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The Colby Echo (April 1, 2021)
Get PDFPublished by the students of Colby College since 1877, The Colby Echo is the weekly, editorially independent student-run newspaper of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Published monthly, 1877-1886; semi-monthly, 1886-1897; and weekly, during the academic year, 1898-present
Past and Future: Climate Experts Consider Where Our Planet Has Been and Where It Is Going
Get PDFIn this, the second installment of the Colby Climate Project series, we explore the work of members of the Colby community who working to address this monumental environmental challenge
Deep North: Assistant Professor of Women\u27s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Sonja Tomas Pushes Students to Confront the Uncomfortable
Get PDFMany of those white students are uncomfortable, Thomas said. “I hear a lot of, ‘I don’t want to say something if it’s not on the right track.’ I have to push back and say, ‘Silence is not a right track either.’
Ready, Willing, and Able
Get PDFSo what gives? How, after four years on Mayflower Hill, do these Colby alumni have an outsized impact in a fintech company that is focused on, for example, changing the way municipal bonds are traded? What makes them able to dive in and figure it out? “That’s part of the liberal arts education,” said Associate Professor of History John Turner, who taught Tagg Martin ’13, history major turned MarketAxess go-to analyst. “You’re always learning. … You are always going to be mastering something, as opposed to having mastered.
A Better Way
Get PDFAlane O’Connor ’96 studied environmental economics at Colby. Associate Professor of Statistics Liam O’Brien first studied physics and mathematics.Together the pair has combined their broad experience to produce groundbreaking research that is changing the way clinicians around the world treat pregnant and opioid-addicted women and their unborn children
Reconstructing the Voting Rights Act: Subnational Action and Voting Rights Post-1965
Get PDFThe discussion of suffrage and the development of the U.S. electorate is misguidedly based solely around federal action; constitutional amendments and federal legislation are commonly revered as primary determinants of the right to vote. This tendency poses a specific problem with contemporary discussions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Specifically, discussions of the VRA ignores the ability of subnational actors to innovate politically and readjust their vehicles of political development in the wake of federal supposition of state powers. The Voting Rights Act did not destroy state authority regarding the right to vote; it merely disrupted their vehicles of development. This thesis describes the ways in which subnational actors responded to the VRA by either pushing forward or pulling back on federal initiatives regarding the expansion of suffrage prior to Shelby. Although they remain watershed moments in United States history, neither the Voting Rights Act nor Shelby act as the beginning and end of voting rights and federalism. Through the administrative, executive, and judicial action of state actors in Georgia, Massachusetts, Kansas, and Idaho, I conclude that federalism and the ability of subnational actors to affect suffrage were not destroyed by the Voting Rights Act. Changes in the demographic composition of states elicited suffrage-related responses from subnational actors that benefitted the actor’s partisan interests; subnational officials responded to demographic change by covertly expanding or restricting the right to vote as a means of benefitting the majority party. This thesis concludes that the decentralization of authority regarding the right to vote is necessary
Stimulated neutrino oscillations in supernova
No full textNeutrinos are fundamental particles which only interact via gravity and the weak force, which makes them uniquely hard to observe and study experimentally. There are three flavors in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics, however there has been experimental results that suggest the existence of a theoretical fourth neutrino flavor, called the sterile neutrino, with the three flavors in the SM being active neutrinos. Sterile neutrinos would interact only via the gravity, which means we would only be able to detect them through neutrino oscillations. A potential environment in which active to sterile oscillations could be highly probable to occur is supernovae, due to a large amount of neutrinos being created through nuclear fusion as well as high and varying densities of matter through which the neutrinos propagate. To investigate the evolution of neutrinos in supernova environments and the possibility of stimulated sterile neutrino oscillations, we create a code to simulate the evolution of neutrinos through a supernova density profile
Microbiome community and parasitic infections in wild bees
Get PDFThe microbiome is increasingly recognized for its complex relationship with host fitness. Akin to primates and other social animals, bumblebees harbor a specific microbiome derived from social contact. The bumblebee microbiome is characteristically species poor, with just a few “core” phylotypes accounting for the majority of total abundance. Genomic analyses reveal phylogenetic congruence and adaptation of the core endosymbionts to the bumblebee gut, indicating a shared evolutionary history. Prior investigations reveal that the relative abundance of core microbes is negatively associated with infection by a trypanosome, Crithidia bombi, and that the microbiome has a mechanistic role in immunity. As an extension of these studies, we have deeply sampled wild bumblebee populations throughout central and down east Maine in a three-year microbiome field survey. The wild bees of the field survey consistently host high abundances of the previously recognized core microbes, as well as low abundant, environmentally derived taxa. Community composition appears to be dependent on colony lifecycle but is largely robust to the horizontal exchange of microbes, supporting the narrative of a robust and coevolved bumblebee microbiome. Compositional variation additionally shows a relationship with Crithidia bombi infection severity. Bumblebees with high relative abundances of core microbes have lower infection loads. The relative abundances of two core phylotypes, Lactobacillus and Apibacter, are particularly strong indicators of host health. However, as relative abundance does not directly reflect absolute abundance, total community composition may be a better indicator of health than the relative abundance of single taxa