Future archaeologies : method and story.

This will be an account of an ongoing experiment called 'future archaeology'. Despite it’s name it's not strictly an archaeological experiment, since I’m not an archaeologist. Nor is it strictly scientific, since I’m not a natural scientist. However, it is an empirical experiment: it draws on evidence, it draws on artefacts, it has a method, and is theoretically grounded in critical social sciences, science studies, anthropology, and archaeological theory

The Art and Craft of Train Travel.

Current theories concerning the social and material construction of time and space have little to say concerning the specific things and people involved. For example, how do times and spaces get made on a train—with passengers, train seats, tables, and views through the window? Through a travelogue of one train journey across England, this paper explores the art and craft of train travel, and the making of a particular time and space. The paper draws together science studies approaches to socio-material relations, and geographical concerns with socio-spatiality, to discuss passengers as spatially distributed persons and property. Reflecting on ethnographic evidence in the form of quotations and photographs woven through the text, it demonstrates how these heterogeneous passengers craft their travel times as an effect of their travel time use; how socio-material interactions with pens, papers, puzzles and electricity pylons make time. Following Michel Serres, it also suggests how passenger time is not a simple flow but a percolation, and how these passenger times coalesce in train carriages to form communities. The paper is itself a journey, in the form of words and images, which begins and ends with the imaginary, social, and material work of making a destination

The role of FUBP3 in osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a disease of low bone mineral density (BMD) and altered bone architecture leading to an increased risk of fracture. Worldwide, osteoporosis affects millions of people and causes an enormous and increasing healthcare burden. Reduced BMD is the major risk factor for fracture and is a highly heritable trait. Genome wide association studies (GWAS) have identifed the 9q34.11 locus containing Far Upstream Binding Protein 3 (FUBP3) as associated with BMD, fracture and height. FUBP3 is a DNA and RNA binding protein and transcriptional regulator of c-myc, but has no previously confrmed role in the skeleton. I hypothesised that FUBP3 is the causative gene underlying the association with BMD, fracture and height at the 9q34.11 locus and that FUBP3 is needed for normal bone development and maintenance. To test this hypothesis, I used bioinformatic tools to interrogate the 9q34.11 locus and prioritise FUBP3 for further study and studied the skeletal phenotype of an FUBP3 deficient mouse. Skeletal assessment included analysis of growth, bone mineral content and bone structure, strength, and cellular parameters. Analysis of the 9q34.11 locus confirmed that FUBP3 was the most likely causal gene underlying the association with BMD and was expressed in bone. Compared to wild type mice, FUBP3 defcient mice were short and demonstrated reduced bone mineral content, altered trabecular bone parameters and reduced strength, suggesting an important role of FUBP3 in both development and adult bone maintenance. Finally, I investigated the cellular phenotype underlying the skeletal changes seen with FUBP3 loss. These did not demonstrate a deficit in osteoblastic bone formation or osteoclastic bone resorption with FUBP3 deficiency. Nevertheless, the data presented in this thesis provide the first demonstration of a functional role of FUBP3 in the skeleton and confirm FUBP3 as the most likely causal gene at the 9q34.11 BMD, height and fracture GWAS locus.Open Acces

Inward and Onward: An Autoethnography on the Lived Experience of Love, Loss, and Grief in a Doctoral Program

While research around attrition during doctoral programs exists, the lived experience of grief during a doctoral program has little footing in the current literature. This autoethnography examined the lived experience of one doctoral student, acting as both the researcher and the researched. The purpose of this study was to have a meaningful understanding of the broad grief process, and its impact on one doctoral student’s identity development through sharing, analyzing, and interpreting their most raw stories in an effort to name and normalize the challenges and opportunities related to doctoral program persistence and identity development. The following research questions were explored: Q1 What might I learn about the way that my life’s primary grief experience transformed my sense of identity as a doctoral student using autoethnography to evoke, recall, write about, and analyze my experiences and my reactions to them? Q2 What can doctoral students, program faculty, administrators and other stakeholders learn from my experience that may help students persist toward completion of their programs in the face of grief experiences of their own? Exploration and analysis uncovered themes related to academic persistence, identity development, and completion with regard to living through a grief experience during a doctoral program. This narrative description of the lived experience of grief may illuminate often taken-for-granted elements of a student’s grief experience, and the overall potential prevalence for grief in doctoral students. The author offers insight into ways that doctoral program stakeholders may better understand and support grieving doctoral students

A search for the 835 Hz835\,\text{Hz} superburst oscillation signal in the regular thermonuclear bursts of 4U 1636-536

Burst oscillations are brightness asymmetries that develop in the burning ocean during thermonuclear bursts on accreting neutron stars. They have been observed during H/He-triggered (Type I) bursts and Carbon-triggered superbursts. The mechanism responsible is not unknown, but the dominant burst oscillation frequency is typically within a few Hz of the spin frequency, where this is independently known. One of the best-studied burst oscillation sources, 4U 1636-536, has oscillations at $581\,\text{Hz}$ in both its regular Type I bursts and in one superburst. Recently however, Strohmayer \& Mahmoodifar reported the discovery of an additional signal at a higher frequency, $835\,\text{Hz}$, during the superburst. This higher frequency is consistent with the predictions for several types of global ocean mode, one of the possible burst oscillation mechanisms. If this is the case then the same physical mechanism may operate in the normal Type I bursts of this source. In this paper we report a stacked search for periodic signals in the regular Type I bursts: we found no significant signal at the higher frequency, with upper limits for the single trial root mean square (rms) fractional amplitude of 0.57(6)\%. Our analysis did however reveal that the dominant $581\,\text{Hz}$ burst oscillation signal is present at a weak level even in the sample of bursts where it cannot be detected in individual bursts. This indicates that any cutoff in the burst oscillation mechanism occurs below the detection threshold of existing X-ray telescopes.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication by Ap

Changes in the near edge X-ray absorption fine structure of hybrid organic-inorganic resists upon exposure

We report on the near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy of hybrid organic-inorganic resists. These materials are nonchemically amplified systems based on Si, Zr, and Ti oxides, synthesized from organically modified precursors and transition metal alkoxides by a sol-gel route and designed for ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet and electron beam lithography. The experiments were conducted using a scanning transmission X-ray microscope (STXM) which combines high spatial-resolution microscopy and NEXAFS spectroscopy. The absorption spectra were collected in the proximity of the carbon edge (~ 290 eV) before and after in situ exposure, enabling the measurement of a significant photo-induced degradation of the organic group (phenyl or methyl methacrylate, respectively), the degree of which depends on the configuration of the ligand. Photo-induced degradation was more efficient in the resist synthesized with pendant phenyl substituents than it was in the case of systems based on bridging phenyl groups. The degradation of the methyl methacrylate group was relatively efficient, with about half of the initial ligands dissociated upon exposure. Our data reveal that the such dissociation can produce different outcomes, depending on the structural configuration. While all the organic groups were expected to detach and desorb from the resist in their entirety, a sizeable amount of them remain and form undesired byproducts such as alkene chains. In the framework of the materials synthesis and engineering through specific building blocks, these results provide a deeper insight into the photochemistry of resists, in particular for extreme ultraviolet lithography