The Wandering Collection: The India Museum and Dialogues on Empire

Prince Albert’s positive response to the Great Exhibition of 1851 spawned several new museums in the South Kensington area, including the India Office’s India Museum. Scholars for the past century and a half have extensively studied all of these museums. Many of the museums that opened in the wake of this event were museums that revolved around the concept of education as discussed in Bruce Robertson’s 2004 article “The South Kensington Museum in Context: An Alternative History.” Robertson’s article is one of many that focuses on the creation of a museum and the roles that the director and staff played in that creation. Like many other historians, Robertson looks at a museum, in this case the South Kensington Museum, without looking at the wider context in which it was founded. Many of these histories do not include empire as a factor in the creation and day-to-day operations of these institutions. Those scholarly explorations which do involve empire such as the Smithsonian’s Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display tend to focus more on post-colonial representations of other cultures, such as the 1986 exhibition of Indian Art at the Grand Palais in Paris. In contrast, this paper examines the cultural dialogues regarding empire that took place between the educated British public and the Government through the collections of the India Museum. By tracing the collections of the India Museum between 1869 and 1883, it is evident that the British Government and the British people used cultural centers such as the former India Museum as a structure through which the perception of empire could be discussed, changed, and molded to fit changing conceptions of British national identity. In many ways, during this period British perception of empire changed from one sustained by trade to one sustained by culture. By utilizing the internal documents found in museum archives in London, this thesis is able the follow the internal, bureaucratic debates that occurred within this museum and how those debates correlated with larger events. This paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the trade background and focus of the India Museum as it came under the purview of the India Office, as well as how some in the British public received that background and focus. The second chapter explores how changes were made to the India Museum during the mid-1870s in response to public criticisms, including a move from the India Office building to a new home in South Kensington. The final chapter traces the India Museum’s collections through their dispersal to the South Kensington Museum and the ways in which that dispersal reflected shifting perceptions of empire from a solely financial institution to one with a variety of functions.Bachelor of Art

Sensitivity of the IceCube Upgrade to Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations

IceCube DeepCore, the existing low-energy extension of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, was designed to lower the neutrino detection energy threshold to the GeV range. A new extension, called the IceCube Upgrade, will consist of seven additional strings installed within the DeepCore fiducial volume. The new modules will have spacings of about 20 m horizontally and 3 m vertically, compared to about 40-70 m horizontally and 7 m vertically in DeepCore. It will be deployed in the polar season of 2025/26. This additional hardware features new types of optical modules with multi-PMT configurations, as well as calibration devices. This upgrade will more than triple the number of PMT channels with respect to current IceCube, and will significantly enhance its capabilities in the GeV energy range. However, the increased channel count also poses new computational challenges for the event simulation, selection, and reconstruction. In this contribution we present updated oscillation sensitivities based on the latest advancements in simulation, event selection, and reconstruction techniques.Comment: Presented at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2023). See arXiv:2307.13047 for all IceCube contribution

Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Engrafted IL-15 Transgenic NSG Mice Support Robust NK Cell Responses and Sustained HIV-1 Infection.

Mice reconstituted with human immune systems are instrumental in the investigation of HIV-1 pathogenesis and therapeutics. Natural killer (NK) cells have long been recognized as a key mediator of innate anti-HIV responses. However, established humanized mouse models do not support robust human NK cell development from engrafted human hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). A major obstacle to human NK cell reconstitution is the lack of human interleukin-15 (IL-15) signaling, as murine IL-15 is a poor stimulator of the human IL-15 receptor. Here, we demonstrate that immunodeficient NOD.Cg-Prkdcscid Il2rgtm1Wjl/SzJ (NSG) mice expressing a transgene encoding human IL-15 (NSG-Tg(IL-15)) have physiological levels of human IL-15 and support long-term engraftment of human NK cells when transplanted with human umbilical-cord-blood-derived HSCs. These Hu-NSG-Tg(IL-15) mice demonstrate robust and long-term reconstitution with human immune cells, but do not develop graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), allowing for long-term studies of human NK cells. Finally, we show that these HSC engrafted mice can sustain HIV-1 infection, resulting in human NK cell responses in HIV-infected mice. We conclude that Hu-NSG-Tg(IL-15) mice are a robust novel model to study NK cell responses to HIV-1

2018-2019 Mostly Music: Johann Sebastian Bach

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_mostlymusic/1031/thumbnail.jp

2016-2017 Mostly Music: Felix Mendelssohn

https://spiral.lynn.edu/conservatory_mostlymusic/1026/thumbnail.jp

One-shot identification of SARS-CoV-2 S RBD escape mutants using yeast screening

The potential emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike (S) escape mutants is a threat to the efficacy of existing vaccines and neutralizing antibody (nAb) therapies. An understanding of the antibody/S escape mutation landscape is urgently needed to preemptively address this threat. Here we describe a rapid method to identify escape mutants for nAbs targeting the S receptor binding site. We identified escape mutants for five nAbs, including three from the public germline class VH3-53 elicited by natural coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. Escape mutations predominantly mapped to the periphery of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) recognition site on the RBD with K417, D420, Y421, F486, and Q493 as notable hotspots. We provide libraries, methods, and software as an openly available community resource to accelerate new therapeutic strategies against SARS-CoV-2. &nbsp;</p

Multi-messenger searches via IceCube’s high-energy neutrinos and gravitational-wave detections of LIGO/Virgo

We summarize initial results for high-energy neutrino counterpart searches coinciding with gravitational-wave events in LIGO/Virgo\u27s GWTC-2 catalog using IceCube\u27s neutrino triggers. We did not find any statistically significant high-energy neutrino counterpart and derived upper limits on the time-integrated neutrino emission on Earth as well as the isotropic equivalent energy emitted in high-energy neutrinos for each event

In-situ estimation of ice crystal properties at the South Pole using LED calibration data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory instruments about 1 km3 of deep, glacial ice at the geographic South Pole using 5160 photomultipliers to detect Cherenkov light emitted by charged relativistic particles. A unexpected light propagation effect observed by the experiment is an anisotropic attenuation, which is aligned with the local flow direction of the ice. Birefringent light propagation has been examined as a possible explanation for this effect. The predictions of a first-principles birefringence model developed for this purpose, in particular curved light trajectories resulting from asymmetric diffusion, provide a qualitatively good match to the main features of the data. This in turn allows us to deduce ice crystal properties. Since the wavelength of the detected light is short compared to the crystal size, these crystal properties do not only include the crystal orientation fabric, but also the average crystal size and shape, as a function of depth. By adding small empirical corrections to this first-principles model, a quantitatively accurate description of the optical properties of the IceCube glacial ice is obtained. In this paper, we present the experimental signature of ice optical anisotropy observed in IceCube LED calibration data, the theory and parametrization of the birefringence effect, the fitting procedures of these parameterizations to experimental data as well as the inferred crystal properties.</p