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Schiller's Piano, co-created by Laurence Osborn and Zubin Kanga
Get PDFThis is a major Cyborg Soloists output, co-created by Laurence Osborn and Zubin Kanga. It is a concerto for piano/keyboards and chamber orchestra. The keyboards use samples of piano construction, which change across the piece. The work is a response to the construction of a replica of Schiller's Piano by prisoners at Buchenwald Concentration camp, and responds to the way Schiller's poetry and ideals were reappropriated by fascism. It also relates to the memory of the survivors of the camp, and was created in close collaboration with the Buchenwald Memorial, and features field recordings made in the workshop where the prisoners built the piano.The work was performed in Manchester and London (at the Southbank Centre) with Manchester Collective (one of the UK's leading ensembles). It had a combined audience of 1000 people, and was covered in national press, including The Telegraph, which stated "the piece was remarkable for the exquisite tact with which Osborn approached its emotive theme, a quality echoed in Kanga's self-abegnating performance"<br/
Intraoperative spectroscopic evaluation of sentinel lymph nodes in breast cancer surgery
Get PDFBackground: Sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy is a standard procedure for patients with breast cancer. Positive SLNs on histological examination can lead to a second surgery for axillary lymph node clearance (ALNC). Here we report a non-destructive technique based on autofluorescence (AF) imaging and Raman spectroscopy for intra-operative assessment of SLNs excised in breast cancer surgery.Methods: A microscope integrating AF imaging and Raman spectroscopy modules was built to allow scanning of lymph node biopsy samples. AF imaging was utilised to determine optimal sampling locations for Raman spectroscopy measurements, such that scanning was completed within 20-30 minutes. After optimisation of the AF image analysis and training of classification models based on data from 85 samples, the AF-Raman technique was tested on an independent set of 81lymph nodes. Sensitivity and specificity were calculated using post-operative histology as a standard of reference.Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for the AF-Raman analysis for bisected lymph nodes was 0.93. For a regime that maximised specificity (reduced risk of false positive detections), a 97% specificity and a 80% sensitivity was achieved. The main confounders for metastasis were areas rich in histiocytes, for which only few Raman spectra had been included in the training dataset.Conclusions: This preliminary study indicates that with further development and extension of the training dataset (inclusion of Raman spectra of histiocytes), the AF-Raman is a promising technique for intra-operative assessment of SLNs. Intra-operative detection of metastatic SLNs could greatly reduce additional surgery for axillary clearance
Enhancing Tree Performance Through Species Mixing:Review of a Quarter-Century of TreeDivNet Experiments Reveals Research Gaps and Practical Insights
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Cross-cultural validation of the Revised Green et al., Paranoid Thoughts Scale
Get PDFBackground. With efforts increasing worldwide to understand and treat paranoia, there is a pressing need for culturally valid assessments of paranoid beliefs. The recently developed Revised Green et al. Paranoid Thoughts Scale (R-GPTS) constitutes an easy to administer self-report assessment of mild ideas of reference and more severe persecutory thoughts. Moreover, it comes with clinical cut-offs for increased usability in research and clinical practice. With multiple translations of the R-GPTS already available and in use, a formal test of its measurement invariance is now needed.Methods. Using data from a multinational cross-sectional online survey in the UK, USA, Australia, Germany, and Hong Kong (N=2510), we performed confirmatory factory analyses on the R-GPTS and tested for measurement invariance across sites.Results. We found sufficient fit for the two-factor structure (ideas of reference, persecutory thoughts) of the R-GPTS across cultures. Measurement invariance was found for the persecutory thoughts subscale, indicating that it does measure the same construct across the tested samples in the same way. For ideas of reference, we found no scalar invariance, which was traced back to (mostly higher) item intercepts in the Hong Kong sample.Conclusion. We found sufficient invariance for the persecutory thoughts scale, which is of substantial practical importance, as it is used for the screening of clinical paranoia. A direct comparison of the ideas of reference sum-scores between cultures, however, may lead to an over-estimation of these milder forms of paranoia in some (non-western) cultures
Newly emerged bumblebees are highly susceptible to gut parasite infection
Get PDFOne factor that can affect infection susceptibility is host age, the effects of which vary in a range of ways. For example, susceptibility may increase with age, due to senescence or decrease with age as a result of maturation of the immune system. If certain ages are more susceptible to infection, populations with contrasting demographics, such as same-age cohorts versus a mixture of ages, will exhibit differing disease prevalence. We use the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, and its interaction with the gut trypanosome Crithidia sp. as a model system to investigate age-related susceptibility in a social insect. Crithidia sp. are widespread and prevalent parasites of bumblebees that are spread between colonies via faeces on flowers when foraging, and within colonies via contact with infected bees and contaminated surfaces and resources. In the field, Bombus spp. live for approximately three weeks. Here, we inoculated bumblebees at 0, 7, 14 and 21 days of age and measured their infection after one week. We also measured the level of gene expression of two antimicrobial peptides important in the defence against Crithidia bombi in bumblebees. We found that younger bumblebees are more susceptible to infection by Crithidia sp. than their older siblings. Specifically, individuals inoculated on their first day of emergence had infection intensities seven days later that were four-fold higher than bees inoculated at 21 days of age. In contrast, the gene expression of two AMPs known to protect against the trypanosome, abaecin and defensin, did not significantly vary with age. These results suggest that age does affect susceptibility to Crithidia sp. infection in B. terrestris. The higher susceptibility of callows may have implications for the susceptibility of colonies at different stages of their lifecycle, due to the contrasting age demography of workers in the colony
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