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Resurrected Criminals, Time-Loops, and Faustian Bargains: The Speculative Edge of 1940s Film Noir
Get PDFIn the 1940s, as film noir reached the height of its generic consolidation, a more uncanny and supernatural variant emerged in its shadow: speculative noir. While the genre\u27s hard-boiled lineage, Expressionist aesthetics, and the lyrical fatalism of French Poetic Realism define its conventional form, certain films of the period reconfigured noir through Lovecraftian horror, gothic motifs, weird science, and ontological rupture. This neglected strain of noir stretched the genre\u27s murky boundaries beyond fatalistic crime narratives into what science fiction writer Fritz Leiber calls the dark dangerous forest —a space of eerie, indeterminate forces. Although critics such as James Naremore and Christopher Orr have examined the paradoxes and semantic-syntactic elasticity of noir, its intersection with speculative fiction during the 1940s remains critically underexplored. This study addresses that gap by defining speculative noir as a distinct iteration of the noir tradition. Its differentia specifica lies in extending noir\u27s claustrophobic, doomed worldview—marked by moral ambiguity and male vulnerability—through the integration of supernatural and science fiction registers. These inflections draw from the narrative traditions of Weird Tales and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith while deepening noir\u27s preoccupations with moral decay and deterministic fate. Through close readings of Decoy (1946), Repeat Performance (1947), and Alias Nick Beal (1949), I demonstrate how this mode recalibrated noir\u27s parameters and prefigured the tropes of Hollywood\u27s 1950s science fiction cycle. Employing semiotic analysis and Steve Neale\u27s dialectic of repetition and difference, I situate speculative noir as both an industrial phenomenon and a cultural symptom of atomic age anxiety—particularly fears of cosmic insignificance, psychological fragmentation, and the Frankensteinian fear of scientific transgression
I Love You, but I’ve Got to Cancel You: Psychological Determinants and Consequences of Cancel Culture Participation
Get PDFThis study explores how individuals react to celebrities who take a political stance that contradicts and threatens their social identity. An online experiment examines these questions in the context of the Israeli war against Hamas in the wake of the October 7 terror attack. Israeli Jewish participants who were led to believe that a beloved celebrity fully embraced the Palestinian’s narrative and condemned Israel experienced more negative and less positive emotions and had a greater intention to cancel the celebrity. However, writing a comment or a social media post (particularly if the comment bashed the celebrity) partially buffered these emotional effects. Effects were moderated by the intensity of the media user’s parasocial relationship with the celebrity and the strength of their identification with Israel. The findings offer a unique perspective on why, under certain circumstances, engaging in toxic cancel culture behaviors can be experienced as psychologically rewarding in the short term
A Body of One\u27s Own: Samaritanism, Sex, and Self-Ownership
No full textRobust Samaritan theories hold that citizens may be pressed to share whatever others need for minimal flourishing. Cécile Fabre extends that duty to organs, labor, and even sexual services, while Cohen\u27s ideal of an “egalitarian ethos” asks citizens to internalize such claims. I show that coupling these ideas with a rejection of even minimal selfownership yields a trilemma: Bodily resources can be commandeered, everyone is motivated to comply, and rape loses its status as a wrongful taking. Efforts to cordon off sex because of concerns with trauma, autonomy, or cash compensation either become ad hoc or smuggle rights back into the body. What survives is a narrow but decisive principle of self-ownership that forbids compelled use of another\u27s person, while still leaving room for redistributive justice in external goods. Defending this minimal self-ownerhsip as sovereignty does not entail libertarianism; but it preserves the practical and conceptual wrongness of rape and sustains the moral significance of sexual consent
Cost-effective Solutions for High-throughput Enzymatic DNA Methylation Sequencing
Get PDFCharacterizing DNA methylation patterns is important for addressing key questions in evolutionary biology, development, geroscience, and medical genomics. While costs are decreasing, whole-genome DNA methylation profiling remains prohibitively expensive for most population-scale studies, creating a need for cost-effective, reduced representation approaches (i.e., assays that rely on microarrays, enzyme digests, or sequence capture to target a subset of the genome). Most common whole genome and reduced representation techniques rely on bisulfite conversion, which can damage DNA resulting in DNA loss and sequencing biases. Enzymatic methyl sequencing (EM-seq) was recently proposed to overcome these issues, but thorough benchmarking of EM-seq combined with cost-effective, reduced representation strategies is currently lacking. To address this gap, we optimized the Targeted Methylation Sequencing protocol (TMS)—which profiles ~4 million CpG sites—for miniaturization, flexibility, and multispecies use. First, we tested modifications to increase throughput and reduce cost, including increasing multiplexing, decreasing DNA input, and using enzymatic rather than mechanical fragmentation to prepare DNA. Second, we compared our optimized TMS protocol to commonly used techniques, specifically the Infinium MethylationEPIC BeadChip (n = 55 paired samples) and whole genome bisulfite sequencing (n = 6 paired samples). In both cases, we found strong agreement between technologies (R2 = 0.97 and 0.99, respectively). Third, we tested the optimized TMS protocol in three non-human primate species (rhesus macaques, geladas, and capuchins). We captured a high percentage (mean = 77.1%) of targeted CpG sites and produced methylation level estimates that agreed with those generated from reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (R2 = 0.98). Finally, we confirmed that estimates of 1) epigenetic age and 2) tissue-specific DNA methylation patterns are strongly recapitulated using data generated from TMS versus other technologies. Altogether, our optimized TMS protocol will enable cost-effective, population-scale studies of genome-wide DNA methylation levels across human and non-human primate species
Atmospheric Teleconnection Patterns and Hydrological Whiplashes in the Western U.S.
Get PDFThe Western U.S. is undergoing notable transformations in its hydrological patterns, distinguished by rising variability and recurrent “whiplash” shifts between extreme wet and dry phases. Our comprehensive analysis of 469 streamflow stations from 1981 to 2023 reveals a substantial increase in hydrological whiplash events, with a peak of 206 stations experiencing dry-to-wet whiplash in the early 1990s. We establish strong links between these streamflow extremes and sub-seasonal to seasonal teleconnection factors, particularly the Western Pacific Oscillation (WP) and Eastern Pacific/North Pacific Oscillation (EPO). Additionally, we demonstrate the combined impacts of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), with MJO Phases 2/3 showing a positive relationship (correlation coefficients = 0.45) with wet conditions in the Pacific Southwest from October to December. Future projections using CMIP5 and CMIP6 models indicate increasing precipitation variability across the region. Notably, the CMIP5 RCP 8.5 scenario projects more volatile conditions than other scenarios. The results emphasize the pressing need for water management strategies that are both adaptive and flexible, to cope with the growing unpredictability of the hydrological cycle in the Western U.S
Multiscale Modeling and Dynamic Mutational Profiling of Binding Energetics and Immune Escape for Class I Antibodies with SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein: Dissecting Mechanisms of High Resistance to Viral Escape Against Emerging Variants
Get PDFThe rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has underscored the need for a detailed understanding of antibody binding mechanisms to combat immune evasion by emerging variants. In this study, we investigated the interactions between Class I neutralizing antibodies—BD55-1205, BD-604, OMI-42, P5S-1H1, and P5S-2B10—and the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein using multiscale modeling, which combined molecular simulations with the ensemble-based mutational scanning of the binding interfaces and binding free energy computations. A central theme emerging from this work is that the unique binding strength and resilience to immune escape of the BD55-1205 antibody are determined by leveraging a broad epitope footprint and distributed hotspot architecture, additionally supported by backbone-mediated specific interactions, which are less sensitive to amino acid substitutions and together enable exceptional tolerance to mutational escape. In contrast, BD-604 and OMI-42 exhibit localized binding modes with strong dependence on side-chain interactions, rendering them particularly vulnerable to escape mutations at K417N, L455M, F456L and A475V. Similarly, P5S-1H1 and P5S-2B10 display intermediate behavior—effective in some contexts but increasingly susceptible to antigenic drift due to narrower epitope coverage and concentrated hotspots. Our computational predictions show strong agreement with experimental deep mutational scanning data, validating the accuracy of the models and reinforcing the value of binding hotspot mapping in predicting antibody vulnerability. This work highlights that neutralization breadth and durability are not solely dictated by epitope location, but also by how binding energy is distributed across the interface. The results provide atomistic insight into mechanisms driving resilience to immune escape for broadly neutralizing antibodies targeting the ACE2 binding interface—which stems from cumulative effects of structural diversity in binding contacts, redundancy in interaction patterns and reduced vulnerability to mutation-prone positions
The Impact of Insufficient Sleep on Dietary Choices and Physical Activity Behaviors: Evidence from a Randomized Cross-over Trial
Get PDFThe current study aimed to identify how manipulated sleep restriction affects dietary choices and physical activity (PA). Young adults were administered one week of well-rested sleep levels (WR: 8–9 h/night) and sleep-restriction (SR: 5–6 h/night) in their (naturalistic) at-home setting, using a randomized cross-over design. Participants made consequential bids for snacks/beverages following SR and WR in an auction task. Other primary outcome measures included daily self-reported dietary intake and actigraphy-measured PA. Multivariate regression analyses examined main and moderator impacts of SR on primary outcome measures. In total, 118 treatment participants completed the study (M = 20 years old, n = 65 females). SR predicted increased self-reported daily caloric intake and importance of taste (over healthiness) in auction bids, but only in participants with higher baseline cognitive or behavioral control characteristics (p \u3c .05). Furthermore, SR predicted reduced average hourly PA (p \u3c .01), increased sedentary behaviors (p \u3c .01), and more prolonged bouts of sitting (p \u3c .01) for all participants. While prior literature suggests dietary choices may mediate the link between SR and obesity, we did not find altered dietary choices. Rather, our results suggest decreased PA may also contribute to the link between SR and obesity
Moral Preferences in Ultimatum and Impunity Games
Get PDFWe report on two experiments (total N = 2572) testing the role of moral preferences in one-shot, anonymous ultimatum and impunity games, which vary the veto power of responders. In the impunity game, if an offer is lower than the responder’s minimum acceptable offer, the proposer still receives his share, while the responder gets nothing. Study 1 is correlational and explores how moral preferences, as measured using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, explain behaviour in the two games. Study 2 is causal and investigates the effect of moral suasion on behaviour. Regarding proposers, both studies provide evidence that moral preferences affect offers more in the impunity game than in the ultimatum game. For responders, Study 1 shows that moral preferences explain behaviour similarly in both games, while Study 2 demonstrates that moral suasion influences behaviour more strongly in the impunity game. Exploratory analyses of the binding and individualizing dimensions help reconcile these results. Our findings shed light on the complex relationship between moral preferences and behaviour in ultimatum and impunity games
Is “Pre-sepsis” the New Sepsis? A Narrative Review
Get PDFSepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by a dysregulated immune response to infection, leading to organ dysfunction and high mortality. Despite advances in treatment, sepsis remains difficult to manage. Historically, the concept of sepsis evolved from ancient observations of infection-related decay to the germ theory of the 19th century. The latest Sepsis-3 definition describes sepsis as life-threatening organ dysfunction due to a dysregulated host response. However, this clinical characterization may be too late for effective intervention. The concept of endotypes and the ontological data applied to sepsis highlight the substantial heterogeneity in pathophysiological pathways leading to this endpoint. We propose a focus on the “pre-sepsis” phase, where early immune dysregulation arises before significant organ damage. This phase represents the host’s initial response to infection, preceding sepsis and, thus, organ failure. Currently, there is no formal definition of “pre-sepsis”, but this phase could be defined on the basis of early biological pathways in host-pathogen interactions, such as those involving endogenous carbon monoxide. By focusing on “pre-sepsis” and developing tools to detect it, clinicians could intervene earlier and potentially prevent the progression to sepsis. This approach may lead to improved outcomes and more personalized treatments, targeting specific immune pathways tailored to patient profiles. Ultimately, this shift could address existing challenges in sepsis treatment, offering new directions for clinical research and therapeutic development