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Everyone Needs Friends
Get PDFThe Friends Grassroots Network—established and sustained by the Conservation Lands Foundation, whose mission is to protect, restore, and expand the National Conservation Lands—is made up of just over 80 non-profit organizations. This article spotlights a few of them
Outdoor Recreation in the National Conservation Lands: “Can’t Live With It and Can’t Live Without It”
Get PDFThis paper examines the historic role and place of outdoor recreation in the National Landscape Conservation System (now called the National Conservation Lands) and how these lands can coexist with the growing demand for outdoor recreation. We will explore why this critical 21st-century conservation system needs to continue to provide diverse outdoor recreation opportunities, and why sustainable outdoor recreation needs the National Conservation Lands
Selective Actions of Bile Acids on Fatty Acid Absorption
Get PDFIntestinal fat absorption is a significant, yet often overlooked, contributor to overall energy balance. In Western societies where high-fat food is abundant, the regular overconsumption of fat enhances nutrient absorption and promotes obesity and related metabolic disease. As detergents, bile acids emulsify and solubilize dietary fats, enabling gastrointestinal lipases to hydrolyze triglycerides into absorbable free fatty acids for intestinal uptake. Here, we show that manipulations of the bile acid pool and lipase have distinct effects on the absorption of individual fatty acids with unique metabolic consequences. To reduce the bile acid pool in mice, we disrupted the rate-limiting enzyme of bile acid synthesis, Cyp7a1, using liver-directed AAV-CRISPR gene editing. Compared to lipase inhibition, reducing bile acids by loss of CYP7A1 selectively altered fatty acid absorption, disproportionately decreasing saturated fatty acid absorption while preserving polyunsaturated fatty acid uptake. These selective changes in absorption prevented diet-induced obesity, attenuated overeating, improved insulin sensitivity, and suppressed lipogenesis. Using in vitro micelle solubility assays and intestinal enteroids, we then determined that a specific bile acid, cholic acid, preferentially solubilizes polyunsaturated fatty acids into mixed micelles, thus providing a mechanism for the enhanced uptake of these fatty acids. In contrast to bile acid pool modulation, lipase inhibition did not prevent obesity, did not trigger anorectic hormones, increased food intake, induced lipogenesis, and decreased absorption of all fatty acids indiscriminately. Taken together, our studies unveil the multifaceted aspects of dietary fat absorption and highlight a natural selectivity in the absorption of different fatty acids by bile acids. These findings advance our basic understanding of intestinal fat absorption and suggest that bile acids can be leveraged to control fatty acid absorption for health and disease
Blood and Brains: Marginal Substances in Colonial Mexican Women’s Witchcraft
Get PDFWomen in colonial Mexico engaged in magical practices to exert power over their households and communities. These practices often involved feeding one’s husband substances, such as menstrual blood and donkey brains, intended to tame or bewitch him. By analyzing reports made to the Mexican Inquisition about women’s use of magic substances, this thesis seeks to explain the symbolic power that these materials held in colonial Mexican society. It views love magic as a practice of primarily Iberian origin which flourished in colonial Mexico as Spanish, Indigenous, and mixed-race women sought to exert control over marriages increasingly defined by patriarchal gender roles. It thus challenges the idea that Mesoamerican women were practicing love magic prior to the arrival of Europeans. Furthermore, this study treats menstrual blood and donkey brains as “marginal” substances, both because they had crossed the boundary of the body and because they were a source of power for those who lived at the margins of society. This approach allows us to examine how Spanish anxieties around religion and gender gave rise to a host of magical practices that persisted throughout the colonial era
Integration of Phosphoproteomics and Network Modeling Prioritizes Candidates for Anti-Viral Drug Repurposing
Get PDFDrug repurposing is a rapid and cost-efficient way to identify new treatments for viral outbreaks such as COVID-19. In this study, we combined infection-driven phosphoproteomics with network methods to prioritize candidate drugs for SARS-CoV-2. We used the Prize-Collecting Steiner Forest (PCSF) algorithm to identify signaling pathways associated with viral infections based on protein phosphorylation activity. Then, using PathFX, a network-based drug effect association method, we identified a list of drug candidates linked to viral phenotypes. Using the set of phosphorylated proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, we prioritized drugs based on overlaps between the drug’s network proteins and the viral disease module. This approach produced predictions comparable to more complex network methods, supporting its value as an efficient framework for therapeutic repurposing for viral diseases. Overall, this work outlines a generalizable framework for integrating disease-specific omics data into network-based approaches for drug repurposing
German/Jewish Dance in Exile: Valeska Gert Before, During, and After World War II
No full textGerman/Jewish Dance in Exile: Valeska Gert Before, During, and After World War II is a critical account of the avant-garde German/Jewish modern dancer Valeska Gert (1892-1978), her performance spaces both in Germany and the United States, and the forms of sociality (and non-sociality) that she cultivated through her artistic practices. I argue that Gert used dance practice to create novel economies, meant in the broadest sense, which reassigned and redetermined value. First, I analyze how Gert used gender nonconformity to challenge contemporary notions of what or who was worthless. Through her onstage embrace of the tropes of the bad refugee woman, bad Jewish woman, and bad older woman, she overturned narratives about which people were good or bad in terms of a global marketplace. Second, I evaluate the work of her performance venues in creating unique opportunities for exchange between others who did not fit into limiting national, ethnic, class, and gender ideals. My project exposes underacknowledged alternative support structures of those with aims outside of dominant markets while, at the same time, making manifest the racialized, classed, and gendered prejudices to which Gert and others could not or would not conform. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to historical methods, I combine traditional archival research on the topics of German/Jewish artists in exile and queer subcultural spaces with visual analysis, discourse analysis, and choreographic analysis—a method unique to dance studies that includes close readings of bodily movement to investigate what and how motions signify. While scholars have focused on the consolidation of German- and American-Jewish identity, my dissertation aims to investigate the role of the body in transgressing imposed identities
Technology as Sovereignty: Computing Popular Geopolitics and Forms of Political Participation in the Mexican Bajio
No full textIn contrast to approaches that study a single social world, such as that of hackers, this dissertation addresses the tensions between hardware developers and other middle-class tech entrepreneurs’ claims of ownership rights over technological infrastructures and workers’ claims of personal rights over their bodies that produce them. These tensions are often unaccounted for in traditional Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information and Communication scholarship. This dissertation contributes to these fields by introducing a broader research program that considers the materiality of digital information, showcasing the relationships between workers and technological entrepreneurship while examining the political dimension of sociotechnical systems. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation addresses three research questions: (RQ1) Why do middle classes construct computing as an instance of sovereignty, that is, tecnología propia? (RQ2) How and against what do they create, expand, and defend new forms of political participation built around computing? And (RQ3) What are the limits of technological sovereignty as a framework for political participation at sites of global supply chains like the Mexican Bajio? To answer these research questions, I adopt a postcolonial STS perspective to analyze “technological sovereignty” as a category within a broader popular geopolitical discourse connected to computing in the Mexican Bajio, the largest industrial corridor in North America. Through a case study in which workers’ construction of their bodies as sites of sovereignty challenged small tech entrepreneurs’ construction of technology as one, this dissertation makes three contributions. First, it establishes a more extensive research framework for exploring the political dimensions of sociotechnical systems. Second, it places discussions around technological sovereignty within broader historical debates on labor, lean and modular production, and extraction in Mexico, especially in the context of global capitalism. Third, this dissertation examines the limits and possibilities of technological sovereignty as a framework for political participation that has computing as its locus. Hence, it sheds light on the political consequences—forms of representation, participation, and exclusions—of innovation, lean organizational styles and technological authorship
Protocol for differentiating murine 3T3-L1 and SVF-derived preadipocytes and isolating crude mitochondrial fractions
Get PDFHere, we present a protocol for differentiating 3T3-L1 preadipocytes and stromal vascular fraction (SVF)-derived preadipocytes from mice into mature adipocytes, followed by the isolation of crude mitochondrial fractions. This cost-effective and reproducible protocol is optimized for small-plate formats, compatible with standard reagents, and suitable for metabolic studies such as insulin resistance and mitochondrial function
Educating the Multilingual Subject
Get PDFOne strand of Claire Kramsch’s work has been a deep reflection on what it means to be multilingual. Kramsch has argued that being multilingual involves subjective and symbolic dimensions of engagement with languages, cultures and interlocutors that have often been ignored in much language education practice. This article will reflect on the consequences of this thinking for language education and the ways that it has in turn expanded the scope and understanding of language instruction. It will consider what it means to posit the language learner as a multilingual subject living and communicating in and between languages and cultures and negotiating identities, as well as how the teaching and learning of another culturally contextualized language can be designed with reference to the developing multilingual subject
Ten Moments in Symbolic Competence
Get PDFSymbolic Competence (SC) has emerged as one of the key intellectual and critical contributions from Claire Kramsch’s five decades of published research so far, though we scholars and teachers still hesitate at times to apply it in our analyses of practical, multilingual settings. This essay takes the opportunity to reflect personally on the concept, and on how the complex features it illuminates in everyday life have shaped the author’s own formation in various dimensions. The piece takes as its particular inspiration Kramsch’s 2023 “Poetic Equivalence: Key to the Development of Symbolic Competence” as a model for self-reflection, historical contextualization, for its rigorous, fresh understanding of what “symbolic” does and doesn’t mean in everyday, multilingual life, and—to use a Kramschian turn of phrase—for articulating “why it matters.”