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The BSA Museum houses a study collection of artefacts donated to the BSA and collected by its members up to the 1960s. The collection provides a valuable resource for teaching and research, enabling scholars to gain first-hand familiarity with objects from a range of material types (including ceramics, metals, stone, terracotta) dating from the Neolithic through to the Late Byzantine period. The collection comprises some 4,000 individual artefacts and over 46,000 sherds of pottery, objects that have been displayed in different parts of the BSA premises over the past 130 years. Of the whole collection, various small sections have been published in the Annual of the BSA. What has been lacking, however, is a narrative about the museum itself: where its objects came from, who studied them, how the collection as a whole has been catalogued and organized. This paper tells that story: from the collection’s humble beginnings, with the first donation of just a few sherds in 1892, through to recently completed digitization and public engagement projects.

This article reviews a decade of publications and rescue excavations on the islands of Aegina, Poros and Salamis, and on the island-like Methana peninsula. Considerable amounts of new data have come to light that demonstrate how, from prehistory through to more recent times, the islands of the Saronic Gulf have been plugged in to networks with one another, with their neighbouring mainlands and with the wider Aegean. Moreover, a not insignificant number of publications has recently become available that synthesize many years of archaeological discoveries into cultural histories, telling the stories of each island and of the whole archipelago.

This study uses the collection of fifteenth- to twentieth-century travel literature from the BSA library to consider issues of (elite) mobility in the Aegean Sea. These texts contain a wealth of information on the routes chosen by travellers between various islands and mainland ports, and on the navigability of the Aegean basin. By using a combination of computational Proximal Point Analysis and Social Network Analysis, these routes are visualised, and discussion focuses on how navigation varied both between centuries and according to the traveller's place of origin. It is suggested that travellers were dependent on other sorts of networks, and that routes travelled were shaped greatly by the economics and politics of the day. It is also proposed that methodologies used in this paper offer great potential for engaging broad-scale sets of archive data.

This article is a case study in doing new things with old data. In 1953 Lord William Taylour directed the excavation of a monumental vaulted tholos tomb known as 'Tholos IV' at the site of ancient Pylos, Messenia, Greece. The excavation was conducted over two months, during which detailed notes were recorded in three notebooks now kept in the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The formal publication of Tholos IV, however, contains only a basic narrative of the excavation, offering neither precise detail on stratigraphy, object find spots, nor even a complete inventory of small finds. The present study goes back to the original notebooks kept by Taylour and combines the data contained in them with a new digital survey of Tholos IV to produce a comprehensive and accurate 3D GIS model for the excavation. Furthermore, the GIS has been produced in such a way that its dataset is compatible with new excavation data currently generated in the ongoing Palace of Nestor Excavations (PONEX) project, bringing together two excavation campaigns conducted under very different circumstances, methodologies, and recording protocols. Discussion follows on how the production of this GIS deepens our understanding not just of the legacy excavation, but also of the site and its wider landscape.

Since flexible production systems usually require special technologies and additional components, high costs are the main limitation factor for their flexibility. Therefore, the most economic components have to be chosen for each flexible production system. This paper focuses on automatic feeding systems and starts with a comparison of the flexibility and the feeding rates of the most important flexible feeders available today. To cope with the deficits of flexible feeders with mechanical orientation, a new modular system is presented. In addition, a design method for the different modules of the new feeder is introduced. Finally, a detailed cost analysis determines the economic application of the modular feeder within the presented systems in dependency of the given flexible feeding task.

Flexible feeding technology is one of the main challenges in modern assembly systems. A promising approach is a new modular feeding system, which was developed at the iwb . This paper presents a method to ensure an optimal operating performance of the new feeder at single or double line frequency. Hereby, the modular system's natural frequencies are adjusted adequately during the development phase by adapting the masses and inertias of the relevant components. This is done with the aid of a structural mechanical model of the modular feeding system, which is derived and verified on a product-neutral basic set-up. Finally, the application of the model during the development phase of the modular feeder is presented.

First described by Paul Ehrlich in 1879, who noted its characteristic staining by acidophilic dyes, for many years, the eosinophil was considered to be an end-effector cell associated with helminth infections and a cause of tissue damage. Over the past 30 years, research has helped to elucidate the complexity of the eosinophil’s function and establish its role in host defense and immunity. Eosinophils express an array of ligand receptors which play a role in cell growth, adhesion, chemotaxis, degranulation, and cell-to-cell interactions. They play a role in activation of complement via both classical and alternative pathways. Eosinophils synthesize, store and secrete cytokines, chemokines, and growth factors. They can process antigen, stimulate T cells, and promote humoral responses by interacting with B cells. Eosinophils can function as antigen presenting cells and can regulate processes associated with both T1 and T2 immunity. Although long known to play a role in defense against helminth organisms, the interactions of eosinophils with these parasites are now recognized to be much more complex. In addition, their interaction with other pathogens continues to be investigated. In this paper, we review the eosinophil’s unique biology and structure, including its characteristic granules and the effects of its proteins, our developing understanding of its role in innate and adaptive immunity and importance in immunomodulation, and the part it plays in defense against parasitic, viral, fungal and bacterial infections. Rather than our worst enemy, the eosinophil may, in fact, be one of the most essential components in host defense and immunity.