Rocket Ships, Emotions, and Disgusting Wealth: The Emotional Significance of the Billionaire Space Race

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Dual regimes of ion migration in high repetition rate femtosecond laser inscribed waveguides

Ion migration in high repetition rate femtosecond laser inscribed waveguides is currently being reported in different optical glasses. For the first time we discuss and experimentally demonstrate the presence of two regimes of ion migration found in laser written waveguides. Regime-I, corresponds to the initial waveguide formation mainly via light element migration (in our case atomic weight < 31u), whereas regime-II majorly corresponds to the movement of heavy elements. This behavior brings attention to a problem which has never been analyzed before and that affects laser written active waveguides in which active ions migrate changing their local spectroscopic properties. The migration of active ions may in fact detune the pre-designed optimal values of active photonic devices. This paper experimentally evidences this problem and provides solutions to avert it.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Revealing invisible brews: a new approach to the chemical identification of ancient beer

While ancient Near Eastern cuneiform texts and iconography unambiguously demonstrate the social, economic, and ritual significance of beer, direct archaeological evidence for beer production or consumption remains surprisingly rare. This scarcity of material evidence renders it difficult to extrapolate information about the ingredients and production processes of beer, on the one hand, and the paraphernalia and social contexts of its consumption, on the other. In recent decades, organic residue analysis has become an essential tool in the identification of ancient alcoholic beverages, but research on Near Eastern beer has focused largely on production and storage vessels, whose form, archaeological context, and associated macroscopic residues already indicated their use in beer production. In this paper, we present a novel field sampling protocol that prevents contamination along with a refined organic residue analysis methodology that relies on a series of co-occurring compounds to identify confidently beer in ceramic vessels. The same compounds were identified in several modern beer samples and, thus, support our identification of a similar fermented barley-based beverage in archaeological samples from the late second millennium BCE site of Khani Masi in northeastern Iraq. The results presented in this paper allow us, for the first time, to unambiguously link a diverse range of vessel types to the consumption and production of beer, identify a fundamental change in Mesopotamian consumption practices, and shed light on the cultural dimensions of Babylonia's encounter with the Zagros-Mesopotamian borderlands