Browsing by Subject "Laboratory"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Laboratory Debris Flow Experiments: A Study of Erosion
    (2018-08) Maki, Laura
    We investigate the dependence of net erosion on grain size distribution in experimental debris flows and erodible beds. We systematically and independently varied the composition of each the supply and erodible bed material and the flume inclination angle, ϕ. Then, we demonstrate that there is a unique neutral angle, ϕN (the angle at which erosion is equal to zero), for each bed and supply composition combination. We show that for each system, total net erosion increases roughly linearly with increasing ϕ and can be predicted based on ϕ-ϕN and the geometry of the erodible bed. Our other macroscopic findings include that ϕN is dependent on both the compositions of the bed and the supply; as davg,S increases, ϕN decreases; as davg,B increases, ϕN increases; and as davg,S/davg,B increases, ϕN generally decreases. We then consider particle scale dynamics that drive these macroscopic results including segregation mechanisms, inter-particle collisions, and relative roughness.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Laboratory literature: science and fiction in the place of production
    (2013-10) Hadley, Matthew James
    In this dissertation, I claim that the figure of the scientific laboratory in literature serves as a means for the literary text to reflect upon its own conditions of possibility, its processes of production, and its socio-cultural functions, all of which enact an autocritique of literature by literature. In representing production within the scientific laboratory, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (chapter one) and H. G. Wells' Island of Dr. Moreau (chapter two) demonstrate how this space of scientific labor is a model for the space of literary production. Following out the claim that an isomorphism exists between these two spaces, I offer new insights into the processes and effects of literary inscription. With this focus on literary production, I read these literary texts from the perspective of the material and affective processes that constitute a literary object rather than from a point of view on the finalized product alone. I argue that the novel itself becomes a laboratory, a space of experimentation in and through which one enacts and reenacts the myriad living processes associated with literary discourse. In my third chapter, I further elaborate this perspective through a reading of bodies and social groups in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy that take on the qualities of scientific or literary laboratories, and often both at once. I specifically pay attention to Butler's use of genetics and genetic engineering in both the content and formal characteristics of her novels. Here, I take the laboratory as a concept for thinking through both literary labor, as well as the function of speculative fictions and utopian thought in the biotech industry and the life sciences. Finally, my fourth and final chapter considers the function of the laboratory as a social apparatus for the production of discourse on life in Ridley Scott's film Prometheus. As in the previous chapters, the laboratory is here a site in and through which the work's conditions of possibility are made visible, enabling the film to critique the roles of marketing and finance in contemporary laboratory practices that come to blur the line between the fictional and the scientific in the era of biocapital.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Potential Impacts of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substance Contamination in Laboratory Materials and Model Organisms on Laboratory-based Studies
    (2021-12) Rushing, Julianna
    Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are persistent chemicals that present risks to human environmental health as a result of their ubiquitous nature. These compounds also impact laboratory based exposure and toxicology experiments through PFAS contamination in common materials used for aquatic laboratory exposure experiments. This thesis reviews literature surrounding PFAS bioaccumulation in aquatic organisms in laboratory exposure studies using several measures such as the bioaccumulation factor, bioconcentration factor, biomagnification factor, rate of uptake, and elimination rate. Lack of standardization in how the bioaccumulation factors were calculated creates challenges in statistical comparisons. This thesis also investigates potential PFAS contamination and impacts on aquatic laboratory based exposure experiments in habitat materials, fish feed, and aquaculture fish. Results suggest that PFAS contamination is present in common fish feed and can also be found in aquaculture fish. Unaccounted PFAS contamination in bioaccumulation and toxicity studies could confound results and ultimately influence environmental health recommendations.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Staging `open-minded science': culture and evidence in contemporary Ayurvedic Laboratory research in India
    (2012-11) Ganguly, Ritika
    In their analyses of traditional medical systems such as Ayurveda, postcolonial critics of science and technology have often pointed to the hierarchies, inequalities and asymmetries between western and non-western, biomedical and traditional, knowledge claims and practices. This dissertation explores Ayurvedic knowledge-making itself as a site that consolidates hierarchies, produces power, and confers privilege. Ethnographically situated at an Ayurvedic laboratory, this study argues that `open-minded science' - a relatively recent articulation by a Hindu science elite to name the collaborative production of contemporary Ayurvedic knowledge - produces new forms of exclusions that express their cultural authority through a scientific discourse on the revitalization of the Indian medical heritage. Central to this project are the ways in which contemporary Ayurvedic practice brings into view a wider set of relationships - those between knowledges that come to be characterized as codified and folk, between experts and community, and ultimately, between science and politics.