating group strategy

We thank the University of St Andrews for PhD studentships (D.E.S and S.C.), GlaxoSmithKline and the University of Glasgow for financial support.Deoxyfluorination is a primary method for the formation of C–F bonds. Bespoke reagents are commonly used due to issues associated with the low reactivity of metal fluorides. Here, we report the development of a simple strategy for deoxyfluorination using first‐row transition metal fluorides that overcomes these limitations. Using CuF2 as an exemplar, activation of an O ‐alkylisourea adduct formed in situ allows effective nucleophilic fluoride transfer to a range of primary and secondary alcohols. Spectroscopic investigations have been used to probe the origin of the enhanced reactivity of CuF2 . The utility of the process towards enabling 18F‐radiolabeling is also presented.PostprintPeer reviewe

Alternating Spin and Orbital Dimerization in Strong-coupling Two-band Models

We study a one-dimensional Hamiltonian consisting of coupled SU(2) spin and orbital degrees of freedom. Using the density matrix renormalization group, we calculate the phase-diagram and the ground state correlation functions for this model. We find that, in addition to the ferromagnetic and power-law antiferromagnetic phases for spin and orbital degrees of freedom, this model has a gapless line extending from the ferromagnetic phase to the Bethe ansatz solvable SU(4) critical point, and a gapped phase with doubly degenerate ground states which form alternating spin and orbital singlets. The spin-gap and the order parameters are evaluated and the relevance to several recently discovered spin-gap materials is discussed.Comment: 4 pages REVTEX and 4 Postscript figure

Bostonia: The Boston University Alumni Magazine. Volume 11

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs

Schur Polynomials and the Yang-Baxter equation

We show that within the six-vertex model there is a parametrized Yang-Baxter equation with nonabelian parameter group GL(2)xGL(1) at the center of the disordered regime. As an application we rederive deformations of the Weyl character formule of Tokuyama and of Hamel and King.Comment: Revised introduction; slightly changed reference

Physiology, behavior, and conservation

Many animal populations are in decline as a result of human activity. Conservation practitioners are attempting to prevent further declines and loss of biodiversity as well as to facilitate recovery of endangered species, and they often rely on interdisciplinary approaches to generate conservation solutions. Two recent interfaces in conservation science involve animal behavior (i.e., conservation behavior) and physiology (i.e., conservation physiology). To date, these interfaces have been considered separate entities, but from both pragmatic and biological perspectives, there is merit in better integrating behavior and physiology to address applied conservation problems and to inform resource management. Although there are some institutional, conceptual, methodological, and communication-oriented challenges to integrating behavior and physiology to inform conservation actions, most of these barriers can be overcome. Through outlining several successful examples that integrate these disciplines, we conclude that physiology and behavior can together generate meaningful data to support animal conservation and management actions. Tangentially, applied conservation and management problems can, in turn, also help advance and reinvigorate the fundamental disciplines of animal physiology and behavior by providing advanced natural experiments that challenge traditional frameworks

Understanding Urban Demand for Wild Meat in Vietnam: Implications for Conservation Actions

Vietnam is a significant consumer of wildlife, particularly wild meat, in urban restaurant settings. To meet this demand, poaching of wildlife is widespread, threatening regional and international biodiversity. Previous interventions to tackle illegal and potentially unsustainable consumption of wild meat in Vietnam have generally focused on limiting supply. While critical, they have been impeded by a lack of resources, the presence of increasingly organised criminal networks and corruption. Attention is, therefore, turning to the consumer, but a paucity of research investigating consumer demand for wild meat will impede the creation of effective consumer-centred interventions. Here we used a mixed-methods research approach comprising a hypothetical choice modelling survey and qualitative interviews to explore the drivers of wild meat consumption and consumer preferences among residents of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Our findings indicate that demand for wild meat is heterogeneous and highly context specific. Wild-sourced, rare, and expensive wild meat-types are eaten by those situated towards the top of the societal hierarchy to convey wealth and status and are commonly consumed in lucrative business contexts. Cheaper, legal and farmed substitutes for wild-sourced meats are also consumed, but typically in more casual consumption or social drinking settings. We explore the implications of our results for current conservation interventions in Vietnam that attempt to tackle illegal and potentially unsustainable trade in and consumption of wild meat and detail how our research informs future consumer-centric conservation actions

Plant polyphenols inhibit functional amyloid and biofilm formation in <i>Pseudomonas</i> strains by directing monomers to off-pathway oligomers

Self-assembly of proteins to &beta;-sheet rich amyloid fibrils is commonly observed in various neurodegenerative diseases. However, amyloid also occurs in the extracellular matrix of bacterial biofilm, which protects bacteria from environmental stress and antibiotics. Many Pseudomonas strains produce functional amyloid where the main component is the highly fibrillation-prone protein FapC. FapC fibrillation may be inhibited by small molecules such as plant polyphenols, which are already known to inhibit formation of pathogenic amyloid, but the mechanism and biological impact of inhibition is unclear. Here, we elucidate how polyphenols modify the self-assembly of functional amyloid, with particular focus on epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), penta-O-galloyl-&beta;-d-glucose (PGG), baicalein, oleuropein, and procyanidin B2. We find EGCG and PGG to be the best inhibitors. These compounds inhibit amyloid formation by redirecting the aggregation of FapC monomers into oligomeric species, which according to small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) measurements organize into core-shell complexes of short axis diameters 25&ndash;26 nm consisting of ~7 monomers. Using peptide arrays, we identify EGCG-binding sites in FapC&rsquo;s linker regions, C and N-terminal parts, and high amyloidogenic sequences located in the R2 and R3 repeats. We correlate our biophysical observations to biological impact by demonstrating that the extent of amyloid inhibition by the different inhibitors correlated with their ability to reduce biofilm, highlighting the potential of anti-amyloid polyphenols as therapeutic agents against biofilm infections

The C4 Clustering Algorithm: Clusters of Galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We present the "C4 Cluster Catalog", a new sample of 748 clusters of galaxies identified in the spectroscopic sample of the Second Data Release (DR2) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The C4 cluster--finding algorithm identifies clusters as overdensities in a seven-dimensional position and color space, thus minimizing projection effects which plagued previous optical clusters selection. The present C4 catalog covers ~2600 square degrees of sky with groups containing 10 members to massive clusters having over 200 cluster members with redshifts. We provide cluster properties like sky location, mean redshift, galaxy membership, summed r--band optical luminosity (L_r), velocity dispersion, and measures of substructure. We use new mock galaxy catalogs to investigate the sensitivity to the various algorithm parameters, as well as to quantify purity and completeness. These mock catalogs indicate that the C4 catalog is ~90% complete and 95% pure above M_200 = 1x10^14 solar masses and within 0.03 <=z <= 0.12. The C4 algorithm finds 98% of X-ray identified clusters and 90% of Abell clusters within 0.03 <= z <= 0.12. We show that the L_r of a cluster is a more robust estimator of the halo mass (M_200) than the line-of-sight velocity dispersion or the richness of the cluster. L_r. The final SDSS data will provide ~2500 C4 clusters and will represent one of the largest and most homogeneous samples of local clusters.Comment: 32 pages of figures and text accepted in AJ. Electronic version with additional tables, links, and figures is available at http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~chrism/c