535 research outputs found
Blow the Wind
David Mooney (arranger) writes This arrangement for choir, harp and treble solo combines two well-know folk tunes relating to the subject of the wind. It has been written specially for this project. The North Wind Doth Blow and Blow the Wind Southerly provide the principal thematic material. The two beautiful melodies are woven into the setting while the harp provides a descriptive underlay and word-painting .
The performers are Dr. Cliona Doris (concert harp), Max O\u27Neill (treble solo), The DIT Junior Choirs (dir. by Dr. Lorraine O\u27Connell), Niamh McCormack (soprano), Aoife Moore (soprano) and Sheena Styles (alto)
Portrait of John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Handwritten inscription: \u27To Felton M. Johnston, my dearly valued friend with the respect and friendship of [John W. McCormack]\u27https://egrove.olemiss.edu/fmjohnston/1113/thumbnail.jp
Today's lifestyles, tomorrow's cancers: Trends in lifestyle risk factors for cancer in low- and middle-income countries
Background: The global burden of cancer is projected to increase from 13.3 to 21.4 million incident cases between 2010 and 2030 due to demographic changes alone, dominated by a growing burden in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Lifestyle risk factors for cancer are also changing in these countries and may further influence this burden.Design: We consider examples of changes already occurring in population-level distributions of tobacco and alcohol consumption, body weight, and reproductive lives of women to gauge the magnitude of their projected impact on cancer incidence in future decades.Results: Trends in lifestyle factors vary greatly between settings and by sex. Some common trends point to considerable increases in cancers of the (i) lung in men due to tobacco smoking; (ii) upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) due to increasing tobacco and alcohol consumption, worse in men; (iii) colon from increasing body mass index, and alcohol and tobacco consumption; and (iv) in women, breast due particularly to consistent international trends of younger age at menarche, smaller family size, and, at postmenopausal ages, increasing body weight.Conclusions: In many LMICs, the future cancer burden will be worsened by changing lifestyles. Affected common cancer sites likely to experience the largest increases are lung, colon, UADT, and breast. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society for Medical Oncology. All rights reserved
Revisiting res ipsa loquitur: Mccormack v Sportsdirect.Com Fitness Limited considered
In this article, the author considers the recent decision of the Sheriff Appeal Court in Mccormack v Sportsdirect.Com Fitness Limited [2025] SAC (Civ) 15 in which the maxim res ipsa loquitur was found to have been incorrectly applied by the sheriff court.<br/
Author response
Perforin-2 (MPEG1) is an effector of the innate immune system that limits the proliferation and spread of medically relevant Gram-negative, -positive, and acid fast bacteria. We show here that a cullin-RING E3 ubiquitin ligase (CRL) complex containing cullin-1 and βTrCP monoubiquitylates Perforin-2 in response to pathogen associated molecular patterns such as LPS. Ubiquitylation triggers a rapid redistribution of Perforin-2 and is essential for its bactericidal activity. Enteric pathogens such as
Yersinia pseudotuberculosis
and enteropathogenic
Escherichia coli
disarm host cells by injecting cell cycle inhibiting factors (Cifs) into mammalian cells to deamidate the ubiquitin-like protein NEDD8. Because CRL activity is dependent upon NEDD8, Cif blocks ubiquitin dependent trafficking of Perforin-2 and thus, its bactericidal activity. Collectively, these studies further underscore the biological significance of Perforin-2 and elucidate critical molecular events that culminate in Perforin-2-dependent killing of both intracellular and extracellular, cell-adherent bacteria.
DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06505.001
A wide range of bacteria and other microbes can infect animals and cause disease. Throughout evolution, these microbes and their hosts have been fighting never ending arms races in which the microbes deploy ever more elaborate weapons, while the hosts adapt to defend themselves. An animal's first line of defense is provided by its ‘innate’ immune system. This system is activated by the general features of microbial cells; for example, the molecules that make up the walls surrounding most bacteria. Microbes must defeat the innate immune system in order to cause disease, and ultimately to spread from one host to the next.
One component of innate immunity is a protein called Perforin-2 that is present in most, if not all, animal cells. This protein forms pores on bacterial cells, causing them to split open and die. However, it was not clear how Perforin-2 is switched on and what, if anything, bacteria do to counteract it. To address these questions, McCormack et al. infected human and mice cells with bacteria that cause serious diseases of the digestive tract.
The experiments show that when animal cells detect bacteria, or merely a fragment of their cell wall, a specific group of proteins, called the CRL complex, attaches a molecule called ubiquitin to Perforin-2. Ubiquitin works much like the shipping label of a package, enabling the efficient targeting of Perforin-2 to the invading bacteria. McCormack et al. also show that some bacteria use a protein called a cell cycle inhibiting factor (or Cif for short) to inhibit the CRL complex. This blocks the ubiquitin labeling of Perforin-2, which renders it a useless weapon that can no longer be directed towards bacteria.
Mice that are infected with a bacterium called
Yersinia pseudotuberculosis
become seriously unwell and often die. However, McCormack et al. found that mice infected with mutant
Y. pseudotuberculosis
that lacked Cif remained healthy. Also, mice that lacked Perforin-2 are highly susceptible to infectious diseases. McCormack et al.'s findings reveal how Perforin-2 is activated during the innate immune response and how some bacteria can defeat this pivotal defense. In the current age of antibiotic resistant bacteria, these studies may spur the development of new drugs that restore or increase the activity of Perforin-2.
DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06505.00
Review of George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory
This is a welcome and wholly worthwhile extension of the author\u27s George Eliot\u27s English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communication (2005), a densely written and stimulating examination of places and people in Eliot\u27s life which have some resonance, in varying degrees of coding, from the seemingly casual to the subtly integrated, in her published work. McCormack there defined three categories of place identification. These range from \u27absolute certainties\u27 through \u27pretty good cases\u27 to \u27alluring, probable, but irretrievably speculative suppositions\u27, categories certainly applicable to herpresent study, in which her dedication and saturation in George Eliot, the works, the life, and a wide range of biographical and critical commentary, is again evident. It is a direct invitation to see and feel places and people, decode traits, pick up on similarities, mine differences, above all, be aware. McCormack\u27s method is one of intimate identification with the life and the writing life.
The main thrust demonstrates how Eliot\u27s social agenda, with the Sunday salons from 1869 onwards at the Priory as the focus, feeds into her fiction - and initially her poetry - together with comparable assimilations from her travelling life in Europe with Lewes from 1854 onwards up to the fraught honeymoon with Cross in 1880. Throughout, the Haight contention that Eliot was largely reclusive, a view commonly supported, is subjected to intense scrutiny and is vigorously disputed. The Sunday gatherings, carefully assembled, would suggest that Eliot enjoyed being the centre of a salon of her own making, her essay on Madame de Sable providing precursory evidence. The importance of Lewes as initiator, manager, socializing facilitator with an eye alert as always to publishing and critical opportunities, is integral. McCormack uses his unpublished journals and diaries, supplementing them with a detailed attention to known biographical sources which she carefully sifts for reliability or bias
‘…a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A Conversation with Mike McCormack
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edinburgh University Press via the DOI in this recor
Review of George Eliot\u27s Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications.
When we think of George Eliot, the word \u27travels\u27 is likely to suggest journeys to far-flung places in foreign lands, but considered in an English setting, she seems to be locked in either Warwickshire or London. Kathleen McCormack, however, shows how widely George Eliot travelled in her own country, so widely that she made over fifty visits to English places and only thirty to foreign destinations. Indeed, \u27widely\u27 is a word that stimulates Kathleen McCormack\u27s imagination as she has revealed in an earlier work, George Eliot and Intoxication (2000), in which the last word, \u27Intoxication\u27, is interpreted in its widest sense. Her article, \u27Widely Sundered Elements\u27 (George Eliot Review, 2000) prepares the reader for this more detailed and ambitious survey which should fascinate anyone interested in English settings and their relevance to the writings of George Eliot (or \u27Evans\u27 as she at first forbiddingly if fashionably calls her). After an exploration of well-known haunts in Warwickshire, chapter headings invite us to visit less familiar places: \u27Seasides\u27, \u27Islands\u27, \u27Country Shires\u27, \u27Spas\u27, \u27Whitby, Devon, Oxford, Surrey\u27 and \u27Country Houses\u27. The Leweses rarely travelled for pleasure alone; we are shown how they journeyed for other reasons too: for health, for research, for escape from gossip, for specimen-gathering on English beaches, for visits to museums, art galleries, cathedrals, for the refreshment of working in different places. Although the railway must have helped, they were prepared to endure all kinds of discomfort in England and on the Continent for the sake of fresh environments. The author of this interesting new book describes their travels as purposeful and productive unlike the dreamy, fruitless voyage of Maggie Tulliver down the river and unlike her subsequent \u27boarding a coach without checking its destination\u27
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