Thanaleisure and the super-rich: the case of the Titan submersible disaster

This commentary reflects on the Titan submersible disaster as a case study of the thanatic leisure habits of the super-rich. Previous analyses of elite consumption have explored their tendency to seek out exclusivity and luxury, and to monopolise space (Thurlow and Jaworski 2012; Featherstone 2014; Atkinson 2021). Drawing on literature from the fields of thanatourism and dark leisure, the commentary theorises how deep sea submersible tourism offers adjacency to death and suffering as a means to pursue mythical masculine desires, confront artificial frontiers and hardships, and assert status. It concludes with a discussion of how the wastefulness, pollution and redemption struggles that characterise what is here defined as thanaleisure add to our understanding of thanacapitalism (Korstanje 2016). That is, as an economic system that not only commodifies death and suffering, but justifies its own existence through promoting the hypermobility of the few at the expense of the majority

Precision targeting of rhabdomyosarcoma by combining primary CAR NK cells and radiotherapy

Background: Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is the most common type of soft-tissue sarcoma in children, and it remains a challenging cancer with poor outcomes in high-risk and metastatic patients. This study reports the use of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR)-targeted chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) natural killer (NK) cells in combination with radiotherapy as a novel immunotherapeutic approach for RMS treatment. Methods: Primary human NK cells from healthy donors were engineered using lentiviral transduction to express a cetuximab-based EGFR-specific CAR. The ability of the engineered NK cells to lyse RMS cells was then assessed in vitro in RMS monolayers and spheroids, as well as against chemotherapy-resistant and primary patient-derived RMS cells. Migratory properties of NK cells were observed in a subcutaneous RMS xenograft model using in vivo imaging, and the efficacy of EGFR-CAR NK cells in combination with localized fractionated radiotherapy was analyzed. Results: Primary human EGFR-CAR NK cells demonstrated enhanced cytotoxicity against multiple RMS cell lines in both two-dimensional culture and three-dimensional spheroid models. Furthermore, EGFR-CAR NK cells were highly efficient against chemotherapy-resistant RMS cells and patient-derived samples. Importantly, EGFR-CAR NK cells also exhibited improved tumor homing compared with non-transduced NK cells in an in vivo RMS xenograft model. Notably, the combination of EGFR-CAR NK cell therapy with fractionated radiotherapy further enhanced NK cell infiltration into the tumor and reduced tumor growth. Conclusion: This study provides a proof-of-concept for EGFR-CAR NK cells as a promising immunotherapy for RMS, particularly when combined with radiotherapy to overcome barriers of solid tumors. This combinatorial approach may hold potential to improve outcomes for patients with RMS and other EGFR-expressing malignancies

Cascading constraint and subsidiary discretion: Perspectives on police discretion from police-led drug diversion and stop and search in England

This article explores how discretion is managed and exercised across senior, middle, and street levels of policing. It uses qualitative data from two studies in England. The first, a study across three police force areas, involved interviews and focus groups with 221 people who were designers, deliverers, and recipients of police-led drug diversion. The second study used 354 hours of ethnographic observation and 21 interviews to examine stop-and-search practices in one other police force. Rather than a simply expanding scope of discretion at lower levels of the hierarchy, the findings reveal a multi-level process of cascading constraints and subsidiary discretion. At each level, we observe the exercise of occupational professionalism and autonomous judgement, but higher-level constraints shape how discretion is applied in pursuit of organizational professionalism

IoT-enabled Spatiotemporal Resilience Analysis for an Unmanned System of Systems

As research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned equipment continues to advance, the unmanned system of systems (USS) has been developed unprecedentedly. Much of the existing research on USS focuses on the effects of changes of system resilience with respect to time, but little on spatial changes. However, USS missions might involve physical strikes against unmanned systems. Alternatively, they could involve signal jamming of data transmissions at the data layer. Therefore, it is crucial to account for variations in the performance of the data layer. Time plays a key role in determining the mission performance of the USS, while spatial location affects the transmission performance of the data layer. To examine how time and space issues impact the resilience of the USS, this paper introduces a spatiotemporal resilience assessment framework. This framework evaluates the resilience of USS from both time and space perspectives. Additionally, the paper proposes a spatiotemporal resilience optimization scheme for the entire USS mission process. The scheme enhances spatiotemporal resilience and focuses on optimization during the prevention and recovery phases. Finally, the proposed methods are validated using a case study involving a USS with positive hexagonal formation

Rights and support: a conversation

with Fatima Ahdash, Emily Jackson, Dafni Lima, Daniel Monk, Julie McCandless, Beth Tarleton, Rachel Taylor, and Sarah Trotter Note from the editors: in the conversation that follows, which took place on Friday 18 October 2024, members of the project discuss the three reflection pieces that feature in the rights and support section of the special issue: Daniel Monk's paper, 'Elective home education: rights and their limits', Rachel Taylor's paper 'The limits of parental authority', and Beth Tarleton and Nadine Tilbury's paper 'Substituted parenting: assumptions, stigma and parents with learning disabilities'

The role of apology beliefs for apology tendencies across cultures with varying honor norms

Apologies serve as crucial tools for relationship repair, promoting reconciliation, and demonstrating accountability. However, beliefs about the morality, effectiveness, and responsibility-signaling nature of apologies may vary across cultures, particularly in contexts shaped by honor norms where apologies fit central cultural concerns for morality and strength in ambiguous ways. This study investigates the relation between apology beliefs and cultural honor norms across 14 Mediterranean, East Asian, and Anglo-Western samples (N = 5296). We assessed personal and normative beliefs about apologies and their alignment with apology tendencies (willingness to apologize and past offered apologies) as well as intersubjectively rated honor norms. Results revealed that stronger beliefs in the morality and effectiveness of apologies, as well as perceptions of apologies as admissions of responsibility, consistently predicted greater willingness to apologize across regions and past apologies offered. Against our expectations, honor norms moderated only a few of these relations, with significant interactions suggesting weaker links between apology beliefs and apology tendencies at stronger honor norms. Complementary analyses comparing regional categorizations (Anglo-West, East Asia, and MENA) further supported a picture of relative cultural similarities but also highlighted a wider array of relevant apology beliefs in the MENA region as well as a greater focus on personal morality beliefs in Anglo Western societies and personal effectiveness beliefs in East Asian societies. Our findings underscore the universal significance of apology beliefs in fostering reconciliation while also revealing some cultural variability in how personal beliefs and cultural norms may interact in shaping apology-related behaviors across diverse societies

How to Enhance Sleep for Athletes? A Narrative Review of Sleep Hygiene and Sleep Extension Practices

Sleep is becoming widely accepted as a crucial for athletes, with potential impacts on both performance and recovery, yet despite this, sleep amongst athletes is commonly suboptimal. This review aims firstly to summarise underlying reasons why athletes commonly present with poor sleep with a view to informing subsequent interventions, and secondly, to summarise sleep hygiene and sleep extension practices to potentially offset this, with consideration for the content and delivery approach of such interventions

Exploring feedforward neural network explainability using the layerwise relevance propagation framework

Neural Networks (NNs) can learn very accurate solutions to complex problems, but it is rarely clear how. The Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP) framework would explain how a given NN would produce a prediction for given data by assigning a relevance score to each data feature in each data example. This would be achieved by propagating each NN layer's output onto each data feature in its input. Other researchers have shown what hyperparameters and architectural choices lead to these explanations beinanalytically correct, however, it is not always possible to apply these in practice. The first chapter discusses the problems and solutions that were explored in this research. The second chapter presents background literature about AI, NNs, model shade, explainability, and LRP. The third chapter compared explanations extracted by LRP to those extracted from white-box models. These were most comparable when the NN architecture was large and when the data that it was fitted on contained many data examples. This established a link between explainability and the predictive accuracy of a NN. The fourth chapter found that explanations generated by LRP can be made correct through hyperparameter optimisation, and the newly-proposed Local LRP (LLRP) framework exceeded the explainability of trained LRP over greyscale and colour images by learning the hyperparameters at each NN layer. Chapter five discovered and analysed why the actual and expected negative relevance representations differ, and the sensitivity of positive relevance was maximised individually instead of trying to mutually maximise positive and negative relevance. A final reflection in chapter six shows that this thesis has contributed to NN explainability by improving the relevance produced by LRP. Future research opportunities were highlighted throughout this work

Accidental and Regulated Cell Death in Yeast Colony Biofilms

The yeast species Saccharomyces cerevisiae is one of the most intensively studied organisms on the planet due to it being an excellent eukaryotic model organism in molecular and cell biology. In this work, we investigate the growth and morphology of yeast colony biofilms, where proliferating yeast cells reside within a self-produced extracellular matrix. This research area has garnered significant scientific interest due to its applicability in the biological and biomedical sectors. A central feature of yeast colony biofilm expansion is cellular demise, which is onset by one of two independent mechanisms: either accidental cell death (ACD) or regulated cell death (RCD). In this article, we generalise a continuum model for the nutrient-limited growth of a yeast colony biofilm to include the effects of ACD and RCD. This new model involves a system of four coupled nonlinear reaction–diffusion equations for the yeast-cell density, the nutrient concentration, and two species of dead cells. Numerical solutions of the spatially one and two-dimensional governing equations reveal the impact that ACD and RCD have on expansion speed, morphology and cell distribution within the colony biofilm. Our results are in good qualitative agreement with our own experiments

Raman Spectroscopic Characterisation and Chemometric Analysis of Facial Cosmetics as Associative Trace Evidence

Decorative cosmetics such as facial foundations or finishing powders are widely used and easily transferred upon physical contact. As such, they may be used as associative trace evidence to link people to each other or to places in criminal investigations. To maximise their probative value, it is important to understand the variability amongst representative market products and the degree of sample discrimination that can be achieved. Additionally, it is required that analysis techniques be non-destructive, readily available and relatively inexpensive. Raman spectroscopy is a powerful tool for probing the chemistry of facial cosmetics. As well as fitting the criteria above, it offers the capability of studying a wide range of sample types with minimal prior preparation. The information derived from Raman spectra can help analysts to understand and visualise spectral variability, potentially enabling discrimination between samples. This thesis presents the novel application of Raman microspectroscopy to the analysis of 297 facial cosmetic samples with subsequent chemometric methods for objective spectral interpretation. The analysis of 177 newly purchased cosmetic products revealed the most important chemical components for sample discrimination and highlighted the issue of spectral heterogeneity, leading to the separation of 126 spectrally homogeneous from 44 spectrally heterogeneous samples. Microscopic examination of samples allowed for the assessment of visual homogeneity but revealed that this was not a reliable indicator of spectral homogeneity. Subjective assessment of Raman spectra did not always correlate with the principal component analysis (PCA) models as the dimensionality reduction technique applied different variable weightings. Assessment of PCA loadings showed the primary distinction between samples to be their titanium dioxide polymorph, followed by iron oxide and lecithin content. The effects of ageing were more noticeable visually among the water-based products yet nearly undetectable via Raman spectra. Drastic colour and texture changes were evident after 15 months of passive ageing, as were the detachment of borosilicate glass pigments and silica microspheres from their respective matrices, which may have implications for casework. The spectral changes were more pronounced amongst the aged samples that contained a higher organic composition, indicated by the loss of organic components or their degradation to other species. Furthermore, inter-batch comparisons of some products showed a change of titanium dioxide polymorph used (from anatase to rutile) showing a lack of formulation consistency. Donations of 120 used samples, old discarded products and expired shop testers allowed for the assessment of a set of "real world" samples. Raman analysis of these donated samples and comparisons with their newly purchased counterparts revealed an increase in baseline fluorescence, increased spectral heterogeneity, and extra peaks in the spectral mid-range. These spectral alterations suggest chemical changes associated with ageing, and/or the contamination of these samples, most likely from a biological source. This study describes the first microscopic and Raman spectroscopic characterisation of facial cosmetics within a forensic context, further enhanced by the addition of multivariate data analysis methods, which addresses the need for objective, unbiased interpretation of spectral data. These cosmetic traces may be exploited in criminal investigations in questioned (Q) versus known (K) comparisons, or sample eliminations, or to provide investigative leads. The discovery of a counterfeit product demonstrated the utility of these analyses not just in a crime scene investigation context but also for the verification of genuine consumer goods. The assessment of cosmetic traces on a purely visual basis is not recommended, owing to subjective descriptions and the difficulties associated with analysing interference pigments; the addition of Raman spectroscopy offers much needed enhanced discrimination potential. Raman microscopy is well suited for the analysis of microtraces such as those that might be encountered in casework, and involves less sample preparation than many other analytical techniques such as surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)