Understanding Early Modern Beer: An Interdisciplinary Case-Study

Beer was a staple of early modern diets across northern Europe and the Atlantic World. While its profound social, economic, and cultural significance is well established, little is known about the nature and quality of the drink itself, particularly its nutritional characteristics. Until now, attempts to estimate calorie and alcohol content have been monodisciplinary in approach, involving either theoretical calculations based on grain content, or a rough approximation with modern equivalents. Using sixteenth-century Ireland as a case-study, this article describes an interdisciplinary approach to the problem of early modern beer. Exploiting a rich seam of unpublished archival material, the project recreates an early modern beer, using the most appropriate ingredients, equipment, and processes possible. Scientific analysis of the finished drink offers new perspectives on beer as a dietary staple. The project is a model for integrating practical or experimental approaches into mainstream historical study, and the practice of radical interdisciplinarity. It represents the most comprehensive effort to recreate an historic beer in any context to date, bringing together historians, experimental archaeologists, agronomists, microbiologists, brewing scientists, craftworkers, farmers, and maltsters to tackle problematic questions about the past

A dynamic microsimulation model for epidemics.

Funder: Aerospace Technology InstituteFunder: UK Research and InnovationFunder: The Alan Turing InstituteA large evidence base demonstrates that the outcomes of COVID-19 and national and local interventions are not distributed equally across different communities. The need to inform policies and mitigation measures aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 highlights the need to understand the complex links between our daily activities and COVID-19 transmission that reflect the characteristics of British society. As a result of a partnership between academic and private sector researchers, we introduce a novel data driven modelling framework together with a computationally efficient approach to running complex simulation models of this type. We demonstrate the power and spatial flexibility of the framework to assess the effects of different interventions in a case study where the effects of the first UK national lockdown are estimated for the county of Devon. Here we find that an earlier lockdown is estimated to result in a lower peak in COVID-19 cases and 47% fewer infections overall during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The framework we outline here will be crucial in gaining a greater understanding of the effects of policy interventions in different areas and within different populations

Dust attenuation in disk-dominated galaxies: evidence for the 2175A dust feature

The attenuation of starlight by interstellar dust is investigated in a sample of low redshift, disk-dominated star-forming galaxies using photometry from GALEX and SDSS. By considering broadband colors as a function of galaxy inclination we are able to confidently separate trends arising from increasing dust opacity from possible differences in stellar populations, since stellar populations do not correlate with inclination. All commonly employed dust attenuation curves (such as the Calzetti curve for starbursts, or a power-law curve) provide poor fits to the ultraviolet colors for moderately and highly inclined galaxies. This conclusion rests on the fact that the average FUV-NUV color varies little from face-on to edge-on galaxies, while other colors such as NUV-u and u-r vary strongly with inclination. After considering a number of model variations, we are led to speculate that the presence of the strong dust extinction feature at 2175A seen in the Milky Way (MW) extinction curve is responsible for the observed trends. Independent of our interpretation, these results imply that the modeling of dust attenuation in the ultraviolet is significantly more complicated than traditionally assumed. These results also imply a very weak dependence of the FUV-NUV color on total FUV attenuation, and we conclude from this that it is extremely difficult to use only the observed UV spectral slope to infer the total UV dust attenuation, as is commonly done. We propose several simple tests that might finally identify the grain population responsible for the 2175A feature.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures. ApJ accepte

Assessing the distribution and relative abundance of wobbegong sharks (Orectolobidae) in New South Wales, Australia, using recreational scuba-divers

Wobbegongs are benthic sharks that are commercially targeted in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Given a dramatic reduction of more than 50% in landed catch in a decade, there is a clear need to ensure that basic ecological data such as distribution and abundance are available for management use. Opportunistic sightings of wobbegongs collected by recreational scuba-divers were used to assess the distribution and relative abundance of wobbegongs in NSW. From July 2003 until January 2005, 304 dives were undertaken by recreational divers and 454 wobbegongs were reported. Larger numbers of wobbegongs were sighted in northern compared to southern NSW. Spotted and ornate wobbegongs were sighted in similar numbers, but species composition was highly variable across locations. Only a few juvenile and newborn spotted wobbegongs were sighted, whereas small ornate wobbegongs were mostly sighted north of central NSW. The latter were possibly the third, cryptic species, the dwarf ornate wobbegong. The paucity of sightings of small wobbegongs suggests that juveniles and newborns are inconspicuous to divers or that small wobbegongs are found in areas not visited by divers. Potential species and size segregation suggest that closing areas to fishing may enable populations to sustain current levels of commercial exploitation. The cost-effectiveness of using recreational scuba-divers to opportunistically collect distribution and relative abundance data was apparent from this study. However, the lack of spatial and temporal homogeneity in diving effort suggests that future studies should consider incorporating organized surveys and a facilitator, rather than using opportunistic records of sightings.10 page(s

A dynamic microsimulation model for epidemics

A large evidence base demonstrates that the outcomes of COVID-19 and national and local interventions are not distributed equally across different communities. The need to inform policies and mitigation measures aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 highlights the need to understand the complex links between our daily activities and COVID-19 transmission that reflect the characteristics of British society. As a result of a partnership between academic and private sector researchers, we introduce a novel data driven modelling framework together with a computationally efficient approach to running complex simulation models of this type. We demonstrate the power and spatial flexibility of the framework to assess the effects of different interventions in a case study where the effects of the first UK national lockdown are estimated for the county of Devon. Here we find that an earlier lockdown is estimated to result in a lower peak in COVID-19 cases and 47% fewer infections overall during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. The framework we outline here will be crucial in gaining a greater understanding of the effects of policy interventions in different areas and within different populations