Mediating for Climate Change

For almost my entire life, I have been perplexed at my/our inaction towards climate change. Inundated with scientific data, reportage, an overwhelming scientific consensus of not only the phenomenon, but also our part in it, I wonder about why we are not only reluctant to act, but incapable of it. There is an extensive literature exploring such questions, from behavioural sciences, to feminist theory, to economics and global systems science. However, while this literature helps to explain various facets of the problem, there are still few examples of work synthesising multiple approaches or using these to inform production of an intervention or action

Sounding dispersal as a route to empathy with the changing arctic

This article elaborates on the new media musical project The Matter of the Soul: Its background, theoretical approach, methods and realization. The Matter of the Soul is a musical, sculptural and performance work. It aims to engender empathy in humans with the process of dispersal and transformation in the Arctic amid the climate crisis. The work draws an analogy between human migration, the movement of water from ice to ocean in the Arctic and changing identity online

Hydatid disease in Western Australia

BECAUSE hydatid disease is a disease of humans as well as animals every consideration must be given to its control and to the prevention of any possible increase in incidence. The incidence of hydatids in Western Australia has not, in the past, been very high. However, the great increase in sheep numbers which has taken place in recent years and which is expected to continue for many years to come, will produce a situation where it could be expected that the incidence of the disease will rise unless stock owners, particularly sheep owners, take appropriate steps to control the tapeworms responsible for the disease

THE INFLUENCE OF SPATIAL LATERAL BIASES AND NATIVE READING DIRECTION ON DRIVING AND AESTHETIC PREFERENCES

The neglect of leftward space occurring after a right parietal lesion, known as hemispatial neglect, results in a rightward spatial bias. Neurotypical individuals display an opposite leftward spatial bias, known as pseudoneglect (Bowers & Heilman, 1980). The leftward lighting bias and the leftward aesthetic preference are hypothesized to be related to pseudoneglect (Smith & Elias, 2018). Leftward biases are attenuated, or even flipped to the right in certain circumstances, notably in participants whose native reading direction (NRD) moves from right-to-left (RTL) and when spatial tasks occur in extrapersonal space. Aesthetic preferences and spatial abilities were compared between RTL and left-to-right (LTR) groups in an image rating task using eye tracking (Chapter 2) and image lighting tasks of three-dimensional (3D) images of sculptures (Chapter 3) and two-dimensional (2D) images of abstract paintings (Chapter 4). Participants’ basic spatial ability was assessed using the greyscales task (Mattingley, Bradshaw, Nettleton, & Bradshaw, 1994), a measure of perceptual asymmetries. LTR and RTL participants show clearly diverging trends of behaviour when making aesthetic judgments. When examining 2D images in Chapter 2 and illuminating 2D images in Chapter 4, preferences were leftward among LTRs and rightward among RTLs, however, both groups demonstrated a consistent leftward bias on the greyscales task. In Chapter 3, similar group differences between professionals in LTR and RTL regions were found for sculpture lighting, but participants illuminating 3D sculpture images did not show any light placement biases. In Chapter 4, a rudimentary version of a virtual mapping technique known as Halos (Baudisch & Rosenholtz, 2003) was carried out in a procedurally similar way to the artwork lighting task of the same chapter but measured spatial abilities rather than aesthetic preferences. Contrary to predictions, smaller errors were made when estimating the size of halos on the right, and as circle size increased estimation accuracy decreased. Studies in Chapter 5 examined navigation spatial abilities when driving, experimentally using a driving simulation, and through the analysis of naturalistic data from the Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study (SHRP 2 NDS). Lane deviations were rightward, and collisions were more frequent and severe on the right side in the simulation and naturalistic data analysis revealed greater likelihoods of collisions from crossing over the right line or edge of the road and when making a right turn. Overall, findings suggest that an RTL NRD and task complexity modulate pseudoneglect and that lateral spatial biases when driving are in line with previous lateral bumping when walking results. Across all studies, findings provide clarity about the occurrence leftward bias attenuation

Functional characterization of synthetic leukotriene B and its stereochemical isomers.

Leukotriene B (LTB), a potent lipid chemotactic factor for neutrophils, is 5S,12R-dihydroxy-6,14-cis,8,10-trans-eicosatetraenoic acid (Fig 1), based upon direct comparison of natural LTB with synthetic 5S,12R-dihydroxy-6,8,10,14-eicosatetraenoic acid (5,12-di-HETE) stereoisomers in three biological assays. Of the six synthetic stereoisomers evaluated, only the 5S,12R,6,14-cis,8,10-trans compound had chemotactic potency for human neutrophils in vitro that was comparable to that of natural LTB, with a concentration of 3 X 10(9-9) M eliciting a one-half maximum response. In contrast, the racemic mixture of 5R,12R- and 5S,12S-6,10-trans,8,14-cis, the racemic mixture of 5S,12R- and 5R,12S-6,10-trans,8,14-cis, the 5S,12R-6,8-trans,10,14-cis, the 5S,12R-6,8,10-trans,14-cis, and the 5S,12S-6,8,10-trans,14-cis stereoisomers required concentrations of 3 X 10(-7) to 1 X 10(-6) M to elicit comparable responses. Only natural LTB and its synthetic counterpart elicited a local neutrophil infiltration when injected into the skin of the rhesus monkey at 10 ng and 100 ng per site. Natural and synthetic LTB at a concentration of 3 X 10(-8) M each provoked an EC25 contractile response of guinea pig pulmonary parenchymal strips in vitro, whereas the other four tested stereoisomers of 5,12-di-HETE were inactive at this concentration. Structure-function analyses suggest that the neutrophil chemotactic activity depends critically upon the C-1 to C-12 domain, including the stereochemistry of the 6-,8-,and 10-olefinic bonds and the presence of both hydroxyl groups

A NEUTROPHIL-IMMOBILIZING FACTOR DERIVED FROM HUMAN LEUKOCYTES : I. GENERATION AND PARTIAL CHARACTERIZATION

A factor has been derived from human leukocytes which irreversibly inhibits the response of human neutrophils to diverse chemotactic stimuli without impairing their viability. It is released by both polymorphonuclear and mononuclear leukocytes during incubation in acidic medium, after endotoxin exposure and subsequent incubation in low potassium medium, and during phagocytosis of particles. It is extractable from both leukocyte types and therefore must be preformed. This chemotactic inhibitor is completely separable from contaminating chemotactic activity in the crude supernatants, has a mol wt of 5000, and is inactivated by digestion with trypsin or chymotrypsin. It has been termed a neutrophil-immobilizing factor because it inhibits neutrophils directly and independently of the chemotactic stimulus, and has relatively little effect on human monocyte chemotaxis