123 research outputs found
Theological Reflections on the Blessed Virgin\u27s Impeccabilitas
Get PDFAbout the author: Father Eamon Carroll, O. Carm., of the School of Sacred Theology of the Catholic University of America, is a past President of the Mariological Society of America
Physiological concentration of calcium inhibits elastase-induced cleavage of a functional recombinant fragment of surfactant protein D
No full textSurfactant protein D (SP-D) plays an important role in lung host defence. SP-D levels have been shown to be depleted in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients. A recombinant fragment of the human SP-D (rfhSP-D) which consist of a hydrophobic neck and a CRD has been shown to be active in vivo and partially reverses the symptoms of the SP-D deficiency in the lungs when administered to SP-D knock-out mice. In this paper we studied the in vitro effect of different proteolytic enzymes commonly found in CF patients lungs, such as neutrophil elastase, cathepsin G and protease 3 as well as Pseudomonas elastase, on rfhSP-D. It was also shown that cleavage was inhibited by physiological concentration of calcium. When Western blot was compared with ELISA, we show that an anti-SP-D ELISA is a not a reliable assay of functional SP-D levels since non-functional fragments of SP-D are also detected. Thus, ELISA cannot be used as a reliable "diagnostic" tool for SP-D deficiency. Finally, we observe that SP-D is not cleaved in control patients but is degraded in about half the samples from cystic fibrosis patients, indicating that degradation of endogenous SP-D, by enzymes present in CF bronchioalveolar lavage fluid (BALF), may lead to deficiency of the protein as seen in CF and therefore rfhSP-D may be a useful future therapy
“We’ve Forgotten Our Roots”: Bioweapons and Forms of Life in Mass Effect’s Speculative Future
Get PDFMany cultural artefacts explore the relationship between populations and politics, including Mass Effect, a role-playing videogame that both critiques and affirms liberal and conservative biopolitical tendencies. Of particular interest is the biopolitical dynamics of the Krogan lifeform. Due to population difficulties deriving from both naturalistic and cultural tendencies, they were targeted by a bioweapon – the genophage. The genophage drastically transformed how they comprehend their own form of life, as the bioweapon infected the Krogan with a plague-like genetic modification targeting their reproductive organs. The player in the Mass Effect trilogy can cure the genophage or not, and reasons are provided to contextualize both options. In this article, I argue that the genophage problematic can be interpreted as a reflection on the attempt to affect a form of life from the outside. I emphasize what Tristan Garica describes as we-expansion: that Mass Effect leaves open the question of the possibility of expanding our sense of we. But Mass Effect also leaves open the question of we-contraction, in so doing it neither offers a utopian or dystopian political vision, but an agnostic one
SimJEB: Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset (for review only)
No full textThe Simulated Jet Engine Bracket Dataset (SimJEB) is a collection of finite element models of crowdsourced engine bracket designs. The designs originate from the "GE Jet Engine Bracket Challenge" hosted by GrabCAD.com in 2013. Each entry has a corresponding CAD file, tetrahedral mesh, triangular surface mesh, and structural simulation results from four load cases. The SimJEB dataset is open to the public and licensed under the Open Data Commons Attribution License
project-aero/transient-indicators: Files associated with 2020-01-13 manuscript draft. Author correction.
No full textThe author of the Wolfram Notebook has been corrected to be S. M. O'Regan
Retraction IRAK1-independent pathways required for the interleukin-1-stimulated activation of the Tpl2 catalytic subunit and its dissociation from ABIN2
No full textVolume 424 (2009), pp. 109–118This paper is being retracted at the request of the authors. Three members of the laboratory of the last-named author have tried subsequently to reproduce the result reported in Figure 2B of the paper, but have been unable to do so. Consequently, the authors no longer consider the conclusion that interleukin-1 is able to activate the full-length catalytic subunit of the protein kinase Tpl2 when it is co-transfected into IRAK1-null HEK293 cells that stably express the interleukin-1 receptor to be correct. All of the authors, apart from the first author, have agreed to this retraction.Margaret J. Stafford, Eamon McManus, Dionissios Baltzis, Mark Peggie, Philip Cohen (MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit, College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, UK
The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We:Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series
Get PDFPopular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings areinscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere. This is also true for science fictiontelevision series. This article critically examines how political matters and ethical agencies are representedwithin The Expanse, a series that takes place within a speculative twenty-fourth century milky way. Firstly,I will situate The Expanse within its generic “system of reference.” Then, I will illustrate how politicalmatters are represented as conjoined with the ethical. While the ethical refers to actions of persons, politicsrefers to fictional conceptions of what Tristan Garcia’s terms we-ourselves, understood as conflicting andoverlapping conceptions of “we.” The conjunction between the political and the ethical in The Expanse isspatiotemporal: the characters, the events they are entangled in, and the spaces that connect discreteevents develop through fictional and literal time. I argue that the science fictional representations of“we-ourselves,” and the specific spatiotemporal representational capacities of the television series format,can be understood through the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope and the dialogic.That is, The Expanse’s we-representations are chronotopic and the refractive rhetoric of television isdialogic
Escape Vectors, Gravitational Pulls, and Machine Ontology:Politics and Sense-making in Ryōsuke Takahashi’s "FLAG"
Get PDFJapanese popular culture can be comprehended as an ideological battleground where political notions are postulated and speculated on, including popular mecha anime. This paper focuses on the mecha science fiction of Takahashi Ryōsuke to think the relation between anime media and sense-making. I critically analyse Takahashi’s FLAG. In the series, the photojournalist Saeko Shirasu is assigned to a special forces’ unit, SDC (or “seedac”) that is tasked by the United Nations Forces to reclaim a UN flag. This flag attained symbolic value following its being photographed by Shirasu, which depicts civilians raising the flag in the war-torn Uddiyana, plunged into civil war following the explosion of sectarian religious differences among Buddhists and a native belief system. The flag became a symbol for peace but was stolen by the extremist “Gelut Sect” to disrupt peace accords. I take sense-making to be connected to the democratic political problem of orientation as critically disucssed by Hannah Richter. This paper both attempts to grasp how Takahashi uses anime to think the relation between media and sense-making and uses Takahashi’s anime to conceptualize the relation between politics, media, and sense-making. I read FLAG from the perspective of MOO, arguing that various media machines–from cameras to informational fragments–have the capacity to interrupt sense. In this way, what I call the “journalist-assemblage” constitutes what Bryant terms a “rogue object”. Rogue objects constitute escape vectors that can be followed to depart from oppressive gravities. This is a political matter of orientation. I use Bryant’s typology of gravities to make this textual point in Takahashi explicit, but also to make the meta-textual argument that anime can be utilized to disrupt given sense-making practices. Adjacent to this, I make an argument contra Grant Hamilton for the relevance of the critical and philosophical interpretation of texts
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