KU News: Modernized storage will safeguard a celebrated mammal collection for future generations

Today's News from the University of Kansas

0
268

From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu

Headlines

Modernized storage will safeguard a celebrated mammal collection for future generations
LAWRENCE — The world-renowned mammalian research collections at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute are undergoing a major upgrade through a $646,000 award from the National Science Foundation. Pest-compromised wooden cabinets and drawers dating back to the 1960s — woefully inadequate for keeping out bugs that can damage important scientific specimens — today are being replaced with modern stainless steel cases and aluminum drawers built by Delta Designs in nearby Topeka.

‘Unicorniphobia’ may be a rush to regulate big money private companies, professor says
LAWRENCE — In a new article for the Harvard Business Law Review, a University of Kansas associate professor of law examines the growing number of “unicorns” — companies that attain a $1 billion valuation before going public — as well as the associated calls by legal academics and leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission to impose new regulations on them.

Professor writes for and about Mayan culture
LAWRENCE – An interest in Mayan culture unites two different research projects undertaken this year by Ignacio Carvajal. Sales of the University of Kansas professor’s poetry chapbook, “allow: a litany” (La Resistencia Press), will benefit the International Mayan League. Carvajal’s expertise in the Mayan region’s Indigenous languages comes into play in his new article for The Latin Americanist, which details how Indigenous leaders attempted to preserve native authority structures even as they adapted to the impositions of colonizers in the 1500s and 1600s.

Full stories below.

————————————————————————

Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch

Modernized storage will safeguard a celebrated mammal collection for future generations
LAWRENCE — The world-renowned mammalian research collections at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute are undergoing a major upgrade through a $646,000 award from the National Science Foundation.

Pest-compromised wooden cabinets and drawers dating back to the 1960s — woefully inadequate for keeping out bugs that can damage important scientific specimens — today are being replaced with modern stainless steel cases and aluminum drawers built by Delta Designs in nearby Topeka.

The modernized storage will safeguard one of the world’s largest collections of mammal specimens for scientists, scholars, students and the public long into the future.

KU’s Biodiversity Institute holds 279,936 mammal specimens dating back to 1866. Moving them into upgraded storage isn’t an easy task. Or, more specifically, “it’s bonkers,” according to Jocelyn Colella, curator of mammals at the Biodiversity Institute and assistant professor of ecology & evolutionary biology at KU, who is leading the project together with collection manager Maria Eifler.

“KU has the second-largest university-based mammal collection in the Americas,” she said, “and is the fifth-largest collection in the Americas overall.”

Colella’s team includes EEB and MUSE graduate students along with retired curator of mammals Robert Timm, who now serves as a research affiliate at the BI. However, the KU researcher said most of the personnel moving specimens into upgraded storage were women.

“We have a small fleet of museum studies students, museum interns, and undergraduate and graduate students, both paid and as volunteers that are helping make this whole transition possible,” she said. “Right now, we are physically moving cases, using our womanly strength; literally, because our team is mostly women. Next, we’ll transcribe data.”

Throughout the transfer process, Colella and her team are digitizing data about each specimen as well as filling in gaps in data that may have been omitted by previous generations of researchers. Students will verify and record information from specimen tags into the Specify museum database, which links to the broader scientific research community through GBIF, iDigBio, BISON and VertNet.

The KU researcher said the mammal collection was a treasure house for researchers who used specimens to understand evolutionary biology and the process of diversification of species.

“It’s easy to observe things as they are right now, but it’s hard to measure change without physical documentation of the past,” Colella said. “Scientifically, that’s one of the best things that we get from collections — an objective means of measuring change over time. And as change accelerates, we’re able to look at how rates have changed, which allows us to make informed predictions and decisions moving forward.”

Because tissues from specimens collected many decades ago still can be genetically analyzed, preserving them well for future analysis can even have implications for fighting potential disease outbreaks in people, as well as tracking the spread of invasive species.
“Until recently, no one had really looked to museums for public health research. I think a lot of people don’t realize there’s this whole back end to museums that’s involved in really cutting-edge research. That aspect of our work is less appreciated by the public because they don’t see it,” Colella said. “For example, mammal tissues can contain viruses that can infect humans. For public health purposes, developing screening methods that allow us to access those data are becoming increasingly possible and that’s part of my research program — each mammal has parasites and pathogens that also factor into our understanding of diseases that impact human health.”

As part of the project, the importance of scientific collections will be the subject of a new public exhibition now being conceived and planned for spring 2022 by students and exhibit staff at the Biodiversity Institute. Students will collaborate with exhibits staff at the Biodiversity Institute to conceive and build a new public exhibition at the KU Natural History Museum focused on the importance of scientific collections. The exhibition will highlight research stories that illustrate how collections are critical for solving problems of societal interest, including recognizing emerging pathogens, tracing the origins of invasive species and conserving species through genetic management.

“The museum does a great job of highlighting the importance of biodiversity, the variation that we see in life, and I want to make sure this new exhibit highlights some of the other super-advanced aspects of museums, like how museums are plugging into modern science and modern engineering and modern conservation,” Colella said. “In addition to documenting species diversity, we have new genetic techniques that allow us to look at historical diversity, from historical skins, to identify the variation that was present in these populations in the past. Now there are ways to actively seed that variation into living populations today to help species retain the variation that they may have had if their range hadn’t been reduced to a tiny island or their habitat hadn’t been destroyed.”

Further, the KU researcher hopes to select specimens during the move to new storage that can be included in the exhibition to highlight ways that engineering projects can be inspired by structures and mechanics encountered in nature.

“We’re looking into robotics and the use of bats as models for ‘morphing wings.’ When bats fly, their wing membranes are flexible, not rigid like an airplane — and that’s a very hard thing to engineer, but it makes bats incredibly maneuverable,” Colella said. “There are scientists using the morphology of bat wings and engineering similar materials to build flying robots. The same thing is happening with wind turbines, which are being modeled after the fins of whales because of their unique fluid dynamics.”
-30-
————————————————————————
The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.


————————————————————————

Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings

‘Unicorniphobia’ may be a rush to regulate big money private companies, professor says
LAWRENCE — Maybe unicorns aren’t so scary after all. While kids love them, legal scholars and financial regulators seem to be in a hurry to slap new regulations on them before they can do more economic harm.

Of course, the latter group is talking not about the mythical creatures, but companies that attain a $1 billion valuation before going public. A University of Kansas law researcher has written a new paper arguing that proposed new securities regulations likely wouldn’t have prevented any of the problems that have put these “unicorns” in the headlines.

In “Unicorniphobia,” forthcoming in the Harvard Business Law Review, Alexander Platt, associate professor of law at KU, examines the growing number of unicorns as well as the associated calls by legal academics and leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission to impose new regulations on them. While it was once so rare for a company to reach a billion-dollar valuation while private that they earned the nickname ‘unicorns,’ today there are more than 800 that fit the description. Current and recent unicorns include many familiar household names, such as Zoom, Slack, Spotify, Roku, Robinhood, TikTok, Facebook, UberEats and AirBnB. Those companies aren’t subject to the same regulations and controls that govern publicly traded companies, which has led to some calls for new regulations.

However, the debate has been one-sided, Platt said. The arguments for new unicorn regulations rely heavily on examples of “bad” unicorns, like Theranos and Uber, that have been through massive scandals. To fight fire with fire, Platt draws on the case of a “good” unicorn: Moderna Inc. Platt argued that, had the proposed regulations been in place, they could have prevented Moderna from quickly developing its COVID-19 vaccine in early 2020.
“A lot of commentators calling for more regulation in this area rely on Theranos and Uber as the key examples of bad unicorns,” Platt said. “I ask, ‘If all these proposed solutions had been in place, would they make a difference?’ I think the answer is no.”

The proposals claim that because unicorns are not limited by regulatory and other institutional forces that keep public companies in line, they are especially prone to risky and illegal behaviors. To combat that, they suggest taming unicorns through mandatory IPOs, expanded disclosure obligations, increased secondary market trading, expanded whistleblower protections and enhanced SEC enforcement against large private companies.

Platt makes three main arguments against those proposals. First, he wrote that such stepped-up regulations may in fact make things worse. If forced to move toward public status, unicorns might take on some of the institutions, practices and features that some scholars have warned make public companies especially dangerous.

Second, Platt wrote that such measures wouldn’t have necessarily prevented the actions of “bad unicorns” like Theranos, whose CEO is now on trial for criminal fraud for allegedly misleading investors, the public, employees, media, regulators and others.

“Elizabeth Holmes was evidently willing to risk a potential 20-year prison term. The SEC can’t put anyone in jail, so it’s hard to see why having them sniffing around would likely have made a serious difference in deterring the alleged misconduct in this case,” Platt said.

Finally, new unicorn regulations could have prevented one unicorn and potentially many others from delivering important social benefits, Platt wrote. He explores the case of Moderna, a former unicorn that delivered one of the first COVID-19 vaccines. Platt details how the company endured a lengthy and rough “corporate adolescence,” including the failure to bring a single product to Phase III trials after nearly a decade as well as the loss of several top employee departures. However, given its private status, Moderna raised enormous sums of money and tried a range of projects, including vaccines, to make its technology work. Ultimately, in the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it did work.

“Their lengthy unicorn status, and the secretive, sometimes chaotic and destructive period they were able to go through outside of the public eye was a key part of what put them on a path to success in developing the COVID vaccine in 2020,” Platt said.
Perhaps unicorns aren’t something to be quite so afraid of after all.
-30-
————————————————————————
Subscribe to KU Today, the campus newsletter,
for additional news about the University of Kansas.

http://www.news.ku.edu
————————————————————————

Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman

Professor writes for and about Mayan culture
LAWRENCE – An interest in Mayan culture unites two different research projects undertaken this year by Ignacio Carvajal.

Sales of his poetry chapbook, “allow: a litany” (La Resistencia Press), will benefit the International Mayan League, which supports immigrants to the United States from historically Mayan regions, which include parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Belize.

It’s written in English, interspersed with Spanish.
Carvajal’s expertise in the Mayan region’s Indigenous languages, K’iche’ and Kaqchikel, comes into play in his new article in The Latin Americanist journal, “Writing Ajawarem: Establishing Authority Over People and Territory in Three Sixteenth-Century Texts in the Highlands of Guatemala.” It details how Indigenous leaders in Mesoamerica attempted to preserve native authority structures even as they adapted to the impositions of Spanish Catholic colonizers in the 1500s and 1600s.

Carvajal is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Kansas and an affiliate of KU’s Indigenous Studies Program and Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies.

“My research focuses, broadly, on two sets of related language work,” Carvajal said. “On the one hand, I study a variety of documents from the colonial period, mostly in Spanish, K’iche’ and Kaqchikel. On the other hand, I collaborate in the creation of language-learning materials for K’iche’ today. I also write poems. I have often thought about it as very separate things, but I’m learning more about how they are all just different parts of my person.”

Carvajal said that K’iche’ is not his first language. He said he is conscious of and earnest about the contradictions and responsibilities included in being a non-Indigenous learner and instructor of an Indigenous language. Most academic study of Indigenous communities has historically been carried out by outsiders, a trend that is increasingly changing.

Carvajal was born in Costa Rica and moved to Kansas when he was in middle school. His father attended graduate school at KU, earning his doctorate in educational measurement in 2011.

Carvajal graduated from Lawrence High School, Johnson County Community College and KU before earning a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin. It was there that he became interested in Mayan culture. He now teaches literatures, languages and cultures from Latin America at KU.

The Latin Americanist article, Carvajal said, “is about different Mayan language ways of expressing authority, especially under the alphabetic regime the Spanish imposed after invasion.” The Maya had to adapt to the colonizers’ use of the Latin alphabet in their religious and legal writings during this period. A common misconception is that writing itself didn’t exist in the continent prior to European invasion, yet Indigenous peoples had previously relied on a system that combined pictographic and syllabic writing, among other methods of memory keeping, he said.

The K’iche’ word ajawarem translates to “lordship” or “authority,” which Carvajal wrote is defined by “military and political might and legitimacy for leadership and the ability to collect tribute.”

In the article, Carvajal traced “the notion of ajawarem during the Postclassic period in the highlands and argue(s) that it is wielded in the face of colonial imposition.”

The article examines three types of documents. One is the Popul Wuj, sometimes described – misleadingly, according to Carvajal — as the Mayan Bible because it contains aspects of their cosmology. The others are groups of writings, one a collection of local histories known as the Memorial de Sololá and the other as Titulos, as in titles to the land.

“In the analysis of each,” Carvajal wrote, “I point to the commonalities that they share as responses to colonial impositions, yet also focus on the specific aspects of … how authority was wielded by members of different lineages and political affiliations as they asserted their ajawarem under a colonial context.”

Carvajal said the documents show how various Indigenous lineages and colonialist groups (such as Franciscan and Dominican priests) were constantly reconfiguring and vying for means and expressions of political authority.

“It’s really interesting,” Carvajal said, “because it was written in the context of folks being taught by the missionaries to read alphabetically and also being asked to recognize the Christian god. Other scholars and I read the incorporation of these systems as a way to navigate and resist the impositions of colonization.”

Solidarity through poetry
As for “allow: a litany,” Carvajal said he had been working on the poem — a chapbook-length poem spanning 26 pages in print — for about the past four years.

“It came a point where the poem had enough shape to be cohesive,” Carvajal said. “It felt like it’s already something that a past self of mine wrote, so I thought it was ready to get released into the world or else be buried.”

Inspired by fellow poet monica teresa ortiz’s recent donation of book sales to an organization they believed in, Carvajal approached the new, Kansas City, Missouri-based La Resistencia Press — an independent press founded by a collective of queer writers of color by the same name — whose editor, MG Salazar, “was kind enough to agree to give all of the proceeds” to the International Mayan League.

“I thought it was a good way of fostering solidarity through poetry,” he said. “So that’s the material aspect that I’m proud of about the poem. I am also proud of the communal aspect of the poem: Adriana Linares did the beautiful woodcut for the cover, and Dorian Wood set a recording of the poem to music, which is available via a QR code at the back of the book.”
The poem itself is structured as a prayer, asking for a variety of things to happen, including to:
“allow for the recompense of our mothers
for their celestial rewards to be granted earlier
for a damn advance on their salvation.”

Carvajal said a passage like that, and the poem as a whole, “works both at a specific level and on a general level.”

Carvajal’s previous poetry collection, “Plegarias,” was dedicated to his mother, so he recognizes that their relationship influences “an important part of my art.”

“Beyond that specificity — which really becomes meaningless, because a poem serves whoever reads it — women are so often charged with the mitigation of chaos and with education and spiritual fortification — rearing and nurturing — of men, women, nonbinary folks or anybody, right? So I think they’re due an advance on their salvation.”

Chris Perreira, assistant professor of American studies at KU, writes of the poem: “An appeal as much as an imperative, ‘allow’ registers diasporic potentialities of impossible kinships — measuring space and time across natural terrains and national borders.”

-30-
————————————————————————

KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
[email protected]
http://www.news.ku.edu

Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]

Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here